Do you like my headline here, on this post? Can you write a better one?

Headlines are critical. I’ve noted that, with some frustration (I’m not so good at headlines) on this blog before, here.

Headlines come up today because being in New York last week to  judge the Forbes.com business plan contest gave me a chance to visit with my son Paul, who lives in New York, and is CTO of Huffington Post. And he told me what they’re doing on the Huffington Post about headlines.

Why do you care? Maybe because (whether you like its political views or not) in the last 2-3 years Huffington Post has posted huge growth in traffic and advertiser and investor interest and visibility and traffic. So they have to be doing a lot of things right. And, if you’re writing or blogging, you should know about how they do headlines.

It starts with a lot of testing. Paul was quoted in How the Huffington Post uses real-time testing for headlines in Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab:

The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.

And then there’s Twitter. As a Twitter user, I enjoyed reading Huffpost crowd sources headlines in Snoo.ws. Here are highlights:

Using the hashtag #headlinehelp, visitors will be able to click on a link to an article and help write an appropriate headline that fits the story. Through social byproduct, the best headline will filter through to editors.

The Huffington Post made its first attempt at using the hashtag late yesterday asking participants to replace the headline, “No, YOU Lie,” regarding a story about Rep. Joe Wilson’s interjectory fireworks during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress.

Hashtags are not perfect aggregators by any means, as previous use of them has seen contests hijacked and critical messaging spoiled. With Huffington Post’s reputation, they surely have gained some followers who may wish to use this idea in a negative way for the company.

How cool is that? I’d love to copy that idea. But reality rears up its ugly head: Huffington Post has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter; I have barely four thousand. Mine are smarter and better looking, but still …

Or no, perhaps, not so cool? Maybe data-driven headlines are a problem (quoting The Noisy Channel on this subject):

I’m sure this approach must rattle some old-school journalists. And there is a real danger of optimizing for the wrong outcome. For example, including the word “sex” in this message might improve its traffic … but to what end?

OK, good point, but the discovery that there are some words (sex, violence, naked, brutal) which get better results is nothing new. It’s older than I am (I posted about words I won’t put into titles despite the temptation on this blog a couple of years ago).  What’s new is the ability to test quickly and bring a crowd into it in a practical way.

It’s not about asking people what’s new, or changing the news content. It’s about headlines. And gaining readers.

It was sometime in the 1970s when I first ran across the Procter and Gamble one-page memo policy.  I was a journalist then, interviewing an executive from P&G. It seemed to make so much sense. The people who worked there, I was told, loved it.

What can’t you say in a full page?

Think about emails, which are the memos of this millennium. What can’t you say in a page? Sure, there are special cases, but those are special cases. Most of the time, shorter is better.

A great learning moment for me, years ago, was when the editor of the business school resume book insisted that no resume be more than one page.

“Even the president of the United States can do a one-page resume,” she said. “Summarize.”

For better or worse, one of the things happening to us as we approach the second decade of the third millennium is fewer words. And I hope better words.

Blog posts seem to do better when they’re shorter. The better books break things into smaller pieces.

In Zen Habits, Leo Babuta calls it “The Elegant Art of Writing Less.”

Novels? A good novel contains no extra words. Emphasize “extra.”

White papers? There’s a medium built around words, and sections, and subsections, and organized, structural writing.

How does the saying go? “I’m sorry for this long memo; I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”

True confession: I love writing. I love short sentences, strong words, making myself understood.

I think most, if not all, good bloggers like writing. Video people do vlogs and YouTube, poets go to Twitter (say, what?), but bloggers are writers. Almost all of my favorite blogs — I’ve got the blogroll on this blog, rightmost column, near the bottom — are written by people who care about writing. Not that they don’t care just as much about business, their main content area; but they’re writers.

Yes, I’ve done all the startups in my bio; yes, I have the MBA degree; and yes, I built Palo Alto Software. But if I could have made a decent living just writing, I would have.

Flashback: 1970, I was 22, wanted to write, studied literature. I was in a PhD program in comparative literature, briefly; ended up with MA in Journalism. UPI, McGraw-Hill, Mexico City, and whoosh, the 1970s all gone.

Flashback: 1979, journalist, bored filling space between ads, enrolled in Stanford University business school. Then I fell in love with business planning, helped to start Borland International, founded Palo Alto Software, founded bplans.com. And grew it, slowly for years, no outside investment. Tough times, good times.

And suddenly it was 2007, 40+ employees and a great management team, me struggling with changed technology, and I changed jobs. And started blogging. That change was Part 1 of this series.

So what helps me a lot is that I like writing. As a journalist I wrote a lot for many different publications. I also wrote published fiction (not very good, by the way, not worth citing, but they paid me) (and I’m not including market research that was wrong, either) and a full-length novel that got some second looks, but never got published.

So now, you can see how much blogging I do by looking at the sidebar here on the right. You can’t see that I’m also writing a lot on a family site, a personal site, and even an anonymous pure writing site.

If you’re going to be blogging a lot, you have to like writing.

Benjamin Floyd of Read Click Done asked me after yesterday’s post: “how do you do it?” Two books, 1400 or so posts, 1300 or so tweets in the last two years. “Where do you find the time.”

Fair question. Reminds me of Bob Sutton’s Really, I Write it Myself. So do I. Bob thanks his editors, and so do I. But yeah, I write it all myself. (Well, there was that one guest post on angel funding, but it was the only exception.)

It’s a full-time job

To all the real business people feeling insufficient because experts say they’re supposed to be doing all this as a sideline, I say: relax. That’s a myth. A post now and then and some tweets here and there, maybe; but this blogging I do is a full-time job.

I go to the office every day, and I’m there all day except meetings (and traveling, and teaching, and speaking gigs, and angel investment, but that detracts from my point, so forget I said it).

I’m often writing at night too. And on weekends.

I also use scheduling. For example, I’m on vacation with family today, so I wrote this last Saturday, to be posted today.

Repeat: it’s a full-time job. It doesn’t just happen.

It’s no coincidence that my new life blogging and writing and speaking and teaching, and tweeting too for the last few months, was a delightful baby-boomer late 50s career change. While I’m still employed full time by Palo Alto Software, the company I founded, I don’t run it. Nobody reports to me. As I said in yesterday’s part 1, my business card says “President” but it should say Chief Blogging Officer.

Two years ago this month I started blogging. Just a couple weeks after naming Sabrina Parsons CEO of Palo Alto Software. I remained president, but switched my job to blogging, writing, speaking, and teaching. I guess I should have changed my title to CBO, for chief blogging officer.

I didn’t understand at first …

“I’m a business plan expert,” I said, naively. “I write how-to stuff. It doesn’t work on blogs. It’s static.”

Sabrina, however, insisted.

Set up your Google reader. Start reading Anita Campbell, John Jantsch, Guy Kawasaki, Pam Slim. You’ll figure it out.

What happened? On the day of that conversation I’d posted seven times on my one main blog Planning Startups Stories. As of today I’ve posted 700 posts on that one, plus 460 posts on Up and Running, my blog at Entrepreneur.com, plus 43 on Huffington Post, a couple dozen on Small Business Trends, about a dozen on USNews, and 140 on Planning Demystified. And come to think of it, I’m also posting on Business in General, Email Fail, and some others.

I read a lot of great blogs. Those four above, Steve King’s Small Business Labs, Seth Godin, Bob Sutton. Oh. I just checked. Several hundred links on my Google reader. Better stop listing. I owe thanks to so many others.

I think I get LinkedIn now. I’ve been answering questions in LinkedIn too … I’ve got a good ranking in the business plan category there. I’m connected with people I know and like.

Lately I’m loving Twitter. I’ve tweeted more than 1,200 times. I love keeping up with friends and favorite bloggers, the news in general, a few celebrities, and, my favorite benefit of Twitter, links to Web things that interested the people I follow. My Twitter friends keep me up to date. I love it. I don’t do Twitter clutter: no tweets about what’s for lunch, going home, ball games or weather; I do tweets about links, issues, articles, people, news.

I’m still struggling with Facebook, trying to figure out how to resolve the inherent conflict between use for business, keeping track with business-related contacts, and use for personal, photos from the kids and grandkids, keeping up with cousins and nieces and nephews. I’m a split personality in Facebook.

So for the record, they were right, I was wrong. I did have blogging in me. “And,” they added (flashing back to that conversation two years ago), “your blogging will be good for our company.” They were right about that, too.

I don’t think anybody (certainly not I) realized how much I’d enjoy writing again. Maybe it’s that 30-some years ago, before I got the MBA degree and got into business, I was a journalist. I was a foreign correspondent in Mexico City. I was night editor for United Press International (UPI) there, then I was a McGraw-Hill World News (think Business Week) stringer there, and I freelanced a lot too.

Not that journalism is the same as writing. In my case, I also wrote fiction, got a short story published, wrote a novel that got some second looks, but never got published (no loss, it wasn’t that good). My BA degree was in literature, and I got an MA in journalism too, just before going to Mexico for years, and long before coming back to the U.S. to get the MBA degree.

So let me say that I love it. It’s been great for me. But it’s also been very good for business, too, which is really cool. But that’s another post, scheduled for tomorrow.

God is no longer in Yahoo! Messenger, but she is in Twitter. Not on LinkedIn, but several incarnations in Facebook.

True story: Several years ago I found God on Yahoo! Messenger. That was the year that Yahoo! Messenger first started. She accepted my contact request, but never answered even one of my instant messages. Well, when I say true story, I mean that "God" was a Yahoo! instant messenger address, and I did set her up as a contact. Was she really God? I doubt it.

She's dropped out of Yahoo! now. Today I sought God on Yahoo! Messenger and got the following:

Disappointed, I sought God on Twitter, and she's there. She tweets and she answers tweets. (For the uninitiated, Twitter is social media in 140-character pieces. To tweet is to post on Twitter, and a tweet is somebody's post on Twitter.)

Last Friday a week ago she shared "one of my funnier 'direct' messages: http://tinyurl.com/62wusp" … click the link, it is funny.

If seeking God in social media sites offends you, I sincerely apologize. That wasn't my intention. But if calling her "she" offends you, I don't apologize for that detail.

I'm wondering, though, what went through the mind of somebody at Yahoo! during the time that God was available in instant messenger. Did he or she ever answer messages? Did it seem irresponsible, or just mischievous, to have that address available? Was it assigned to the first person (deity?) who requested it, right at the beginning?

And at Twitter, the same thing. God answers tweets a lot like the God I grew up with, the traditional Judeo-Christian God. Yesterday she wished all of her followers a happy new year. And how about this one, also from last week:

I tweet, therefore I am

Now I assume that God in Twitter is actually some person, and I'm glad that whoever that is does a reasonably good job at it. It's quite a responsibility to take on. I think.

A blog post calls another very well known and well liked blogger an idiot. That's the title: "So-and-so is an Idiot." A mutual friend tipped me off in an email. I know the alleged idiot in that post, I do business with him, I like him, I respect him, and I've recommended his writing a lot.

Still, that's good blogging, right? Be controversial. Make people mad. Get traffic. I've done it myself, although I don't think quite as blatantly as that. I've certainly wanted to do it a few times. And the title, particularly when the subject is well known, is really powerful. And besides, nobody's always right, right? A disagreement here and there adds spice.

Is it all about traffic? Is sharper, meaner, and more obnoxious better?

You could, after all, start the post with "Not really. But I do think he's wrong when he says … " Actually, this annoying attack  post cites, in small print down at the bottom, a much better post by Jon Dale that says essentially the same thing right. And better.

Because in the middle of that meanness, there is a point — indiscriminate high-volume Twitter use, to the point of near-Twitter-spamming, is probably not such a good idea, even if our well-known and well-liked friend says it is. The real point to be made is (and I'm not citing the URL on purpose, because I really don't like the title, or the personal attack):

The days are numbered for these types of tricks. I think everyone will agree that the world is changing into a more transparent place. Long tail success is created by genuineness and honesty. The days of the glamour and illusion created by mediums like television are coming to and end, being replaced by the blinding light of reality that is already creeping through the cracks of our world. We are about to step out of the casino doors at eight in the morning, after drinking and gambling all night, into the sunshine of honesty and truly seeing people for who they are.

And this ends with a very strong conclusion, reassuring, that we don't have to be celebrities:

Be honest. Be yourself. Be genuine in thought, word and deed. We will be drawn to you and love you for it.

So far and so good, a nice conclusion, and the idea of success mapping to genuineness and honesty is very attractive. A mean title, and kind of a mean attack, but a good point. Right?

But then I made the mistake of reading the comments. I really like the comments sometimes. Even the nasty name-calling all-uppercase-shouting comments can be fun sometimes. Very human. The best and the worst of human nature.

But by the end of the comments, it was diatribe, like an instant message argument, between two people; dull and ugly. Blogging gets really delightfully and disturbingly, both at the same time, human.

That's just my opinion.

Anita Campbell is giving away copies of my Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan book over at her Small Business Trends blog. She posted this offer last Friday for her birthday (nice touch) and offered five books to be given at random from among the list of people who commented.

The give-away program lasts until this coming Friday, November 21, so you have time to go there and add your own comment to the group. I checked yesterday afternoon and there were 36 comments before one that I added.

Aside from the possible free book, another good reason to go there is to jsts browse through the comments. Why do people plan their businesses? There are some good reminders.

OK, I'm biased, but this is also a good reminder that Anita's is one of the best blogs you'll find anywhere on small business topics in the real world. It's not for nothing that she has more than 100,000 subscribers. I read Small Business Trends every day, I subscribe to it, and I like it because it's focused on practical realities of actually running a business, day in and day out, recession and boom times alike. I'm proud to post there as often as I can.

And I'm grateful that she's saying nice things about my book. Thanks Anita.

I hope you’ll forgive me this post, but it took a long time writing, absorbed most of my Spring, and involved a lot of work by other people with editing, design, and so so forth.

These things go up and down, but I’m proud to share that — at least as I write this — The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan is the number one ranking for business plan books at Amazon.com.

I was delighted to see this in my Alltop view yesterday morning. I’ve been a fan of Steven Wright for years, and in this post, Brian Clark does a very nice integration of some of Steven’s one-liners with thoughts about content marketing.

Just to pique your interest, here are the one-liners he includes:

“Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.”

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.”

“Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don’t have film.”

“Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.”

“The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.”

But that’s just to get you interested, you should click here to go read Brian’s post. My only complaint is that I wish I’d thought of it first.

And then there’s the clip here, following, six minutes of Steven Wright standup comedy. Click here for the YouTube source if you don’t see the video.