Catchy Corporate Blog Writing from the Beginning

“Your page titles are an important part of your web design,” small business consultant Lorraine Ball reminds business owners. Blogger Michael Gray agrees, explaining that, while you want the title as “click-enticing”
(meaning search engine attention-attracting) as can be, titles need to be enticing to readers – as well as short enough to be easy to share on social media. 

Some favor putting the website name in blog titles, Gray remarks, yet he recommends leaving the website name off if that would make the blog post title overly long.

In Say It For You corporate blogging training sessions, I always emphasize that “catchy” and “enticing” can’t be adjectives to strive for only in the titles of SEO marketing blogs. Once the “click” has happened, I tell content writers in Indianapolis, your task is to keep the reader engaged with valuable, personal, and relevant information, beginning with the “downbeat”, which is what I call the first sentence of each post. (Think of an orchestra conductor bringing the baton down to signal the start of the music.)

In order to offer the most specific and detailed business blogging assistance in this very blog post, I did some “strolling” around the blogosphere to find examples. Reading others’ blogs is invariably a great way to learn and gain new perspective for your own blog content writing, I’m fond of telling all business owners new to blogging, and all new freelance blog writers, for that matter!)

Here’s a great opening sentence from Graham Jones, writing about search engine ranking for blogs:

“Search engines are after one thing…”  (Can you see how Jones grabs your attention right away with that “downbeat” opener?)

A second catchy opener I found was in Brian Clark’s piece about bullet points:

“Oh, those magical bullet points.  What would blog posts, sales letters, and bad PowerPoint presentations be without them?”

In corporate blogging for business, readers need to know, right away, what the post will be discussing, but they also need to get interested – right away.  Well-crafted opening lines can accomplish both those things for readers.

Seth Godin (so well-known a writer that he could get away with breaking all the rules), offers the perfect example of a great “downbeat” first liner in a blog post about marketing in recessionary times:

“There are actually two recessions.” There are no links, no keyword phrases for marketing, only a real grabber of a first line.

There are blog content writers and there are blog content writers.  To move into the second category, begin at the beginning, bringing your baton down with catchy, curiosity-building titles and opening lines.