Welcome to the first ever edition of the Carnival of Communication. Within the realm of circular communication the posts that made this edition will teach you about everything from writing great headlines to getting great interviews as well as how comm…

Thank you, Lauren – “this Vivien” – haha :-)

I have previously changed headlines on my blog, but keeping the slug intact. I think that anyone with a blog can agree that it’s a constant editing process – information needs updating, you might prefer to word things differently etc.

David, that’s another handy tip – to get back to the old articles and re-write the headlines, but keeping the slug. Rory also mentioned that on his blog. Have you personally done that on your blog?

Joey, glad you found the 8 points helpful. Perhaps you should try writing an article on your blog and naming it “7 Lessons Lindsay Lohan Can Teach You About Collecting Play Cards”. :-)
just kidding, but I see your point, that’s why I mentioned that “corpse would read” headline in my post.

Ronald, that’s why they say that two heads are better than one – it always helps to look at thing from a different perspective.

Two of the things I struggle with most when coming up with titles are time and relevance. Sometimes I have a title I like better and others tell me to go with it but I feel it somehow misleads the reader.

Case in point: Some months ago I was doing a google blogsearch for the phrase ‘baseball card blog’ and a post about midway down the first page caught my eye. It was titled ‘6 Lessons Britney Spears Can Teach You About Blogging’. I clicked on it because I wanted to see why this post would come up based on the search phrase. I ended up subscribing to the feed because I enjoyed the commentary and writing style. It was one of those make money online blogs. It has since become a ‘me too’ like John Chow blog so I unsubscribed. All that said I have never forgotten about that post because how it stood out and why it was on the first page of a google search for a totally unrelated query.

As for my secret formula, I think for me, and many others, it’s simply to practice and learn. I reckon that even the experts continually question the headlines they finish with.

One of the wonders of WordPress is that you can change your article headlines even after publishing, and not harm any possible link-backs you might’ve already gained, via the ‘post slug’ option.

I do tend to come up with a headline idea very quickly – it helps to give the article a sense of direction. Often the headline will be tweaked after the article is written, just to make it a bit more grabby.

Mind you, it’s worth remembering that the content has to live up to the headline. It’s all very well hooking readers in with a great headline, but there had better be the content to back it up otherwise we could find ourselves with disgruntled and dissatisfied readers.