Dan York has an excellent post on the need to create descriptive headlines for your RSS feeds.

Consider this shocking revelation, folks: most people monitoring blog posts, podcasts, Technorati watches, and RSS news feeds have neither the time nor the inclination to read or listen to all of the content that comes into their RSS readers, personalized RSS-enabled Yahoo or Google homepage, or podcatcher. They’re going to pick and choose.

And what will encourage your readers or listeners who are skimming through a list of dozens or even hundreds of blog posts or podcasts to stop and take in your content? A descriptive headline about a topic they’re interested in.

Dan gives examples from a site called Hackermedia.

Descriptive headline: “PLA Radio - Episode 7 - Screwing With Other Podcasts”
Not-so-descriptive headline: “Off The Hook - 20051109″

Which headline tells you more in 10 words or fewer about the contents of that particular podcast? Easy: the first one.

Print headlines vs. RSS headlines
Shel Holtz adds to this conversation at the 14:00 mark of the Episode 184 For Immediate Release podcast. He notes that catchy headlines that work well in print do not lend themselves to the world of RSS.

Shel compares the blog headlines used by Doc Searls and Niall Kennedy.

A sampling …

… from Doc:

  • “Prediction”
  • “Leading age”
  • “Hearing things”

… from Niall:

  • “Bookmarking and social sharing trends”
  • “Google Alerts for blog content”
  • “Planning a small conference”

Again, the difference is obvious.

Hey, I’m certainly guilty of using print-friendly headlines, both on this blog and on my New Comm Road podcast site myself, so these kick-in the-pants reminders from Dan and Shel are instructive for me, too.

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