How to write a blog introduction: in 3 simple steps

Knowing how to write a blog introduction for your company’s tech product or service is an extremely powerful skill.

Writing a good blog introduction keeps people reading about you and your product or service. A bad blog introduction means people will hit their browser’s ‘back’ button. So, get ready to learn how to write a blog introduction with our three simple yet powerful tips.

First things first: know your audience

In themselves, blog introductions are not hard to do. Pick a subject, start writing. Eventually, you’ll have something that introduces your topic and leads into the rest of your blog.

But, introductions are hard to do well.

Why?

Because a good blog introduction is written in a way that will engage your target audience. A lot of people forget that they should be writing for their readers – and not themselves. You need to think about your reader – who they are, what they do, what their challenges are.

Say your company sells software for HR departments. Your ideal reader might well be an HR Director who has been in the job thirty years and has seen everything.

If your blog introduction fails to tell them anything new, is patronising, or just doesn’t chime with their experiences, they’re very unlikely to read on. To put it another way, don’t write a blog introduction that tells the HR director obvious things like ‘human resources is about training and resolving workplace disputes’.

With that caveat in mind, let’s look at how to write a blog introduction with our three expert tips.

Your three tips on how to write a blog introduction

1. Get the audience’s attention with a hook

The purpose of your introduction is to hook the reader into your post so that they read to the end. This is the essence of all good writing – to seduce someone into reading and not stopping.

The introduction is the place to get your audience’s attention and keep it. They may have been intrigued by your headline and clicked on the link to your blog. They will still give you the benefit of the doubt. But the introduction is where you need to win their trust, and make them decide to keep on reading.

Make sure your hook is:

• Relevant – it must relate to the post and the headline. This seems obvious, but it can be easy to spiral into tangents.
• Intriguing – the introduction should give them something juicy which they want to learn more about. It could be a stat, a line of dialogue or an interesting observation.
• Short-lived – no one likes a hook that outstays its welcome. If you can’t fit your hook into two or three sentences, it’s worth asking if it’s really, erm, hook-y enough

EXAMPLE: imagine we were writing a blog targeted at our HR director mentioned above. Our hook might be something like:

“According to a recent survey, X percent of HR directors still use paper for most of their business processes. How does this measure up against your department’s experience? In a world where whole companies are built on cloud-based digital services, is it not time to finally leave paper-based processes in the waste paper basket?”

2. The intro must be connected to the headline of the post

People will begin reading your article because of the headline. Think of how you read a newspaper – you skim through until a headline catches your eye. If you begin reading, and the introductory paragraph doesn’t seem to be linked to the headline, you feel confused and, in a way, taken advantage of.

You therefore need to reassure the reader that the article is going to do what the headline implied.

EXAMPLE: Our headline might read: “Five ways HR departments can save £1000s by abandoning paper”.  Early on in your introduction, you need to confirm that the rest of the blog is going to do what the headline says. For example:

“HR departments spend thousands of pounds a year on paper and ink, while also losing a lot of time filling in and filing forms. Is there a better way of using all that time and energy?”

3. The intro leads naturally into the main body of the post with a ‘thesis statement’

Making a smooth transition from introduction to the main text helps lead your readers through the article. It keeps their reading experience as seamless as possible because they aren’t disrupted by content that isn’t relevant.

EXAMPLE: A good transition for our example blog would be to point to the ‘five ways’ mentioned in the title:

“In today’s post, we’ll be looking at five ways your HR department can finally free itself of paper.”

Here’s how we’d piece together that sample introduction:

Just add personality

You should now have a nice tidy opening paragraph to your blog post, no matter what the subject. To add a little more personality to your articles, here are some directions to experiment with:

• Be personal – engage your readers with everyday language and use the 2^nd person (‘You’ and ‘Your’) to address them directly
• Sound excited – if there is no enthusiasm in your introduction, people will be less inclined to continue
• Tell a story – people are engaged by narrative and beginning your article with an anecdote or a reference to a story will help the reader relate
• Form a question – this creates plenty of interest. Remember to answer the question in the post!
• Offer a fact – facts and statistics are great for building authority and with a little research are abundant
• Quote – a quote can be a great way to start a post – but make sure it’s relevant

Discover more tips and advice on producing top quality content to help engage your audience and drive leads right here.