Quick Tip: Writing Content that Sucks Your Reader In

Articles are the bedrock of your content marketing strategy. If you are going to enlarge the size of your Web footprint, then you must start here. That’s because so many other things can be developed from them as a result.

Most guidance on how to write articles tells you to start from the beginning: decide on your title, then write the introduction, then argue your points, draw a conclusion, and finish with your anchor text.

That approach is fine if you have a clear idea of how all of those parts fit together. In fact, if you understand those things really well, then you should be able to write straight through without having to think about it all.

But, if you’re struggling with the title or the introduction, or even the main points, then you need to reverse the order. Start with the conclusion, then do the bullets, and then the introduction.

The introduction is probably the most challenging part of any article. That’s because if your readers aren’t persuaded by what it says, then they won’t be bothered to read the rest of your article. So that introduction has to be spot on. It has to be compelling.

The problem, of course, is that it’s difficult to make it compelling without knowing in advance what you’re going to say in the rest of the article.

The introduction is like the overture in an opera. You can’t weave the themes together into a meaning summary if you don’t know what they are; and you can’’t know what they are until you’ve written them. But once you have them, then all you have to do is put them in one place, and then consider them together.

So imagine that you have your ideas, your points, in front of you, then what? The thing to do is to put them in the same order as they appear in the body of your article. If you want to, then you can put them just like that in your introduction. But remember that you want to draw people into the article. You want to tease them. And so it’’s probably better to write one sentence that sets the context, another one that states the problem, and a third one that tells them how you’re going to solve it. In that way they’ll get a short synopsis of what you have to say.

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