Wally Bock's Zero Draft

Short, quick and easy to write posts are just the thing for those days when you’re wondering what to write about. Two of the best kinds are wisdom posts and tips.

A wisdom post is a short post that shares wisdom from someone else that will help your reader. Quotes are the most common. I do them on this blog as “Advice from the Masters” posts.

A tip is a short post that makes a specific suggestion for your reader. They should be able to use it right away. You can do tips posts two ways.

The most common way is to do them without any defined schedule. There are plenty of writing tips on this blog that you can get to by searching the “Writing Tips” category. I wrote them as they came to me, but there’s no commitment to post on any schedule.

I do tips posts differently on my Three Star Leadership blog. There, I do a series called the “Boss’s Tip of the Day.” That sound like it would be a great traffic builder and easy to do. That’s true.

But beware. If you do a “tip of the day” you’ve committed to posting a tip at least every business day. There are days when I seriously repent doing that. First, try tips posts without committing to a specific schedule or frequency to see how they work for you. Then make the decision about whether to commit to a schedule.

If you’re known as a master of your content, people ask you questions all the time. And those questions can be the source for great blog posts and more.

If one person has a question, so do others. So when you answer the question in your blog, the post is automatically interesting to a lot of people.

Answer posts are easy to write. You probably answer the same questions over and over, so you’ve got the answers ready.

Answer posts can help you learn. Every answer, like every question, is a little bit different. You may discover new ways to state your ideas when you write an answer post.

Answers can turn into a book. Most of the time, you should re-write your blog posts, or edit them extensively to turn them into a book. But you can collect your answers to questions and turn them into a book or ebook with very little editing.

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“All beginnings are hard.”

Chaim Potok began his novel, In the Beginning, with that bit of rabbinic wisdom. He could have been talking about blog posts.

The beginning of a post is critical because you only have seconds to capture the reader’s attention. In an instant he or she decides whether to read further or not. If you don’t interest them, they’re off to the next blog.

You have to come out punching. Here are three dos, one don’t, and a tip.

Pique their interest. That’s what I tried to do with the opening line of this post.

Hook them emotionally. If your post is about something emotionally powerful, this is the way to start.

Promise a benefit. We all want to know what’s in it for us.

Don’t waste time. Get to the point.

That leads to my tip. Try cutting off the first few lines or the first paragraph of your draft to see if it makes your opening better.

Bottom Line

When you begin well, more people read your post.