You've got to grab them

"The best writing manual is obituaries" was an important message I grabbed at the free blogging workshop held at Mosman Library this evening.

In his talk Steven Lewis highlighted the importance of hooking one's readers with a headline that will encourage readers to read on. He compared blog post titles with newspaper headlines that must grab the reader. Steven (aka rule17 ) reminded us that, as with newspaper articles, blog followers may not read the whole post. "Readers won't be with you from headline to fullstop". It is important to lead with the most important content. Obituaries, that have interesting titles are not usually written in a linear fashion, have structures that bloggers can follow.

I hadn't thought of this in relation to my genealogy blog but realised that, with those blogs I follow in Google Reader, I probably delete 80% of the posts after reading the post title and first few sentences.

So genealogists, if you want to ensure that others fully enjoy the brilliance in your blogs, you will need to get creative with those titles.