What is the most important piece of real estate in your article or blog post? Is it the introduction paragraph where you let your audience know what they are about to get? What about the main body of the article where they have their problems solved or the bio box where you put your self serving links?

The most important piece of real estate is your title. Get this wrong and you lose your hard earned readers in 3 seconds flat. Stop for a moment and consider how a reader will read through the content that you create for them. First, they read your title. If they find it interesting enough, they will follow the link to continue reading.

Next, they will read the opening paragraph. This might take 30 seconds depending on how fast they read or the length of text. The last test is the body of the article. Is it teaching them what you promised?

In total, there are three gates for your reader to pass through before they get to where you want them to be. And that is the resources box at the end with your links to the money page. If a reader chooses not to pass through any of these gates, then the article fails to meet that end goal.

For you as the writer, the critical test is the title. This is what creates the all important first impression. You have just 8 to 10 words to arouse interest and get that all important click. With this in mind, I am bewildered as a site owner how often people get this wrong. I get several requests to be a guest author on my sites with titles such as -

Pre-Menstrual Syndrome (PMS)? Are You Really Taking Care Of It Or Just Putting A Bandaid On It? Real Natural Solutions! Read This!

Core Value Eating

Muscle building

These are real titles I just pulled from my request list. It does not matter how good the article is, I simply delete without reading it if it has a title like these. The first is too long and is wasting valuable real estate with junk words. Putting 'read this' into a title is a quick way to turn off your audience.

The next two titles are far too short. The writer has only indicated the general market the article is describing. What benefit am I going to get by investing my time in reading this article? A title is not a classic 'who dunnit' where you keep the audience guessing.

If you are really bad at writing titles (and I think we all agree that we just read three substandard examples), here is a simple template to help you write more interesting titles. It won't create fantastic titles for you, but if you go from a poor writer to an average or even good writer, then your results will increase significantly.

Think about your article and then answer these short questions -

1. What is your micro niche? Get as detailed as possible.

2. What is reader going to get?

3. What is the benefit to them for reading your article?

Lets apply this simple template to the PMS title we read earlier.

1. What is the micro niche – PMS pain

2. What is the reader going to get – natural solutions

3. What is the benefit to the reader – put an end to premenstrual pain

Put it all together we get –

PMS Pain – 3 Natural Solutions To Reduce Premenstrual Pain

Now you have a starting point, play around with it a little if you want -

PMS Pain – How To Naturally Reduce Premenstrual Pain

PMS Pain – How To Naturally Reduce Premenstrual Pain With Few Side Effects

These are good titles. They are not great titles, but this simple template will give you far better results than trying to pack half of your word count into the heading.