Your Blog Fails Right From the Start — Vague vs Customized Intro.
What does your blog intro look like?
- Do you use a metaphor or comparison?
- Start with a story?
- Lead with a statistic?
- Lead with a lot of questions? or
- Start with ‘In the world of X, it’s very common’?
In fact, almost every blog on every company’s pages, personal websites, and people’s social media feeds follows this as a way of hooking the reader’s attention right up front.
I know we’re content and copywriters, paid to steal the reader’s attention with whatever techniques we’re using.
If you want to steal the show, you got to keep that energy up the whole time. Just intro, middle, or end performances alone won’t cut it.
Let me be straight: your blog’s success doesn’t solely depend on the intro. Nope, your readers have 700–1000 words to sift through in a typical post.
This doesn’t mean your blog intro shouldn’t be interesting or enticing to the audience’s queries. Nor do I mean that you don’t have to start with a lot of questions. And just nailing the intro doesn’t guarantee your readers stick around your blog for long.
If your quotes, questions, or fancy statistics don’t fit into the topic and the target personas doubt, it’s better to leave them out.
The pain point rings true in every blog post and topic. If it hasn’t been addressed, what’s the use of a content strategy?
I want to go with the pain point analysis method.
As marketers often say, hit at the pain or emphasize it, so the reader is more likely to follow through.
Consider this blog intro on “How to find a freelance writing client?” It appears to target freelance content writers who struggle to find clients in the market.
They could have numerous pain points, and with a title like “getting clients,” it’s about addressing what they’re going through or the common hurdles every freelance writer faces when searching for writing clients.
I really like this intro. It kind of makes you wonder how she gets her next client when she’s in deep credit card debt. We’ve heard stories are a great way to connect, and it’s true. The moment I read this intro, it immediately grabbed my attention. You build a portfolio, then what? You go get the client.
Many freelance creators still see Upwork and Fiverr as their starting point for finding clients. While this intro might not resonate with me personally, it has certainly reached those who begin their freelancing journey by setting up profiles on Upwork.
I don’t even know what I think about this. From start to finish, this intro doesn’t focus on any particular individuals seeking freelance writing clients, nor does it mention specific platforms to explore. It’s casting a wide net for multiple freelance writers without delivering a personalized message.
You know what? This is also ranking on page one, alongside those top 2 results. So, Google seemingly misunderstands the search intent of the blog post sometimes, but not the readers.
Even though these types of results get to rank on the front page, there’s a huge chance for them to get a high bounce rate.
Address your audience or the problem you’re going to unwrap. Talk about it with whatever inclusions (statistics, quotes, questions) you’d like to add with it.
How do you find out what your target audience cares about? Know your reader.
You don’t have to study psychology for this.
I reckon there’s nearly 600 million or so blog posts published online. That’s a hefty number, ain’t it?
So, it’s really getting tougher to find the connection from the content to the community where people hang out.
The word I used was meant to convey a sense of community. Just call the people by their names, the city they’re living in, the job they’re doing, the struggles they’re facing.
Simply by addressing it, your blog post can build a good rapport with the audience.
It’s the same strategy we content writers use to write for B2B and SaaS clients. By understanding the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, why) and interviewing potential clients on a phone call or a Zoom meeting, it gives us a lot of opportunity to know what their pain points are, what to talk about, and what to avoid when speaking to the client.
If you truly want to know how to write the best intro for your blog post, you need to know your audience, understand their pain points, research their pain points, find relevant quotes from experts or recent stats, and ask a lot of questions that the reader really concerns with the topic.
Then what? Display it and grab their attention.
