How to Get Your Blog to 100,000 Visitors and Beyond, Step 3; Get a Compelling Tagline

Step 3 to getting to 100,000 visitors and beyond: Get a compelling tagline.

You're familiar with taglines even if you don't know it. For instance, match the company/brand with these well known taglines (some are even pretty old -- a testimony to their power):

• "You deserve a break today."
• "When you care enough to send the very best."
• "The real thing."

If you said McDonald's, Hallmark, and Coca-Cola, you are a witness to the fact that taglines can be powerful. But unlike these giants of marketing muscle, you don't have a ba-zillion dollars to spend to make sure your target audience knows your tagline. As such, here's what I recommend for making the best taglines for beginning bloggers:

• Make it descriptive. Don't be vague and use something like "the real thing", it won't work for a new and poorly funded blog. Instead, use your tagline to tell the reader precisely what the blog is about. It's that easy. Simply consider "what is my blog about?" and write a summary. This sort of tagline will suit you fine. For example, if you were Coke and you had the resources of most beginning bloggers, "Thoughts and commentary on soft drinks and the industry" would be a better name for your blog (given that this was your subject matter).
• Get to the point. Use 10-15 words at the most. The shorter, the better. Your tagline should be a short sentence or thought -- not a paragraph. If you need to give more details to describe what you blog is about, put it as a link in the "about" section of your blog.
• Put it up top. Place it prominently -- somewhere visitors will see it as soon as they visit your blog. I place both my blog's name and tagline at the top of every page on my blog so both are constantly reinforced with visitors. This makes them easier to remember and reinforces them both with every reader.
• Once you are established, you can get more creative. If you want to change to something a bit more "creative" (like "the real thing"), you can do this once you build up critical mass. However I would say that you still want it to be partially descriptive unless you are a very big blog like Instapundit, Boing Boing, and the like.

Click here to read part 4 of this series.

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Comments

[Cary]

Hi, I followed you over here from ProBlogger...great post :) I'm looking for #2 in this series, and thought you might want to link to the whole series from each post. That would make it a lot easier to follow.

Just a thought, and thanks for sharing your ideas.

[FMF]

I'm posting on it right now. The best option to read all posts in this subject area is to see the special section I've created on the left-hand side of the blog. It has a link for every post in this series. Thanks for the suggestion!

[fivecentnickel.com]

Hey, the trackback from:

http://www.fivecentnickel.com/2005/12/30/weekly-roundup-123005/

Failed on this one, too. It only worked for post #1 in this series.

[Pat at Doggiewoggie]

I agree - my tagline has really helped my blog. The tagline is "All About Dogs". I use this as the description when listing the blog on dog sites too, and I get a lot of traffic, I think because it is a little mysterious and is short and to the point.

[FMF]

Cool site!

Hey, have you read my "pets" posts? You can find them here:

http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/pets/index.html

;-)