You’re sporting an elite blog with spectacular articles and a explosive readership that you’ve got right on the edge of their seat as they eagerly hit up your electrifying RSS feed every time you blast out another dazzling blog post! Your headlines instantly grab your readers’ attention, but you leave them hanging high and dry with your LAME opening paragraphs!! Do you really want to go on posting more and more of the same old boring put-your-readers-to-sleep lead paragraphs? Read on and I’ll give you some tips that will keep you from becoming just another boring lame blogger cluttering up the blogosphere with your splog and consuming excess bandwidth.

Killer headlines are great, but they are not enough. Let me ask you something, bloggers: What is the next most important part of your articles, after your headlines? The answer is: Your opening paragraph! Once you get your readers’ attention with your headline, don’t let up, you’ve got to hit ‘em hard with that opening paragraph! Don’t let up, show no mercy, take no prisoners! You’re only one blog in a sea of millions!! You have got to stand out!!

Hit ‘em when they’re up. Whip up some excitement in their lives, life’s too short not to. If you’re writing about the benefits of learning to write killer opening paragraphs, hit ‘em with the ‘ole sugar rush. Tell them how much traffic they’ll get on their blog, how many new commenters will come to their blog and how much their subscriber base is gonna EXPLODE! Tell them that every reader who reads their exciting opening paragraphs will go out on the web and tell every other blogger about it, who will then link back.

Hit ‘em when they’re down. You guessed it, here comes that negative slant. It’s comin’ at you again like a Mack truck! Tell readers that if they insist on writing lame opening paragraphs, that people won’t even bother to look at their blogs, let alone actually read their posts, and that their blogs will crash into the TechCrunch Dead Pool inside of a month.

Invoke images in your readers’ minds. Consider my last article, where I invoked the image of a thirsty tourist or traveler lost in the desert in extreme heat, looking for water. I compared that thirsty traveler to a blogger desperate for traffic. You need to take a really long, hard look at that image, because that’s exactly how desperate for traffic you’ll be, if you don’t stop writing all those lamer opening paragraphs!

Create an irresistible need to read more of your post. Once your headline has captured your reader’s attention, use your opening paragraph to create an almost compulsive need in your reader’s mind to read more of your riveting article. Summarize the main ideas of your post in a paragraph.

Go big, or go home! Ask a question which will make readers feel a need to read on. Get people curious by whetting their appetite with a tip in the lead paragraph, then tell them you’ll give ‘em a few insider tips if they read on. You can promise them that you’ll explain how they can increase their traffic by 40% in a week, but make sure you can back up that claim. You could polarize readers by asking a controversial question that shocks them and literally forces them to read on. Be very bold, push the envelope, raise the bar. The more readers talk about you, the better, because they’ll link back to your blog and read your articles! You are competing with millions of other bloggers; You have no choice, You Must Go BIG or else go the **** home!!!

Once you learn to write killer headlines followed up by explosive lead paragraphs, you will have some enthusiastic readers riveted to your blog posts! You’ll generate buzz in your niche and the benefits that go with that exposure: Increased traffic, commenting, backlinks, and increased subscribers! If you have any questions or comments, they are welcomed!