Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts?
3 min read
I've been scrolling the Bubbles new feed for a few weeks now. I think of it like trolling[1] for good feeds. This is a pretty high-volume feed so I can't click through every post so I end up just reading the title and trying to decide if it's something I'd be interested in reading. As a person on the internet, I have opinions about what makes a good title.
Prebuttal #
Let me start my list by saying yes, I understand each person can write whatever they like on their blog and in whatever manner they wish. I presume a blogger has submitted their RSS feed to Bubbles because they want people to read what they're writing. Not in a growing my audience kind of way but in a I'm looking for my tribe kind of way. I'm looking for my tribe too. Help me find you! We can be a tribe together.
Use descriptive titles #
Please for the love of god, give me some idea what your blog post is about. I'm interested in a wide range of topics. So even if your post is about something obscure, give me something other than Recent Thoughts... or So Far, So Good. Recent thoughts on what?! What is good so far??? Especially on Bubbles, but maybe even on other blog aggregators, the title is the main signal so pause for a beat and try to come up with a decent title for your blog post.
Avoid bucket posts #
I think this one might be a bit unpopular but I do not like the round-up posts. You know the ones. They're titled Week Notes, Week in Review, Weekly Links and the like. When I'm cruising Bubbles, I do not click weekly notes from randos. For bloggers I know and have followed, I do often scan them.
This one probably is less write better titles and is more write better posts. I think many people use these posts as a writing tool to exercise their writing muscles. I'd suggest a better tool is the age-old favorite of writing blog posts about blogging, like I'm doing here.
Do write posts in reply to other people #
If you're trying to exercise your writing muscles and establish a habit, another good way to find things to write about is to respond to what other people are writing.
These types of posts are way better than bucket posts.
Avoid clickbait titles #
I see this less on Bubbles and way more on Google News if I'm just doing a quick doom scroll during lunch but I hate titles like He lost so much weight doing this... Grrr I hate that. Don't do it. I will curse you out under my breath!
Conclusion #
And that's pretty much it. Those are the main things that irritate me when scrolling Bubbles. If you don't like my opinions, well just ignore them and continue to write on your blog however you like.
What are your pet peeves about reading others' blog posts?
As in fishing, not pissing off liberals. ↩︎
Ben 🫧
Most blogs on Bubbles were added from other blog directories, not because the authors requested to be on Bubbles. So most bloggers have no clue that Bubbles even exists. But having descriptive titles is a good idea anyway, regardless of Bubbles.
unstory
(untitled)
Not every post is written to be "clickbait". Some don't write for web feeds or discovery. Some may even not like the label "blogger".
What you are describing is obvious. A good title helps discoverability. Sure, it helps the brain to categorize links fast. "Weekly nonsense" says even less than (untitled). An article without a title can hide a gem, while weekly or monthly nonsense is just grouped nonsense.
Web feeds are archaic XML or JSON messy thing. They syndicate content in HTML that has to be escaped because the language/format requires that.
If people follow your advice and they start to write attractive titles, it will be the same as the old SEO game. Exciting title, empty substance in the article. Some things are probably better left for natural selection.
There is a bigger problem in writing than non descriptive titles. Length of articles. Most of the writing is just too long. The author writes some thoughts; the idea is good, but it's not worth 500 or 1000 words.
It's faster to click and close a tab than to figure out if an idea is worth reading 1000 words. If you open some small article with a few lines, often referred to as microblogging, even if you read it whole, you did not waste much of your time and energy. On the other hand, if you read 1000 words because somebody had a good title, that's a waste.
Fewer words, which means even no title. The internet is full of words.
Pete J
Tywèle via Mastodon
@flamed yes this is so annoying. I usually skip blogposts like these because they don’t seem very interesting to me.
G
Agreed. I think good titles can be 'good enough' as long as they give a sense of what the post contains.
I don't think that behoves us to head into SEO optimisation either, I don't think it's that kind of route.
I would possibly add if you are posting a Photo only that some mention of that in the title would be nice.
tsd
You mean 'trawling', not 'trolling', for feeds.
Jim Grey
I suck at, and dislike, writing titles. This may be an unpopular answer but when I can't come up with one that isn't at least meh, I feed the article to Claude and ask it to give me title options.
Because bottom line I agree with you. Titles need to at least sort of tell you what you're getting when you click in.
cogmios
When I started blogging in the 90s "titles" did not exist yet, nor comments. It still makes much more sense to blog without titles.
Bri
In regarding to "descriptive title", eh... A title is just a title. Click in it and read the first paragraph, if it isn't what you signed up for, move on to the next one. Probably only wasting like 1 minute of your time.
And also about write better posts. What IS a better posts? It is very subjective. I like to believe "Weekly notes" can be considered a better post. Same can be said for, for example, a gaming post or a post about your religion. You cannot dictate what is a good post or a bad post but you can dictate what you click into. Because, a good SEO optimization title can also be a bad post while a bad title can sometimes be a good post.
As a blogger, you should encourage people to write. Not discouraging them by stating "you should write better post" and then pointing it out that you don't like certain types of posts. If you don't like to read them, don't read them. And it's okay if you don't like certain type of post.