If you’re going to do one thing right on your blog, make sure you start strong. When you nail your blog post intro, you hook your readers. High traffic and engagement numbers follow.

But how does it happen? Can you do it well? With a little common sense and creativity, it’s easier than you think. If you can remember just two steps, you can get it done.

Start With An Invitation. Make It Memorable.

Just as with any other party, start your blog post with an invitation. Make it compelling and personal. Use it to address the reader directly and tell them what to expect.

Ultimately, this your invitation should be a more developed follow up to your headline. It leads the reader down a path to the rest of your content.

As you set your invitation, get creative and make readers curious about the details. Don’t show them everything right away so that they’ll want to stick with you to learn more.

Add Humor, Personality, Or Both

Nothing reflects better on your company than a well-told joke. Once you know what you want to say in your invitation, consider adding humor. It can give a more down-to-earth impression of your brand or business culture, and seem more welcoming.

Along these same lines, don’t be afraid to let some of your personality shine through. What does this look like? Think about the kinds of things your company represents.

Are you casual? Sometimes shocking? Playful? Does a certain kind of music embody your mission? Show that and more.

Two Steps Keep Readers Around

Revealing who you are from the earliest parts of your blog is one of the best ways to keep your readership and engagement numbers high. It helps people want to get to know you for the long term. Sure, it may take a little longer to get it right. It’s worth it.

Writer Tip

Writing Short Sentences And Paragraphs The Right Way – And Why It Matters

by Dave Polykoff

October 28, 2019

Why do writers and bloggers struggle to write short sentences and paragraphs? It’s vital today to acknowledge demands on readers’ time – and make it brief accordingly. Writing short sentences and paragraphs the right way means better readability and more powerful statements. Consider these tips and see what happens to your content:

Write It, Then Quickly Revisit It

Write out ideas as they surface, so during a first draft let it flow regardless of brevity. However – and this is where it’s important – go right back and try to shorten each sentence. The “delete” key can be your ally. Go back and consider eliminating:

Unnecessary words. Delete a word and read it again. If the sentence still makes sense, you were right to delete it. Try deleting the word “that” whenever possible and see if it changes anything. Do you “write down,” or “write”?
Overload of phrases. Poor writing contains too many phrases. “In today’s world,” for instance, can be simply “Today.” Or consider this: you’re not cutting it out, you cut it. Fewer words, and even shorter words, get readers to the point faster.
Adverb clutter. Few things bog down content more than adverbs. Do you totally or actually agree, or agree? Delete words like “actually,” “totally,” “usually” and “fairly” and your content will be shorter and clearer.
The needless modifier. Words like “good,” “just,” “almost,” “hardly” and “simply” just modify nouns and are often superfluous.

Split Long Sentences And Paragraphs

Find sentences of 30 words or more and try to break them in two. You can be amazed at how easy this is; using a semicolon can be helpful. Same goes for paragraphs exceeding 100 words. Shorter paragraphs are easier to digest.

Why It Matters To Write Short Sentences And Paragraphs

Consider two things: competition and short attention spans. Readers have evolved accordingly. One summary says during Elizabethan times the average sentence was 45 words. They shrank to 23 words by early last century, and down to as little as 14 words today.

Studies show today’s average human attention span is eight seconds – down from just 12 seconds at the start of this century. This at a time when technology brings information to our eyes at alarming speeds. Readers have little time for the unnecessary. So many things vie for attention that short sentences and paragraphs are critical toward maintaining interest.

Keep messages clear, short and sweet, or readers won’t stick around.

Writer Tip

How Grammarly Can Make You A Better Writer

by Dusten Carlson

October 17, 2019

All professional writers would love to be complete masters of grammar. However, creating flawless first drafts isn’t a natural skill. Producing nothing but error-free work is nearly impossible. Even those who are well-practiced at proper grammar can still make handfuls of mistakes in their work.

Although applications like Microsoft Word can catch grammatical inconsistencies with a fair amount of accuracy, they don’t necessarily help improve your relationship with proper grammar across the course of time.

One superb program, Grammarly, could be your long-term solution to not only correcting your grammar upfront but learning how to avoid mistakes and write more effectively in the future.

How does Grammarly work—and how can it make you a more adept writer?

No first draft is perfect.

However, writers often struggle to look at their own work with a critical eye. That’s what makes Grammarly such an essential tool for writers—it helps you recognize your mistakes and turn any first draft into a grammatically-polished gem. From exposing misused punctuation to pointing out misspellings to identifying errors in sentence structure, Grammarly ensures that your final drafts are free of any errors that turn audiences off of your writing.

It’s extremely easy to use.

Signing up for Grammarly is completely free (unless you want to upgrade). One phenomenal feature of Grammarly that competitors haven’t matched is that you can plug the application into your Google Chrome browser. Grammarly will then help you with your grammar, vocabulary, and general writing across all online platforms, from your work emails to your Google Docs files.

How does it work? Grammarly jumps into action while you write. The platform catches grammatical errors in real-time and suggests a number of thoughtful solutions to improve skewed sentences, misused vocabulary words, and incorrect usage of punctuation.

A major plus of the program is that Grammarly is both highly useful for improving individual pieces of work and for helping you achieve artistic success in the future. In addition, the application can help you develop essential skills for constructing well-written pieces on a deadline.

How does the solution-based application help you become a more skilled writer over the course of time?

Grammarly helps make your writing both error-free and effective.

The application doesn’t merely seek out issues with the simple grammar of your work. A unique feature of Grammarly that sets it apart from other grammar-checking software is that it also helps you find ways to improve the pre-existing, grammatically-correct writing on the page.

For example, if Grammarly notices a string of words that could be more concisely summarized in one word, it will suggest that you replace them in order to make your work more succinct (i.e. suggesting that you replace “a great number” with “several”).

Features such as these (i.e. recognizing a need for conciseness) can help you produce writing that communicates more effectively and is consistently engaging. In addition, as Grammarly reinforces practicing effective sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation, it’s training your brain to recognize how to make more effective writing choices on your own in the future.

Grammarly Premium offers even more ways to improve.

If you choose to upgrade to Grammarly Premium, you’ll be treated to a plethora of useful features that can vastly improve the quality and content of your writing. Grammarly Premium has all of the same tools as the free version, yet includes features that can take your text from great to outstanding.

These include suggesting thoughtful and unique vocabulary words to replace bland ones, scanning your writing for genre-based stylistic choices, detecting plagiarism, examining your document for readability, and much more.

The upgraded version also provides logistical insight about your writing process (number of unique vocabulary words, your average sentence length, etc.) and facilitates access between yourself and a human proofreader ($.02 per word). The prices for Grammarly Premium currently sit at $29.95 per month for a monthly subscription, $19.98 per month for a quarterly subscription, and $11.66 for an annual subscription. While you may feel that this application is a bit pricey, it’s difficult to place value on an application that is a virtual editor, a grammar checker, and a writing coach, all in one.

Final thoughts

Grammarly can help you improve both your finished pieces/works-in-progress and expanding your writing abilities, making it one of the best grammar-checking applications available on the market.

Not only does Grammarly help you improve your writing in real-time; the application also enriches your writing skill-set over time.

Whether you go for the free or paid version of the program, Grammarly’s reinforcement of proper and thoughtful grammar, sentence structure, word choice and more is certain to help you become a more effective, succinct writer in no time.

Starting Strong: Writing A Great Intro For Your Blog Post