“How to Write Irresistible Blog Intros” plus 1 more

Posted: 23 Jan 2012 12:00 PM PST

This guest post is by Andrea Wren from Butterflyist.com,

Did you know that I like to have sex on roller coasters? Yes, there's nothing that does it for me more than wondering if my partner will puke at the point of, um, no return. Okay I'm fibbing. I can't even imagine how difficult big dipper hanky panky would be, but I got you listening, didn't I?

While I was being a little devious, and you're now going to be a tiny bit disappointed that I'm not going to talk about my fetish for fairground frolics, I've demonstrated two things:

A strong hook in the introductory paragraph of your post is crucial to grab the reader's interest.
Your hook should be linked to what you're actually writing about, otherwise the reader will feel like they've been duped once they continue.

But then, seeing as the title already told you what this post was going to be about, I can be excused. You knew I wasn't going to be talking about my fictional amusement park passions, so I haven't hoodwinked you after all!

But I did gain attention.

First impressions…

They count, don't they? Unlike networking events or dinner parties, where we may be forced to stay making small-talk with a person we've decided we don't like, when we’re reading blogs, we have a choice. And we don't have to stick around. Once you've got your title, you have to think carefully about the all-important first impression that will follow.

So how do you write a winning intro that will make your reader read on?

Find a relevant hook

This is key. A “hook” has that name for a reason—it's designed to capture the reader as an angler would a fish. You lay the bait with your title, and then your hook (the first sentence or two of the opening paragraph) should snatch hard enough that even the wriggliest of wrigglers won't get loose.

How outlandish you can afford to be (a la the tabloid press) depends on the context of the writing, and how confident a writer you are. But even the most conservative of business blog posts can be strongly hooked.

Whether you begin with humor or with a serious quote, a good hook will intrigue the reader, or challenge them, and draw them into finding out where your opening gambit leads.

Therefore, it's useful to start with a curious or unusual fact connected to the post, a question, or something that tests the reader's beliefs. You could even try all three. For instance:

"In a new report, small businesses say they cannot afford to employ women of child-bearing age who may require maternity pay-outs. Should financially struggling SMEs be entitled to refuse to recruit women in certain age groups?"

Controversy, of course, often works well. And juicy revelations can do the trick too. Here are three other tips to make note of:

1. Set the scene

Your hook could potentially be the first paragraph in itself, depending on how succinct you are. But within the introduction, the reader should know what the post will be about.

Setting the scene is about defining reader expectations—he or she needs to assess whether the time they are about to invest in reading your post will be worth it.

In the above example of a hook, the writer might go on to say which report their information comes from, what their own position is (you will generally be shown which way the writer leans from the start, but a clever writer will make it seem that they could have their mind changed), and which arguments they are going to tackle in the rest of the piece.

You give the reader the gist, without giving it all away in the first few sentences.

2. Cut the waffle

So you've got the hook, and you've set the scene. Now read over your introduction aloud.

If it trails off around the houses and then does a few thousand miles across the world and back before it makes its point, your reader will be away with the fairies before you know it.

Like with the continuing blog post, all writing in the intro should serve some purpose. It should make the reader laugh, offer a fact, provide an opinion, make a challenge, concisely explain something, or ask a question. If it does none of these things, get rid of it.

No reader wants to wade through the ramblings of your mind if they aren't going to lead somewhere, or if you've already said it. You need to convince the reader you have a good story. Waffling will not do this.

Don't say anything that doesn't need saying.

3. After a strong beginning…

With a good hook and a pithy opening to your article, your reader should, we hope, commit to finding out what else you have to talk about.

Writing compelling introductions takes practice, but it goes without saying that this is only the beginning. You then have to keep your audience enraptured throughout.

However, that's another blog post waiting to be written.

Andrea Wren is an experienced freelance journalist, travel writer and blogger based in the UK. She blogs at Butterflyist.com, a site which inspires people to have the confidence to push their comfort zones and see the world. Here you can also get her free eBook ‘Travel More, Work Less and Live Life’. Find Andrea on Twitter via @thebutterflyist

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Write Irresistible Blog Intros

Your Social Media and SEO Game Plan for 2012

Posted: 23 Jan 2012 06:09 AM PST

This guest post is by Herman Dias of SEOsoeasy.com.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have heard about the Google Panda update and what it did to many low-quality websites last year. It was more like a Google sniper attack on all the spam and rubbish sites. Honestly, this does not seem to be the end of the Panda: there is more to come, and we need to watch out.

The whole reason Google made these changes was to give Google users a good experience when they use Google search, and why not? When I look for something on Google the last thing I would want to see is rubbish information.

That is why, as SEO marketers, we need to take a different approach to ranking on Google and driving free organic traffic to our sites. If you have done any kind of SEO, you know what the key principles of ranking on Google are.

choosing the right keywords
building a well optimized site with good content
building quality backlinks.

These are the core principles of SEO, and they may get you on page one of Google, but you won't stay there for very long. You have to do more and more of what the big G wants.

Google has started giving social media a lot of importance. It rewards sites that incorporate the core SEO principles and social media strategies by ranking them on page one and keeping them there. In fact, I think last year was the start of the cleanup process by Google. So if you think you got away without incorporating social media to rank on Google, you’d better make the change now or you may be surprised.

Incorporating social media into SEO

In the near future, you won’t be able to just pick keywords, optimize your site, and build links, and expect to rank on page one and stay there. Your site probably will rank on page one, but it won't be there very long.

You really have to incorporate social media into your SEO efforts to rank and stay on page one. Here’s how you need do it.

Select keywords with good commercial intent and good search volume, and build your main site and sub-pages around these keywords.
Have the best content on your site, and optimize your site as per Google’s requirements.
Make sure your subpages are interlinked with one another to create a strong internal linking structure.
Create a Google Plus page and give your visitors something free to subscribe to your page. Make sure this page has a link to your main site.
Create a Facebook page and give your visitors something free to become a fan of your page. Make sure this page has a link to your site.
Create a Twitter page and link it to your site as well.
Create Youtube channel with a link to your site.
Bookmark your main site, and sub-pages at social bookmarking sites.
Choose between three and five blogs in your niche to write good articles and submit a guest post to them, these posts will have a link to your blog and sub page.
Get links from authority sites like .edu and .gov sites, news sites, or high-PR sites.
Submit press releases to top press release distribution sites. Make sure your releases include links to your main site and relevant sub-pages.
Submit articles to at least five article directories. Make sure these articles include links to your main site and relevant sub-pages.
Share your content through sites like Tumblr, Livejournal, Weebly, Squidoo, and so on. Make sure the content contains links to your main site and relevant sub-pages.
Tweet interesting, relevant links your main home page and sub-pages on Twitter.
Share your blog entries on your Facebook wall and Google Plus page.
Prepare videos and post them to your YouTube channel.

These steps will not only help your rank on the search engines fast—and get traffic from them—but they’ll also help you attract traffic from social media sites. These visitors will then have the option of liking your page on Facebook, tweeting your post, giving your page a +1 on Google, subscribing to your YouTube channel, and commenting on your blog post.

This process plays a very important role in ranking on the first page of Google, fast. It will not only create extra traffic and user-generated content, but it will also create backlinks naturally, as well as a community of people who will visit your site often.

This is exactly what Google is looking for. It wants to see activity on your sites; it wants interaction between people; it wants to see fresh, good-quality content; it wants to see quality sites backlinking to your site; it wants to see how long people spend on your site.

Your three-month plan

For this entire process to work successfully you need to create a three-month plan and execute it carefully.

You need to have a three-month (90-day) content strategy. For example, you need to have about 45 good quality blog post ready and set up in WordPress to be posted every other day.
You need to have content ready to submit to article directories, press release sites, those social sharing sites, and as guest posts. You should do these tasks at least twice a month if not more often.
You need to prepare at least one video every week for 90 days and post it on your YouTube channel. If you haven’t tried this tactic before, you’ll be surprised to see the traffic you get from YouTube.
You need to publish each blog post to your Google Plus page, Facebook page, and Twitter page, over a period of time. Slowly will start to get links and visitors from each of these sources.
You need to bookmark all the pages on your site at a steady pace over a period of time using social bookmarking sites.
You need to follow steps 8 to 16 consistently for at least three months. Then you can lower the pace—or increase it—depending on the results you see.

Please note there are many more backlinking sources you can use to build backlinks—consider directory links, blog contextual links, blog comments, and video directory links, for example. You don't need to stick to the ones I’ve mentioned above.

But make sure whatever method of backlinking you choose, you use it consistently. That's why I prefer picking a few sources that have worked for me and using them for about three months. Then I introduce the other back-link sources.

Now’s the time to integrate social media into your SEO plans. If you follow this process, you will see some good ranking in Google and other search engines—as well as decent traffic from Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and YouTube.

Here is a live free case study were Herman Dias shares the exact same method of How to Rank on Page One of Google in 15 days . He also likes writing on topics related to SEO Tips, blogging, list building, traffic strategies and other Internet Marketing Topics.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Your Social Media and SEO Game Plan for 2012