Have you ever sat down to write and suffered from Opening Line Paralysis (OPL)?
It happens to me all the time—in fact it’s taken me about 15 minutes just to start this post. You know what topic you want to write about, and you might even have more main points in mind, but you just don’t know how to kick the post off!
If you suffer from OPL, you’re not alone—many of us bloggers do.
First impressions count
Copyright itestro - Fotolia.com
The same is true for your blog posts. Your opening line really does matter—readers will make a snap decision about whether to read your post by how you open that post, both in the headline or title and the opening line.
It’s no wonder that so many of us feel pressure to get our first lines right.
*It’s worth noting that you can bounce back from a poor first impression. For example, the first thing my wife ever said to me was, “Hi Michael, it’s nice to meet you.” Not a great opening … but I married her within a year!
How can you craft an opening line that will draw people into your post?
There’s no one right way to open a blog post. However, over the years I’ve experimented with a number of formulas that have worked for me.
Note that while I’m writing here about opening lines of blog posts, much of what follows can also be applied to blog post titles, too.
1. Start with a question
Lets start with the approach I took in this post—I asked you a question. The question I chose to ask in this post was one that attempted to make you remember a time when you’d faced a problem or need—paralysis at the beginning of writing a blog post (a fairly common...
