Hook Challenge: How I Got the Perfect Bait on the Fisherman’s Line
Great is the art of beginning but greater is the art of ending. – Henry Wadsworth
You have a fishing line and yes you see the fish swimming round and about your boat. It is fast enough and grabbing it by the hand may just end with you inside the water.
Taking the hook on the fishing line, you hook a worm on the line and drop it into the water.
If you are lucky, it shouldn’t take long before the fish makes for the worm only to get hooked.
In my imagination, I get lucky almost always.
As with writing, it is simple – you simply just need a hook and a bucket to finish the job
Writing is a beautiful art. Not so much different from Picasso staring at the potential of a blank canvas.
Fact is, not everyone enjoys reading though. But not to worry, it is in the same breath that some struggle to relate to other people’s amusements with paintings.
Just as with a painting, the goal is not to please everyone, but rather those that you are expressing to.
So how do you get such population interested in actually reading your article?
Baits are a good start. If you haven’t ever fished, you now at least have an idea how it works.
As a professional SEO writer working towards selling, you aim at maximising your audience and interesting them to feel like sticking around for the ride.
Related article: How to Create SEO Content That Hooks a Target Audience
So how do you get started?
Hook the bait to the line.
Be unique.
To be a freelance web copywriter that people will enjoy reading from, you have to be creative.
You have to think deeper than just beginnings involving weather conditions and ending with people running off to the sunset.
Find your style.
Whether it’s the way you introduce your post with a topic your audience relates to or your honesty about an idea, let it be the secret ingredient that makes them crave your work even more.
If you were the reader, what would you want to read?
Chances are if you’re enjoying the post yourself, so will your audience.
Set your tone, background and imagery.
From the first sentence you put down, your audience should be able to picture how you’d say it and the environment you’ve taken them to.
This cuts the monotony of staring at a page to read something because in the mind of the audience, it feels more like a conversation between you and them.
It also identifies your theme and gives a sneak peek of what they expect to get by reading the rest of the post.
Be quantitative.
Let this not be mistaken for long lengthy sentences with too much info to take in.
You should not beat around the bush for too long in your intro because well, no one is that patient.
Just make sure that the first few lines give enough info about your post such that if they were chopped off and made to a banner, or printed on a postcard or something, they would catch the readers attention.
Keywords.
So that your post ranks high for a typed query on the search engines, maximize on keywords even from the beginning.
They should be specific to cater for the readers needs and for easy traction.
Be interactive.
You can use rhetorical questions as an opening line or a quote.
If you start with a question, your finishing words should be answering that question.
It doesn’t have to be direct, but along the lines of being an answer.
No cliffhangers.
Unless you plan on a sequel or continuing with the post at a later date, don’t leave the audience hanging.
Instead of coming out as interestingly a mystery, you end up leaving the audience wondering what the hell just happened. In short, your work is incomplete.
A safe way to avoid this is by ensuring your parting shot has the same tone as how you started. This way, the post will feel complete.
No last minute rush.
The parting shot is meant to bring an article to conclusion by giving the writer a chance to tie up any loose ends.
This is not the time to introduce new ideas that might have been forgotten in the body part of the article.
The end mirrors the beginning, so any new points added here only confuses the reader.
Don’t be too opinionated.
In case you’re writing a debate topic with facts and arguments, you need to leave the post on neutral grounds.
Let the audience decide to take their pick on their own without you being biased on a particular side.
If people are going to read and remember your post it won’t be because you followed a guide you read somewhere on the internet, it’s because you were able to serve them your best recipe, hot, with the right cutlery and napkins to the side.
And there you have it; an audience that is hooked and willing to run with you to the very end of your story.
Get an engaging audience writer for your writing project.
Photo by Cameron Kirby on Unsplash