What makes a good blog post title? 5 steps to going VIRAL!

I now have 256 blog posts. Each one has a title. I suspect the success of a blog post depends a lot on its title. Let’s analyze which titles worked well, and find some principles for how to choose a good title.

• My post popular posts, by far, are “What is mode_t?” and “Generating Intel and AT&T assembly with clang”. This seems a bit arbitrary; they were low-effort posts.

• Almost all people get to this site from Google search. I should optimize for Google search.

• Most of the most popular posts have a title structured as a question. “What is mode_t?” “What are Lamport timestamps?” “What is STUN?” I should phrase more posts as questions. This also gives me more focus for the post: answer the question!

• Most popular posts are on a single specific topic. “What is X?”

• Good titles don’t give the game away! That is, they’re CLICKBAIT. Questions are natural clickbait, because the question doesn’t contain the answer!

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