Building A Successful Home Based Business struck me as a pretty good title for an article concerned with home based business. Successful Home Based Business is a decent keyword phrase for the search engine robots and "successful" is on most lists of good words to use in advertising, so that should help attract human readers. Building A Successful Home Based Business is also accurately descriptive of the content.

I was especially pleased with this title because it occurred to me very quickly when usually it takes me longer to think up a title than to write a whole article. When it comes to choosing names, my brain just shuts down. It's always been the same, I can still remember the anxiety caused by having to choose a name for a childhood pet gerbil or goldfish . "Goldie" wasn't terribly original but it was the best I could manage for the fish and I think my mother eventually had to name the gerbil on my behalf. When it came to naming my children, the responsibility was almost unbearable: not only did I have to face the trauma of thinking up names, I had to try to guess if the child would grow up despising me for making an inappropriate choice. A name that suits a cute baby can sound ridiculous when applied to a clumsy school kid or, worse still, a moody teenager. It would be a lot easier if we could just call them "child 1","child 2" etc and let them choose their own names when they reach the age of twelve or so.

Anyway, back to Building A Successful Home Based Business. I had the article ready, I had the great title and then I received an email from the owner of Ezine Articles.com (one of the places I regularly submit articles). The email started like this:

"Hi Elaine,

Did you hear that we stopped accepting articles with duplicate titles?

This was a defensive move on our part to reduce the number of incoming non-exclusive rights article submissions. Now that all 86k of the articles listed have unique titles, that means that your future article titles may be rejected if it's already in use by another author... "

My first reaction was: "Oh, good", my second reaction was: "Oh, no". The second reaction was caused by the realisation that things are going to get more difficult for people who take care over their work. Thousands of articles on every subject imaginable are being added to the vast Internet library each day. The quality of some of these articles is dubious. Many Internet entrepreneurs are putting their metaphorical pens to their virtual paper and churning out poorly spelt, ungrammatical, pointless articles just for use as vehicles for their resource box. Some Internet entrepreneurs cheat by having articles ghost written and then publishing the articles as their own. Worse still, there are unscrupulous Internet entrepreneurs who use software to churn out articles that they then pretend to have written. Worst of all are the Internet outright cheats who stoop to copying someone else's article, claiming authorship and slapping on their own copyright notice.

The non-duplicate title rule imposed by Ezine Articles is an excellent thing and should cause the cheats some problems. My point here, however, is not to lecture on the evils of cheating. There is a saying: "All's fair in love and a successful home based business" (or something like that) and I'm not about to start my own anti-plagiarist cyber police force. My really big concern about this deluge of articles is purely selfish: I fear that the cheats have used up all the best titles and I'll never be able to think up a new one. I haven't yet submitted "Building A Successful Home Based Business " but I fear it might get bounced straight back at me for re-naming..

The email from Ezine Articles included some suggestions for inventing good unique titles. One suggestion was to increase the length of future article titles. I can see how this would work but, if the cheats keep on publishing at their current rate, we are going to end up with 95 word titles and people will lose interest in the article before they get to paragraph one. Any minute now, some enterprising Internet entrepreneur will announce that he has invented a "brand new, hot, original, one of its kind" tool for creating unique article titles "at the push of a button" which he will let you have at a "discounted price". In no time at all the Internet will be overrun with wannabe entrepreneurs making the same claims. As there is software that can do a similar thing with whole articles, titles should be very easy to manipulate. Maybe they will find a way of copyrighting titles that they can then hold to ransom. Imagine the stress of having to bid on ebay for the title you need for your new article.

Another suggestion was to change the order of the words if your preferred title had already been used by someone else. Obviously this can work well but there are going to be some ugly titles created by this anagrammaticall manipulation. If we take my short title as an example: "Building A Successful Home Based Business", we could rearrange that to make "Building A Home Based Successful Business" or, at a stretch "Building A Successful Business - Home Based" , maybe we could even push it to "A Successful Home Based Business - Building" or "A Home Based Business: Successful Building" but that's about the limit if we want our title to make sense. After this we will have to look at perhaps changing "A" to "Your" or adding "Easily" or "Quickly" in front of or after "Building A Successful Home Based Business". The length of the title is already starting to grow!

To search engine robots, the word order changing won't matter but to human readers it makes a big difference. "At Home Work" already crops up all over the place as an alternative to "Work At Home". The two phrases don't actually mean the same thing and the former phrase is so clumsy. People tend not to say: "I want to at home work". As a Google search term it's fine, it's also very popular and that's why it gets used, but it's not exactly good conversational English. Just yesterday I saw a website offering to help people to locate "an online home based job you can work at home as a successful home based business". What? Well, I suppose it does get the message over (just about) but it's not exactly easy reading. It's just a collection of keywords strung together in an order that barely makes sense and that is not the best way to communicate with other human beings. The addition of "part-time or full-time", "free", "from home","no risk" and "guaranteed" would make this just about the perfect title material. Then we could extend it with other popular words like "101 Ways" and "Top Ranked" and "Top Ten". It's easy to see how this small selection of words alone could be the start of a whole series of keyword rich article titles, it could run into hundreds. I'd better get on and write some articles to fit those keywords. Now, if only I had a piece of software that would rearrange the keywords into unique patterns…