I figured it would be challenging to maintain the attention of college students as a guest speaker the week after San Francisco State resumed classes after Spring Break. That’s when I was scheduled to talk to an Internet marketing class last year on the topic of search engine marketing.

If I had titled the speech, “Search Engine Marketing” and flashed that up on the first PowerPoint slide or had the professor introduce me along with that title, I imagined I would have lost the students to mobile phone games or text messaging.

Instead, I labeled the presentation: “Making Money on Google,” which captured their attention immediately. That’s because the title appealed to their self-interest. It suggested they were about to learn how they can make money on Google.

A speech title, like a news article’s headline, should be stripped to the core of the presentation’s essence. Since I knew all the students searched on Google, as opposed to its far smaller competitors Yahoo or MSN, it allowed me to keep the title short and punchy.

If you want the audience to listen, keep in mind, they want to know: what’s in it for me? How am I going to be able to use this information?