Tag: Hooks & Openings
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Hooks and Techniques That Keep Audiences Captivated From Start to Finish
Think back to the last time you sat through a string of presentations, a conference, a webinar, an all-hands meeting where the agenda ran long and the coffee ran out. Some sessions flew by. Others immediately triggered the thought: “Now’s a good time to go to the bathroom and get a snack.” You know the…
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Strategies for Captivating Unfamiliar Audiences
I published a blog post once that I thought was brilliant, carefully researched, elegantly structured, full of insight. The comments fell into four distinct camps. One person said it changed their thinking. Another said “Great post” and clearly hadn’t read past the headline. A third picked apart my sources. And a fourth used my ideas…
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Do You Have the Guts to Create Bold Content?
In January 2006, I launched a blog with the tagline “How to sell with blogs.” Within weeks, prominent bloggers were calling me pond scum. Publicly. By name. With genuine contempt. And here’s the part most people don’t believe: that was the plan. I knew that tagline would offend the old guard of blogging, the purists…
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Crafting Subheadings That Capture and Recapture Your Audience’s Attention
I watched a man read an entire article on his phone while standing in an airport security line. He never once stopped scrolling. He wasn’t reading, he was grazing. His eyes bounced from one bold line to the next, scooping up meaning in fragments, building a mental map of the piece without ever committing to…
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Craft Excellent Blog Posts: Seven Actionable Tips for Today’s Creators
I used to think writing was like magic, the kind where you pull a fully formed rabbit out of an empty hat. So I’d sit down at my keyboard, stare at a blank screen, and wait for the rabbit. Sometimes for hours. The rabbit, unsurprisingly, rarely appeared. Eventually I learned that productive writers don’t think…
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Borrow Tarantino’s Storytelling Method to Create Magnetic Content
I saw Pulp Fiction on opening night in 1994, and I remember two things with perfect clarity. First, the audience burst into applause after the opening scene, not the ending, the opening. I’d never seen that before. Second, I spent the next two hours with a question humming in the back of my brain like…
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A Seven-Step Blueprint for Crafting Highly Viral Posts
I once watched a blog post I wrote get shared by someone with a massive audience, and in the four hours that followed, I learned more about traffic than I had in the previous four months of trying to game search algorithms. The post wasn’t my best piece of writing. It wasn’t my worst. It…
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Twenty-Two Proven Headline Templates You Can Rely On
You already know the headline is the most important part of your article. You know it because every writing teacher has told you, because your own behavior proves it (you skim headlines and click the ones that grab you), and because the data is unambiguous: eight out of ten people will read your headline, but…
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Six Essential Ingredients Every Engaging Article Needs
Ask most people what their content marketing strategy is, and after you cut through the jargon, it boils down to something roughly translated as: “More eyeballs. Please. Any eyeballs.” This is not a new impulse. The quest for attention is as old as commerce itself. And it does matter, ask anyone trying to build a…