How 4 Types of Writers Help You Craft Incredible Blog Post Introductions
Every time you begin to write something, you’re David — armed with a slingshot — against a fleet of tiny Goliaths.
The chirps from your reader’s phone, another like on their Instagram post, a salacious news story… Each click, push, or swipe is waiting, poised to destroy the hook you so skillfully set with the headline of your piece.
The sad reality is, readers (myself included) won’t take long to find out if your content has value to them.
So if you know you’re providing quality content, but it’s not getting read, there’s a good chance your introductions need some work.
Fortunately, with a lot of practice and a little guidance from the experts, you’ll be on your way to writing content that gets read.
To give you some methods to practice, I’ll run through the tactics that a few professional journalists, bloggers, researchers, and business writers use to tackle the all-important task of writing an introduction.

Copyblogger’s 5 Ways to Start a Blog Post
Brian Clark of Copyblogger outlines 5 simple ways to start a blog post:
- Ask a Question
- Share an Anecdote or Quote
- Produce an Image in the Reader’s Mind
- Use an Analogy, Metaphor, or Simile
- Cite a Shocking Statistic
With methods #1, #3 and #4, you’re actively engaging your reader.
For example, in method #1, you’re making the reader think. With #3, again, you’re creating something in your reader’s mind. The reader is an active participant.
#4 is a little different in that you’re causing your reader to make a connection between two thoughts that they hadn’t previously connected. Still, in all three methods, your reader plays a role in your story immediately.
The other methods might not engage in such a direct way, but they work because they draw out curiosity or emotion from the reader.
Blogging Wizard’s 6 Steps to a Captivating Intro
Where Copyblogger cites 5 ways to start a blog post, the Blogging Wizard gives you 6 steps.
Here they are:
- Address Readers from Sentence One
- Start by Describing an Emotion
- Identify Reader’s Problem
- Play off Their Hopes/Dreams
- Promise Something the Reader Wants
- Transition by Hinting at How to Solve their Problem
Can you tell that I tried to imitate this formula in the intro to this post?
I highly recommend checking out the full article and Alicia Rades’s clear explanation (along with examples) of each step. As formulaic as it may seem at first glance, there’s considerable room for creativity with this 6-step approach.
By the way, notice how both Rades and Clark describe very reader-focused tactics? That’s because a good introduction is personal.
And to be personal, you have to know your reader well enough to see things from their perspective.
The best way to do that is to ask yourself questions like these:
What is the reader feeling? What does this reader want? What is his/her problem?
The answers to these questions provide the fodder you need to put these expert bloggers’ advice into action.
Writing a Lead with NPR and the New York Times
Hannah Bloch of NPR writes, “The journalism lead’s main job is to make the reader want to stay and spend some precious time with whatever you’ve written.”
Seems pretty relevant to writing blogs, right?
Here are the 6 types of journalistic leads, according to NPR:
- Straight News Lead: the classic who, what, where, why and how introduction.
- Anecdotal Lead: just like the type of intro Copyblogger mentioned; start with a story.
- Scene-setting Lead: read Bloch’s article for an example.
- First-person Lead: to be used sparingly, according to Bloch.
- Observational Lead: an observation about the story and its broader context.
- Zinger Lead: this kind of lead should make your reader spit out the coffee he’s drinking… and then keep reading.
The New York Times had one to add, called the “delayed lede.” This type of lede is an introduction “in which a person is introduced before his or her relevance is revealed.”
Here’s an example, again from the NYT:
As a young girl growing up on the South Side of Chicago, Mae C. Jemison watched telecasts of the Gemini and Apollo spaceflights and knew that that was her destiny. No matter that all the astronauts were male and white and that she was female and black. She simply knew she would be a space traveler.
You may notice familiarity between NPR’s 6 types of journalistic leads and the 5 ways to start a blog that Copyblogger pointed out.
Here’s Copyblogger’s methods again:
- Ask a Question
- Share an Anecdote or Quote
- Produce an Image in the Reader’s Mind
- Use an Analogy, Metaphor, or Simile
- Cite a Shocking Statistic
Scene-setting leads produce mental images. A zinger lead could be a shocking statistic. And both bloggers and journalists start their pieces with an anecdote.
Plus, if you take any one of NPR’s lead approaches, you can easily apply Blogging Wizard’s 6 steps to it and it becomes a journalogger’s dream intro.
The Research Writer Textbook Approach
“You can always work with readers inclined to say, I don’t agree. What you can’t survive are readers who shrug and say, I don’t care.”
Throughout my research for this post, no quote was more salient than this one. And it came from a reference book on research called, The Craft of Research.
According to authors Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams, the common structure of an introduction shares 3 elements.
1. Contextualizing Background
One reason you provide context is to establish common ground, or “a shared understanding between reader and writer about the general issue the writer will address.”
2. Stating the Problem
The other reason — and I would argue the more important reason — is to establish a stable context that you can then destabilize with the problem. The example the authors use is the opening to Little Red Riding Hood.
Silly as it seems, the structure of “stable context destabilized by problem statement” is clear:
(Stable Context Starts) One sunny morning, Little Red Riding Hood was skipping happily through the forest on her way to Grandmother’s house, (Destabilizing Problem Starts) when suddenly Hungry Wolf jumped out from behind a tree, frightening her very much.
3. Responding to the Problem
In your response to the problem, you give either the short version of your solution, or a promise to give it throughout the rest of your piece.
The Research Approach: A Specialized Tool
While the bloggers and journalists above gave us a few approaches that work in a variety of scenarios, the research writer’s method is for a very specific type of writing.
Still, this is a big idea. As content writers, we often have to write posts that tell people they’re wrong or missing information about something. The research writer’s approach helps you do this in a way that’s interesting and not pretentious.
The Art of the Executive Summary
“Use a story.”
That’s how consultant Thomas Heath explains his technique for writing executive summaries on proposals (in other words: an introduction).
His clear definition of the three parts of a story is powerful:
“All stories have three basic parts: a situation that interests the audience, a challenge to that situation, and an answer to that challenge.”
So, according to Heath, to write a story in your intro, all you have to do is:
- Say something positive that’s true and sparks interest.
- Describe a challenge to the situation.
- Present your answer to the challenge.
That’s it. Dead simple. And it’s pretty much the same as the Research Writer Textbook Approach except Heath applies it to writing executive summaries.
Wise Words from George Lois
“If you’re the kind of creative person who gets your best work produced — justifying and selling your work is what separates the sometimes good creative thinker from the consistently great one.”
George Lois revolutionized advertising, and he doesn’t mind telling everybody.
And even though he didn’t write blog posts, his thoughts are equally true when applied to writing content today.
Because when you write a blog post, you are selling something to your reader in exchange for his or her continued attention. And the market for attention — at least when it comes to content — is fiercely competitive.
There’s not just one Goliath, there’s a hundred of them. And they have more writers, more money, and more reach than you.
So when you load up that slingshot, pull back hard, take a deep breath, and let it fly. Then do it again for the next 1000 words.


