This is a continuation of my last article where I discussed seven ways to come up with freaky article titles. I hope you are enjoying the series! :)
In this article:
=> Does Humor Have a Place in Article Titles?
=> Can I Play with Words?
=> Is It Okay to Use My Favorite Keyword as the Article Title?
1. Does Humor Have a Place in Article Titles: Yes and No. When used moderately, humor could prove to be an effective traffic-puller, but use it too much and you would lose on both sides: not only those who don’t share your sense of humor would get offended, you may not also get the 'expected' position and ranking for your article in Google!
Search engines, after all, don’t have funny bones like humans, ya know! They cannot appreciate humor like we do! They recognize keywords, keywords and only keywords! :D
The type of humor you can use in your article titles would usually vary depending on your niche. For example, if you are in the weight loss niche, where everyone is writing on weight loss, you could write an article on 'how to gain weight' or 'how to add several pounds to your body easily and quickly'! ;)
Your article would come across as a rather odd article to those who are accustomed to conventional weight loss advice, and many might click just out of curiosity! You should however warn your readers at the start that the article is intended for humorous purposes only and shouldn't be taken seriously, unless…
To give you another example of a humorous title, how about this one:
"Top 5 Ways to Lose Traffic"
In that article you could discuss – in a humorous way of course – about the five traffic generation mistakes the reader shouldn’t make! For example, let's say that the top 5 ways to generate traffic are: recruiting affiliates, doing joint ventures, getting backlinks, social networking, and blogging. You could teach all these things to your readers, in a fun way:
"Want to know how to lose traffic? Just follow the five tips below and you would be losing traffic hand over fist within just 2 weeks…guaranteed!
a) Don’t Do Joint Ventures
b) Don’t Get Backlinks!
c) Stay in Your Cubbyhole and Don’t Network or Socialize!
d) Don’t Blog, or even if you do, write only cr*ppy posts which no one would bother to read! If you think that it is too hard for you, then make sure your blog has lots of pop-ups and pop-unders: that way, even if you get initial traffic, you won’t get any repeat traffic! ;)
e) Don’t Recruit Affiliates!
Etc!"
These articles can be made educative if you want; you can choose to teach your readers the fun or the serious way, the positive or the negative way, etc; remember that different teaching styles work for different people.
I would suggest that if you are ever bored of writing the same old stuff again and again and want to break-free of sheer boredom, you could write such humorous articles once in a while, but don’t overdo it! Remember that such articles may or may NOT make you money! In short, humorous article articles or article titles should be used no more frequently than once in a while! ;)
And definitely don’t try to write humorous article titles if you have a sardonic sense of humor like me; it could rub some of your readers the wrong way! ;)
2. Don't use complicated word-plays: I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I feel that the art of playing word-games is best used when you are writing to flaunt your creativity (such as when writing fiction) rather than make money. This is also the reason why I asked you to use humor sparingly in your article titles.
While using humor once in a while is okay, definitely don’t use any kind of word-plays, word-games, puns or double-entendre in your article titles! Believe it or not, not all of your readers are college grads; in fact, I would say that a majority of your audience are most probably either school or high school dropouts!
If these people don’t understand your creative word-games and puns, they won't even click to read your articles! So unless your target audience is comprised of intellectuals, I would suggest that you keep your article title simple!
3. Using a keyword as article title is NOT okay: How many times have you come across articles with boring titles such as 'make money online' or 'weight loss tips'? Do you ever click on any of them? Neither do I! Either these authors are more interested in spamming the net with keywords rather than providing useful information, or they just don’t know how to craft good article titles!
You should definitely use keywords in your article title, but for God's sake please don’t make a keyword your article title! Instead of having a title like 'Weight Loss Tips' which no one would bother to read, you could at least have a title like '5 Weight Loss Tips'. I don’t think it requires a lot of copywriting knowledge to do that!
Speaking of keywords, if you find that a keyword has singular and plural variations, and that one variation gets more searches than the other, then you should use the most searched term in your article title and the other one or both in the body of your article! That way, you would get the best of both worlds by grabbing all search engine traffic pertaining to that topic!
For example:
'Christmas decorations' and 'Christmas decoration'
On another note, if any keyword has a related acronym/abbreviation, and one of them gets more searches than the other, then again you should use the same approach as above!
For example:
'Home decor' and 'Home decorations'
Let's add the singular part to it as well, so that it now becomes:
'Home décor', 'Home decorations' and 'Home decoration'!
Interesting, eh? If you take a little time to brainstorm related keywords and use them all in your article, you would do yourself a favor! Most people just limit themselves to the keywords offered by their favorite keyword tool, but I don’t believe in limiting myself in anyway ;)
By the way, here is a tool which may help you get related terms to your primary keyword:
It is not always accurate, and many times I have found that it would suggest 'weight loss' keywords even when I entered an 'internet marketing' keyword as search term, so use it with care!
Well I guess I have rambled enough today, so I gotta give you a break from boredom! In the next article I might bore you with some freakier article writing tips, though! ;)
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