blog writing

10 Winning Tips For Writing Irresistible Blog Post Introductions

September 6, 2022 by FWJ Leave a Comment

What is a blog post introduction?

Whether you’re writing a blog post for a client or for your website the introduction is a way to hook your audience and convey what your writing is here for. It can’t afford to be boring or irrelevant, and it has to have some kind of ‘wow’ factor.

As a freelance writer, your introductions have the power to help sell your work to clients, making a strong impression from the start. If you’re writing for your own blog your introductions are the first thing potential clients will read, meaning they need to showcase your talent to advertise your skills.

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Content & Emotion: A Complete Guide to Injecting Emotions in Your Content

July 11, 2022 by FWJ Leave a Comment

Emotion.

The single ingredient that makes Jake buy the beard oil (he doesn’t need) to impress the girl who hasn’t replied to his text in days.

Emotion, when woven into content, creates a connection between the product and prospect.

Without an array of emotions, prospects are not moved to act on what your content is prompting them to do. Creating content without emotions is like having the right recipe, for let’s say, chicken, but not making it tasty enough for a second bite.

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Do’s and Don’ts of Hot Topic Writing

September 7, 2010 by david 1 Comment

I love a good hot topic article. It’s hip, current and tells me all I need to know on whatever everyone is talking, blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking and Googling about at that particular time. Unfortunately, there are often more bad hot topic articles than good. To tell the truth, some writers/publications wake up, check Google or Twitter trends and start writing on whatever subject that’s moving up the interest boards. In an hour or two, they’ve got their piece up there alongside everyone else’s and it stinks. They hit every “Don’t” of hot topic writing:

Don’t Simply Rehash What Everyone Already Knows

It’s boring and lazy writing. Everyone is talking about it already. Find a new angle on the topic while other people beat the main points horse to death.

Example: The President visited my city recently – it was a big deal. Interrupting local programming to watch the plane taxi in kind of deal. He held a Q & A in a local family’s backyard – even bigger deal and that’s all anyone reported. We learned the family’s names, what the parents did for a living, what neighborhood the chat took place in – repeatedly. Even the broadcasters seemed bored with reciting the same thing all day.

DO Find a Different Angle

When everyone is talking about something – ask the questions no one is asking! When in doubt, try to take the story the local route. Is there someone local who’s been affected by or involved with the subject? Taking the previous example, one could try to find if there were other families in your area that had hosted a sitting U.S. president. You could also go the route of our local weekly, besting the big time daily paper here with a little digging:

The Other Paper found and interviewed the family that came in second to host the President. The story was interesting, hit a different angle and told readers something new about the level of security concern surrounding the President. Named “Sniper Alley,” the article let readers in on a security snafu that knocked the couple out of the running – a quiet, suburban alleyway that could have been a sniper’s paradise.

DON’T Force a Hot Topic on an Unwilling Audience

I could be wrong, but when people hit a online knitting magazine, they are not looking for gossip about Snooki or any of those other Jersey characters. What may be a hot topic on The View can be wildly out of place in other media. Likewise, the latest college football shake-up may not play well with the fictitious Senior Medical Times magazine.

DO Tailor the Topic for Your Publication

This is similar to finding a different angle. Getting a little creative AND working a different angle can make a hot topic work for your audience. Senior Medical Times may not be interested in the mechanics of the Big Ten division split and championship game, but they would be interested in a story about recognizing and preventing deadly heart attacks during football games – true fact: deadly heart attacks increase during games because men having the attack are absorbed in the game and ignore the warning signs.

Sure they score you points with your audience and Google, but tackle a hot topic the wrong way and you’ll find yourself in the slush pile or worse – with a completely irrelevant or stale article.

In my next post we’ll talk about more on hot topic writing. Got a good tip? Email me at [email protected] and I might use it in the next post! Be sure to include your name and blog or portfolio url.

When Good Article Writing Goes Bad

August 26, 2010 by david 14 Comments

On the outside, writer ‘A’ appears to be successful. Their byline appears in multiple publications, they make a decent living as a freelance writer and they can roll out most articles with minimum effort. That’s a good thing right? Maybe not. Writer ‘A’ has got what I call “By Rote Disease.” It’s a common affliction for many freelance writers.

Symptoms include:

Writing articles by a formula
Nodding off during an assignment
Creating work that is competent but typical

“By Rote Disease” is not serious for most writers and can be cured by re-igniting the writing spark that lives inside of each keyboard tapper. There are many reasons why “By Rote Disease” attacks a writer – often it stems from sheer boredom. When a writer becomes an expert in their niche they are 10 times more likely to become victims. A writer is also more susceptible to contracting this disease when they focus more on making money writing than on writing.

Many writers walk away from their full-time jobs to join the exciting world of freelance writing. They are lured by the promises of relaxing days outside under a tree with words pouring forth onto their laptop like a waterfall. They imagine skipping through the tulips on the way to their mailbox to pick up large checks for work that was more pleasure than pain. They see themselves interviewing the leading experts in a particular niche and becoming “besties” with them. Then reality hits:

Lots of work doesn’t necessarily translate to tulip skipping.
Thinking about the phone bill can put a damper on creativity.
Becoming an expert in a niche can mean being so sick of writing about it you want to scream!

This is when the disease sets in and writers turn off the creativity and turn on the robotic lede-paragraph-quote-paragraph-quote-side bar-paragraph-close formula. The copy? Clean. The sources? Stellar. The passion, interest and spark? Gone.

Light the Spark

The quickest way to get over “By Rote Disease” is to simply get out of your comfort zone – which can be scary for writers. Writers build up a reputation, following and list of contacts that makes the job easier, but can potentially stagnate their growth. Moving out of your comfort zone can be as dramatic as moving onto a completely new niche or as easy as taking on a different perspective.

One of the quickest ways to set the writing spark on fire is to learn more about a subject. The great thing about writing is the world is constantly evolving and there are always new ideas and theories being floated about everything. There is always a conference, a new book, etc. popping up. Instead of waiting for a bandwagon to drive by, create your own by investigating and writing about the new things that are happening in your particular niche.

Another great way to freshen up your work is to hit another genre on the side. It’s not like you’re cheating on your niche, it’s more like an open relationship kind of thing. You hook up with a few other interesting niches or genres and bring what you learn back to your main squeeze.

If all else fails, change your location. Get out of the basement and into creation. Hit the library, the park, a bookstore, your back porch…Anywhere that’s not your office. Utilize a perk of freelancing and be open to creating and being inspired by a new location.

All writers run into a lull every once in a while. Great writers recognize when the copy is getting stale and shake things up. Now, get out there and write something great!

Introducing the Writing Life of Susan Gunelius

July 2, 2010 by david 8 Comments

susan-gunelius-books As a follow up to my post yesterday, Introducing the Professional Life of Susan Gunelius, today I’m going to share my writing life with the Freelance Writing Jobs community, so you can get to know me better.

Here goes…

Like most writers, I have always loved to write. I’d rather take an essay test in school than multiple choice any day of the week. English was a natural choice for my minor in college, and when I started my corporate marketing career, writing became a key part of my role. It was through my work in Corporate America that I learned how to write copy and marketing communications that get results.

In 2004, my corporate career came to a stop for personal reasons, which I’ll tell you about in my next post, but I couldn’t stay away from marketing and writing for long before I had an idea to write a book about copywriting that would help small business owners who can’t afford to hire professional copywriters create copy that works. I was tired of watching small business commercials and looking at small business print ads that had little chance of delivering the returns the business owners wanted and needed. That’s when I came up with the idea for my first book, Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Next, I had to learn how to get a book published, and that’s when my entire life changed.

I turned to the Internet to learn how to get a book published and found websites like AbsoluteWrite.com that taught me everything I needed to know about publishing nonfiction books. I spent months researching and learned that my best chance for getting interest from a well-known publisher was to build a platform across the social web. Blogging became my priority target. I taught myself to blog and realized that by joining a blog network, I could increase my online presence faster. I turned to my expertise, marketing, and pursued network blogging opportunities with respected networks that had a broad reach (there were several at the time).

Throughout this process, I was writing my first book. I spent about 6 months learning and building my online platform before I started to approach agents with my book proposal. I targeted ten agents and within a month had two agents express interest. One sent my proposal along to a publisher to gauge reaction, but at the exact same time, something else happened.

I wrote a blog post on a blog I was writing for a large blog network at the time about the Harry Potter brand. A publisher in England, Palgrave Macmillan (a division of Macmillan Publishing), saw the blog post and contacted me asking if I would be interested in writing a book about the Harry Potter marketing phenomenon. Of course, I said yes. Within a week or so, I heard back from my agent about the publisher’s reaction to my copywriting book. They wanted it. Within a year, Entrepreneur Press published my copywriting book, and Palgrave Macmillan published my Harry Potter book, Harry Potter: The Story of a Global Business Phenomenon. From there, the domino effect took over and my new career was born.

Since I started all of this in 2007 until now, I launched my own company and had six books published with a seventh on the way in 2011 and more in the pipeline. My blog for women working in the field of business, WomenOnBusiness.com, was named a finalist in the 2009 Stevie Awards for Women in Business in the category of Best Blog, and has been named to two “Top Blogs” lists by Forbes.com. I am a featured writer on Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and my marketing related articles have appeared across the web on sites like MSNBC.com, FoxBusiness.com, WashingtonPost.com, TheStreet.com, SmartMoney.com, Yahoo! Advertising, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Small Business, BusinessWeek.com, TodayShow.com, and more. I write blogs and online content for a variety of large and small clients, including About.com (a New York Times company), Cox Communications, Newstex.com, Corporate-Eye.com, and many more. Long story short, I’m busier than ever and desperately need an assistant.

I built my writing career by focusing on my strengths and leveraging the social web for organic growth. If you look at my Twitter profile or Facebook profile, you’ll see that I don’t have tens of thousands of followers and connections, and there is a reason for that. I’m a proponent of content marketing via social media where quality trumps quantity. Deb built Freelance Writing Jobs under a similar methodology where quality has always been placed first, and I certainly have no intention of changing that.

You can click on the following links to find my books and read some of my online articles and blog content.

If you haven’t already connected with me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, please do so we can get to know each other even better!

Up next: my personal life

By the way, Deb interviewed me a while back for her Success Stories series on Freelance Writing Jobs, which you can read here.