Blogging Tips

Stifling summer heat has contributed to an abundant growth in the blogging world.  It has been reported that many bloggers have succumbed to the intense heat and taken their endeavors indoors.  Summertime, long known for its ventures in outdoor sports and activities, has now taken a backseat with bloggers staying planted in front of their computers and writing massive amounts of blog posts. Servers have crashed all over the globe due to the massive amount of bandwidth use the summer heat is causing in parts of the world.    The internet may very well collapse due to this overload.

If the above statements were true, and to the best of my knowledge they are not, it would have made a good lead-in story.  I could have written:

“It’s hot and muggy outside.  This has forced many bloggers indoors to the comforts of air conditioning.  This has resulted in overuse of bandwidth on many servers.”

This lead would not have grabbed as much attention.  It’s a bit boring and monotone.  Many of us fail at creating a good lead and fully capturing the readers’ attention.  We seem to be in a hurry to get the material written and forget the days of old when a great lead almost made the whole story.

Creating a great lead is as important as creating a great title.  It’s recommended that you spend as much time writing the lead and title as you have the body of the material itself.  In fact, it’s one area of writing that many of us forget to practice.  If we spent more time coming up with headlines and leads, it would greatly improve our readership.

This is another area that taking a journalistic approach will improve your writing.  You can read my post, “Using Basic Journalism Structure To Write Great Articles” and Jonathan Bailey’s, “5 Things Bloggers Can Learn From Journalism School” for more information about a journalistic writing style.

We create a good lead to hook the reader, give the reader information and to organize the material.  Some writers begin with their lead and write the body of the material from it.  Others write the material and then concoct their lead out of the body of the material.  Still others, like me, use both ways depending on the subject matter and a spur of the moment idea. Either way is acceptable, it’s more a matter of your own personal writing style.

Writing the lead first can be used as an outline and keep you on track with keeping the material organized.  You can quickly move from Point A to Point B if you’ve summarized the material in the lead paragraph.  But if writing the lead is an area you have trouble with, you may want to write it last pulling highlights from the body of your writing.

The lead should be brief and only contain enough information to hook the reader, and highlight what will be explained in the material.

Never give your opinion in the lead; simply state facts.

The lead should be a map.  The body of the material should follow the same pattern as the lead.  In my example, I would not start the body with the possibility of the Internet crashing unless that was the first statement in the lead.  In the case of my fake lead, I would begin the body of the material telling about how the temperature has forced bloggers back indoors, followed by how this overload has affected servers and the conclusion would then be about how this could lead to total Internet collapse.  It would follow a timeline of sorts like the lead.

For bloggers, writing a good lead is a necessity and second only to a great title.  You want to grab the readers’ attention so they’ll stay on your site longer and return to read your updates.  You don’t want to annoy the reader by using a lead that’s poorly written or irrelevant to the blog post itself.  Rob Starr recently covered, “Why Headlines Are Important”.

Writing great headlines and an attention grabbing lead can be attributed to an art form.  Some writers seem to have the magic button, for others it can be a bit intimidating.  It only takes a little more time to work on a great headline and a great lead, and will be well worth the effort.  It’s also something that can be practiced while you’re watching TV, reading the paper, standing in a checkout line—note the headlines on the magazine covers.  Headlines are everywhere.  Pay attention to them and come up with new ones that you think would have been better; make a game out of it and spend some extra time each day writing great headlines and leads.