Effective communication depends on a lot of factors. Blogging is one medium where your skill to choose words can make a big difference. In this article, I am going to talk about one such tip which I found while doing my research. And, when I looked at validating it - I was surprised how big an impact it can make.

I have been reading a lot about how I can improve on my blog posts. I blog on stuff which I work on and a little bit of travel every now and then. So, although I am not a full time blogger, I do enjoy the process and always strive to improve on it. I enjoy the process of preparation for a blog post. A lot of research and reading goes into writing a blog post. And, that learning is the biggest takeaway from the entire exercise.

I read articles on different kinds of tips and recommendations around engaging content. While reading, I came across this very interesting tip. I know that articles with numbers have a higher click through rate. Such titles give users an idea of what content they are looking for and how long the content can be. For example, 7 tips to write effective code vs How to write effective code.

But, this article went even one step ahead. They said that articles with odd numbers have a high click through rate. I was like wow, this is research at a different level now. Good information, but I am not the sort who will believe it unless I can confirm this. So, I started looking for trends. I went to some popular content websites and I started analysing the titles. Some popular sites where I could see this getting validated include Buzzfeed, ShoutMeloud.

So, it's time for me to see how much this tip can work for me. I am going to follow these tips and see how things go:

1. Come up with options for your headlines - yes, it may take time. But spend that time on headlines.
2. Go through this checklist while finalising on your title
3. Title should convey what value it is going to provide
4. Write it for humans but make it keyword friendly (yeah I know it's a complicated one)
5. Use first person

I could have said 5 tips to effective blog post titles. But, that's not what I am doing here right. These are some tips that I found out to be very useful. There can be other things to consider as well, but the thing is - I have something new to research and validate. I would urge you to look at these things as well. After all, observation is the best way to learn things.

Let me know what you think about these tips. You can get in touch with me on Twitter @amitavroy7 or on my Youtube channel. Recently, I have been doing a lot of research and using PEST (the PHP testing framework). You can read about that article as well.

Photo by Daniel Thomas on Unsplash