Top 10 Overused Titles in Internet Marketing

You can’t swing a lolcat these days without knocking over about a dozen articles on internet marketing,  with tips that promise to double your income. SEO experts are officially the 21^st century answer to the snake oil salesmen of the Old West. Grand claims; clever use of superlatives, action verbs and catchy numbers (like our title, yes we know) all designed to grab you by the hash tags and spur you into action. Puh-lease.

It’s bad enough you’ve got us talking like Elmer Fudd (‘retweet, retweet’), at least be original with the titles.  For the love of God, stop using these, the ten most overused titles in internet marketing:

1. Secrets for Growing Your Business – This title, along with variants that may include “top 10”, or “SEO Secrets …”, etc. has been making the rounds for years. There usually isn’t anything secret or profound about the suggestions offered, yet they continue to proliferate.
2. How To Get Traffic To Your Website – Solution: write an article like this one, in which you could simply advise the reader to do the same. This is the geographical oddity known as the pyramidal circle-jerk.
3. How to Make Money Online – Can you get more generic than this? If this title is indicative of the writer’s level of imagination, we’re not impressed. What can someone so devoid of creativity, so incapable of unique thought, teach anyone else about standing out from the crowd?
4. Increase Traffic to Your Website – This one’s a dandy. Just how much of an increase you can expect is never mentioned, and the articles almost without exception will offer generic advice on ‘how to’.  Thank you, Captain Obvious, SEO Marketing Wizard.
5. Keys to Building Your Online Business – Insert your own number in the title for however many useless tips you’re revealing to the masses, click submit, observe the feeding frenzy.
6. Easy Ways to Get More Traffic – This is another example of someone baiting the line with a seductive title, and after hooking the suckers audience, demonstrating that “easy” in this case can be defined as patently obvious to anyone with a functioning brain stem.
7. Steps to Marketing Success – It doesn’t matter how many steps the article includes, most if not all of them won’t include the most important steps: walking away from this tripe.
8. Common Marketing Mistakes – As in the above example, this title neglects to mention that all too frequently mistake #1 is to be a sheep and follow the herd. The quickest way to invisibility on the web.
9. Internet Marketing Tools – This one sounds great, because it summons up this image of a whole boxful of pro gear. You picture yourself delving into it and pulling out just the right gadget to fix your problem, which is mainly that you’ve clicked on this drivel.
10. Proven Techniques To … – We couldn’t get ourselves to even finish this title, and reached for the ellipses. Besides, there are a bazillion mutations of this template.

Hopefully you’ve learned by now, if it wasn’t already apparent, that the authors of such articles as these are in the same business as their readers – to earn money online. So if a title pulls in a lot of suckers readers, then its primary purpose has been served. Whether the content actually benefits you is of secondary importance at best. The only shortcut in this business worth knowing is the about-face maneuver – use it whenever you see an article like these.

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