Entries Tagged 'Thursday is Words Day' ↓

According to the late copywriting great David Ogilvy, four out of five people read only headlines. If your headline is doing its job, the reader should continue on and at least read the first sentence. There are countless Internet articles available about headline writing that include fill-in-the-blank formulas, continue the “write for humans”/”write for bots” debate, or even answer the age-old question, “How many words should a headline contain?” Problem is, most of these pieces don’t explain WHY certain headlines are effective or HOW to write them.

Hopefully, we’ll do that here.

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One of the writing “Facts of Life” is that every story, article, book, or blog post must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The most important paragraph in any piece of writing is the first one, called the Lead. Jumping directly into the body of your piece is likely to elicit a “Huh?” from the reader, followed closely by a click on the browser’s exit button. The lead coaxes your reader to continue reading the remainder of the piece, which, if done well, will “follow the leader.”

Your opening is more than an introductory handshake to set the tone — it’s a commitment to your reader that your prose will entertain, intrigue, inspire, and inform him. Think of the lead as a seconds-long commercial to entice your reader to “buy” the remainder of your story. A tall order, yet with the number of techniques to choose from (see list below), the challenge of writing an opening is not an impossible task. It can even be fun.

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Several years ago, I attended a CLASSSeminar training with Florence and Marita Littauer. They taught us an easy-to-remember outline for presentations that can be adapted to blogging as well as speaking — the P-I-E-R method. The word PIER is a tool to remind the presenter of the four major elements each aritcle, presentation, or speech should contain: Continue reading →

Our main goals as bloggers is to connect with our readers. The best way to do that is to give them an emotional experience. Since cliches are, well . . . cliches, little or no emotion is invoked when the reader reads them. In order to determine how to best rewrite cliched phrases, we must first consider what emotion we want to describe.

“Shaking in my boots” is a worn-out phrase that describes fear and dread. How else can we describe those emotions? One of the best examples I’ve read comes from Continue reading →

A successful blog requires two simple steps: Creating compelling content and generating traffic. Each part of that two-step process can be broken down into individual tactics. If you consistently perform one (or more) of these tactics for both steps of the success formula every day, within 4-6 months, your blog will likely be one of the top blogs in your niche. The key is to follow the formula and follow it consistently.

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