How to create better blog titles that can drive more traffic to your ads

This is the third of five guest posts from AdSense publisher Brandon Gaille. Brandon has built his small business marketing blog, BrandonGaille.com,
to over 2 million monthly visitors in less than
three years. He’s featured as our guest blogger to share insights and tips from his personal blogging experience to help AdSense publishers grow earnings. If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.

Over the past three years, I’ve crafted titles for over 5,000 blog posts and have received over 58 million unique visitors to date. With that many titles and that much traffic, it’s allowed me to identify what types of titles get the most traffic.

The title of your page or blog post will play one of the largest roles in how much traffic you receive. From my extensive experience, a really great title can move your blog post dis and increase the number of social shares by over 300%.

The bottom line is… If you fail to write a compelling title that gets people to click, then your post is doomed to wallow in mediocrity.

Here are a few title optimization tactics that have proven to drive the most traffic.

#1 Place a number at the beginning of your title

If you have a list formatted post, then you need to be using numbered titles every single time. Titles that begin with numbers are proving to drive traffic. This is largely due to the increased consumption of users reading list posts more than any other type of blog post. A list post typically has anywhere from seven to forty key points, which are listed out numerically.
This makes it really easy for anyone to scan through the big takeaways and decide whether to dive deeper into the article. When people see the number 13 at the beginning of the title, they know they can scan through all 13 key points in a matter of seconds.


A numbered title paired with a list post will drive more clicks to your post and list style posts have one of the highest engagement rates. Posts with more clicks and higher engagement often are rewarded by becoming more discoverable to users.

Here are a couple of examples of numbered blog titles:

• 11 Tools to Create Share-Worthy Content
• 17 Incredible Social Media Statistics

I recommend crafting numbered blog post titles for more than half of your posts.

A Conductor study on headline preferences also backs up what I’ve found to be true on my blog.

#2 The odd number gets 20% more clicks than the even number


Although no one has figured out exactly why this happens, the odd numbered titles get more clicks than the even numbered titles. Here’s an example.
Odd Numbered Title: 11 Keys to Earning More Money on Adsense
Even Numbered Title: 12 Types of Ads that Convert

Before you hit publish on the blog post titled, “8 Crazy Ways to Double Your Ad Revenue,” take a moment to either add one more tip or remove the least valuable tip. This will allow you to capitalize on the extra twenty percent of clicks by having an odd numbered title.

Learn more about creating better blog titles from my blog and read all of the “17 Ways to Create Catchy Blog Titles That Drive Traffic.”


Posted By
Brandon Gaille



Brandon Gaille is an AdSense publisher. You can learn more about Brandon at BrandonGaille.com and listen to his popular blogging podcast, The Blog Millionaire.

If you’re new to AdSense, be sure to sign up for AdSense and start turning your #PassionIntoProfit.