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Why Perfidy Valence?
One afternoon last year I woke up from a power nap with an odd term on my mind--"Perfidy Valence". I accepted the term with a fleeting moment of clarity as though it was something completely natural to me and made perfect sense. Then, as I became more fully awake, the phrase continued to stay on my mind while losing any significance to my real world of thinking. However I felt compelled to write a blog post regarding the phrase and to use "Perfidy Valence" as my blog post title.
The advice most often given to bloggers in regard to increasing site traffic is to use titles that will draw readers. Commonly the tactics include using a question that interests many people or presenting an idea that will appear useful to others. Overly technical or obscure titles typically do not attract readers since there is nothing in the title for them to connect to.
What Attracts You to a Blog Post?
Perfidy Valence strikes me as a blog title that would attract few visitors. You who visit this particular blog post will most likely be regular readers who are visiting out of habit, reciprocity, or just to see what I had to say. Those of you who have dropped in might have have done so without even noticing the title of the post while others may have read the title and thought little of it since--well, because I sometimes come up with weird stuff and this was just another one of those things.
Then there will possibly be those who drop by because they were intrigued by the title. Perhaps the phrase had some sort of actual significance for some. For others the pairing of these words evoked a sort of puzzlement that attracted them to the post out of curiosity. If there were any of you who fell into these categories, I hope you don't feel scammed that you were lured here under any sort of false pretenses. For that matter I hope regular visitors aren't thinking something like, "What an idiot! There Arlee Bird goes again with some oddball notion."
It's a Legitimate Question
From my view on this topic of blog titles, it's not so much the words "perfidy valence" that are the real focus here. Some readers may have expected something about a villain from a movie western or a post about science. There are many things the title could suggest since the word "valence" has a range of meanings and "perfidy" is a word that is somewhat charged with emotion and negativity.
In the past I used another term derived from a dream on this blog--Dynamic Flow, After googling the term I found that others had actually used it, though I had no recollection of ever having heard it before. I ended up with the post Dynamic Flow: The Dream as well as Dynamic Flow: A Guest Post By Halina Goldstein. Later I recycled my dream post as Deja Vu Blogfest: Dynamic Flow. I can't say that any of this took on viral post proportions, but I did get some interesting reactions on all of these posts.
However I do think legitimate questions are raised in regard to using obscure blog post titles. Can a title of this nature increase readership? Might using this sort of title cause a new visitor to feel ripped off after reading the post? In this present post I think my topic is a fair one, but could my title be construed to be a deception?
Does using certain key words (such as sex, football, best-seller) or other names or phrases which have topical significance (for example Obama, ISIS, Kim Kardashian) in a blog post title constitute a rip-off if the blogger does not actually discuss to any great extent the word or name used?
Do you usually make an effort to formulate titles for your blog posts that you think will draw new readers? Are there any particular titles that you have used that have had a particularly good response or even caused your blog post to go viral to some extent? Are there any blog post titles that have backfired for you?
What made you visit today's blog post at Tossing It Out?
