To Make Blog Titles Pop, Add a Little Assonance and Alliteration

This month’s issue of Breathe Magazine was the inspiration for both this week’s Say It For You blog posts….

Titles – they either do the trick or they don’t, I always muse while browsing through the magazine racks at Barnes & Noble or the corner CVS. The current issue of Breathe had an especially appealing array of clever titles, I thought.

To be sure, a number of the Breathe titles were very direct, leaving not an iota of doubt as to what kind of information one should expect to see in the article:

• Unlocking Your Potential
• Stand Up For What’s Important
• Ways to Cope With Change
• Project Declutter
• The Joy of Dogs
• The A to Zzzzzz of Power Naps
• Say It Loud, Say It Clear

Still other titles evoked curiosity about what stance the authors were going to take or what they were going to advise:

• When Life Tips Out of Balance
• Food for the Soul
• Only Fools Rush In
• Daydream Believer

I noticed a third grouping of titles, where the authors took advantage of the sound of the words themselves. Although I was looking at a printed page, I found, I was almost reading those titles aloud in my own head:

• Facebook Fallout?
• From Chore to Choice
• Navigating Non-Negotiables
• Experience vs. Expectation
• Is the Grass Greener?

Notice the way similar consonants or similar vowel sounds are presented in a sequence. In scanning those titles, your eyes are both seeing the repetition and, in a real sense “hearing it” as well.

Breathe Magazine reminded me of something I’ve been teaching for years now at Say It For You, namely using alliteration (consonant repetition) and assonance (vowel repetition) in blog titles with an eye to making them more “catchy”. It’s one thing to write great content, and quite another to get readers to click on it.

To make blog titles “pop”, try add ind a pinch of alliteration and assonance!