How do you start a blog post? That is a question that a lot of bloggers are faced with.
Do you follow a pattern in the way you write your posts, or do you mix up how you present what you write, and how you reach out to your audience?
Here are some approaches that one could use to start a blog post? I thought about how I start a blog post and decided to share some of those ideas.
a. Use a journalistic inverted pyramid style, where you start your blog post with the most important text first, answering typical journalist questions such as ‘who,’ ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how’? Once you explain your point, spend the rest of the post explaining how you arrived at that conclusion.
b. Begin with a story or anecdote or case study that might capture visitors’ attention rather than first providing the central fact or opinion behind your post.
c. Show off a statistic that might surprise or generate responses or both. This can be a good way to capture people’s attention.
d. You could start your blog post using a question and answer format, where you provide a set of questions and their answers, possibly starting with what you might consider to be the most important question and answer.
e. You can use a format where you follow a narrative or timeline, where you begin at the beginning and work forward in time.
f. It isn’t unusual to write in a conventional essay style like you might have learned at school, where you build a foundation for an idea or set of concepts and then show the conclusion.
g. If you start by referring to someone else’s’ blog post or article or a news story, and state that you agree with some of it, all of it, or none of it, and then explain why. This can be a good way of generating discussion with others. And the comments on your blog can be a good place to have that conversation.
h. YOu can begin by asking your readers to imagine some hypothetical situation, or asking them to call up some memory.
i. You can also start a blog post with a straight out question, meaningful or even rhetorical, possibly in a ploy to generate comments and discussion.
j. Also, you can address a specific person, and write to them.
k. It may not be a bad idea to disclose something about yourself that your readers may not have known.
l. I like to start with a definition that describes a concept that is central to your post.
m. You can begin with a picture or illustration that highlights some aspect of what you want to blog about.
n. A good strategy can involve laying some foundation for your expertise on a subject-based upon your previous experiences or education or both?
o. You can also quote someone or something that you may not agree with, and proceed to explain why you may have an issue with it.
How do you start a blog post?