Hey there. So at this point, you know your audience, you have your title, and you've got an outline to help you get started. Now comes one of the most important decisions you're going to make. How do you begin your blog post, choose the right beginning and your reader will pay attention till the end of the post, choose the wrong one, and they're going to immediately balance and see what's happening on Twitter. In the next three lessons, I'm going to go over 12 proven strategies to show you how to begin a blog post. In the next three lessons, I'm going to take you through my 12 favorite strategies for beginning a blog post.

This is the first part classic opening strategies. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to choose from four go to strategies for beginning a good blog post. These will help you win the attention of your ideal audience right away and kickstart your imagination. So you are ready to write some great content. Now I put these lessons together because as any other And writer knows the easiest place to get stuck when writing a blog is at the very beginning when you don't know how to begin. So whenever I get frustrated or stuck, I rely on the 12 strategies that I'm about to walk you through.

The first four in this lesson are classic opening strategies. You can ask a good question, you can use a quotation, you can start with a provocative statement, or you can lead with statistics. Now, asking a good question is one of the gentlest, most effective ways to begin a post. It makes your posts sound curious and open minded. It invites the reader into a conversation instead of dictating to them what you think. Now the advantage of leaving with a question is it helps the reader feel welcomed into your posts.

Now they can't answer the question that you're asking outside of the comments section. But the reader is going to ponder possible answers to your question while they read. They will keep reading your post until they get to the end. See if they got their answer, right. It's a nice way of gently bringing the reader into the mindset that you want them to have instead of trying to force them in it very aggressively. Now.

Number two, use a quotation from those who knows such things. By beginning with the lovely words of some expert or visionary in your field or a very respected one, you're implying that the smart quote agrees with you. You also have a some nice language that begins your blog posts from the beginning. So you know, the reader will be enchanted by the words as soon as they open your post. Now the challenge here is, you need to find a smart quote that agrees with you and you need to find a relevant quote from someone that the reader would respect. This can lead to a lot of like googling and internet searches, hoping to find a quote from someone that would fit your blog post.

Well, if it takes you too long to find a good quote, you're going to wish you chose another method. So the next One I'm going to walk you through is beginning with a provocative statement. So I've included a few examples here. Everyone hates ads. Shakespeare sucks, the Information Age is finished. Now the strategy here is you want to grab the reader's attention with a really abrupt short sentence.

You know, they opened your blog posting and they were going to read this nice polite blog and then boom, they suddenly find a fundamental assumption questioned. Now, surprise is key to making a provocative statement word that means you want a short sentence, so the reader isn't going to see the surprise coming. You also have to actually prove whatever unexpected statement you make in your post. So provocative statements can be challenging, but they're also deeply effective. Finally, leading with statistics now example here is 70% of people immediately close blogs that don't begin with facts. Now, this is arguably the most boring of all these classic strategies, but leading with An interesting statistic immediately gives your post a foundation of analytic rigor.

Statistics imply that you've done your research, you have a scientific background and your understanding that makes the rest of your post seem a lot more trustworthy and well thought out. Now, again, the challenge here is that you have to actually find a good reliable statistic to back up your argument. This can lead to a lot of looking all over the internet trying to find something that will prove what you're trying to say. And if that search takes you a long time, you're going to wish that you tried a different method. Still, statistics work really well, especially for business and scientific types who wants to think rationally and have things presented to them with proof rather than stories? Alright, so that's it for classic strategies.

The next lesson I will walk you through less conventional openings.