People think that blogging is just about writing great content. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is about capturing an audience, and not about being a great writer — although being a great writer doesn’t hurt.
Picking a great title is something that is very valuable in blogging. I hired professional writers to work for me before. They wrote great content, but their titles didn’t really give any insight as to what their pieces were about. Additionally, their titles didn’t attract traffic. I had to go in and manually change the title so that it would be popular. The quality of their content was excellent. There were no spelling mistakes either. But, there is another area of expertise that these professionals lacked. They didn’t know how to pick topics that would consistently be popular with the readers, even though they wrote well.
Breakdown of a popular blog entry:
(1) Great Title (30%)
(2) Popular subject matter (30%)
(3) Great points of view examined (30%)
(4) Professional writing skills (10%)
(5) Writing great tweets from content within the blog entry (n/a, but important for promotion)
(6) Linking to other related content. (n/a, but helps get traffic to your other content)
I’m guessing here about the percentages. But, a professionally written piece with a lame title, an unpopular subject matter (which means unpopular with your audience regardless of how popular it is on another medium) and dull points of view regarding the topic, will be a blog article that doesn’t get much traffic.
My assistant is very knowledgeable about notary work. She is the queen of the industry and the entire community seeks her out for knowledge. She writes a few blogs for me from time to time when she has something inspiring to share. There are many technical and spelling errors, but her work is often popular because she writes about things people want to read, and makes some salient point.
To sum it up, if you want to do well in the blog industry, learn to be very refined in how you write your blog titles. You might even try different variations and check your stats to see which got more traffic. The science of title picking is fascinating. It is an art form that is endlessly complicated and will never leave you bored!