Although most of us try to produce quality material, we repeatedly fall into the same traps and our websites suffer from LDTS - Lame Duck Title Syndrome.

The 4 Early Warning Signs Of Website LDTS

1. Readers that find your site never come back.
2. Visitors don’t leave comments.
3. No one links to your articles.
4. Your website traffic doesn’t increase for months at a time.

After learning about the early warning signs, I discovered that I have a partial infection of LDTS. These 4 articles are proof:

1. Make Money Business Opportunities - Did I really use that for a title?
2. New Sites To Check Out
3. Make Money Blogging
4. What I’m Up To Today - This one was a smash-hit as evidenced by the sheer number of comments. (It got one comment that was written by someone I know, LOL.)

I don’t know if I could come up with worse titles if I thought about it for an hour. I obviously was going for speed when I wrote those titles and posts. It definitely didn’t surprise me when none of them got linked to by other bloggers. Why would anyone link to them? I shouldn’t even link to them here, I just like to burn myself publicly from time to time.

The 2-Step Cure For LDTS

1. Learning to write titles that captivate.
2. Overcoming the laziness that leads to bad title writing.

Learning To Write Titles That Captivate

I took a look today at the titles of my articles that have been the most successful and found some very interesting correlations. Have a look at these titles, do you see any common characteristics?

• 5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog
• 102 Ways To Make Your Site A Back-Link Superstar
• 3 Easy Ways To Rock The Next PageRank Update
• The Secret Of Building A High-Traffic Site
• 10 Easy Ways To Make Yourself Look Like A Blogging Newbie
• Masterful Monetization Tutorial For Future ProBloggers
• How To Get Indexed By Google In One Week
• Technorati Bootcamp - Better Your Ranking Pronto

Imply Positive Results In An Awesome Title
I never realized this before today, but every single one of the above titles implies a positive result for the reader. 7 of the 8 imply a positive result directly, and the 8th implies it sarcastically. (10 Easy Ways To Make Yourself Look Like A Blogging Newbie - implies that you will look like you know what you’re doing if you stay away from these 10 pitfalls.)

Numbers In The Article Titles
I found it very interesting that 4 of the 8 most successful articles I’ve written have numbers in the titles. I don’t know what makes numbers so intriguing, but I know that it works. 3 of the 4 numbered-title articles are lists, which have proven to be awesome link and comment bait.

Using ‘Easy’ Lingo
2 of these articles use the word easy in the title. A 3rd indicates that the technique will achieve the desired result in one week, which implies that it’s fairly easy. We are a lazy species!

Talk About The Biggest Names In Your Niche
It isn’t a coincidence that 3 of these articles are about big names in my topic. Google, Technorati, and PageRank are all topics that people in my niche want to learn about. No matter what your niche - talk about the heavy-hitters. Make sure to include the names in the titles.

Overcoming The Laziness That Leads To Bad Title Writing

I’m not even going to try to hide the obvious fact here. When my articles end up with bad titles, it’s because I was too lazy to create good ones. Focusing on the positive benefits achieved with good titles can help the writer to overcome LDTS.

Positive Benefits Of Writing Awesome Titles

• Visitors will read your posts/articles.
• Readers who find your titles captivating will dig deeper into your site.
• Readers who dig deep will likely come back and subscribe via RSS, especially if they find more articles with good titles and copywriting.
• Articles with awesome titles get linked to like crazy, leading to more search engine and referred traffic.