Never Lose Your Audience In The First Paragraph Again

I’ll be honest with you:

The first version of this article sucked. 

Big time.

The number of people who read past the first 2-3 sentences was comparable to Jaguar’s new marketing campaign’s fan base.

This was surprising, because it had all the fancy words, interesting analogies and spice you could ask for.

So I went through it again with “fresh” eyes and noticed that the article had a grammar mistake right at the beginning.

The fancy words and analogies I mentioned earlier were over the top and unnecessary.

And The Icing On The Cake Was?  

In an attempt to sound smart, it just came across as annoying.

So to stop this from happening again, I went through loads of other successful media.

I poured over all sorts of content, from short written old school advertisements to long-form YouTube videos, and everything in between.

I eventually stumbled upon a story thread on X of all places, that grabbed and held my attention until my dog started barking at me for more food.

It was pretty annoying, I’m not going to lie.

But then it hit me - this is exactly what great content is supposed to do.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if your audience felt like this when consuming your content?

The idea of people being too peeved to stop reading felt so enticing that I dug deep and found 3 crucial differences between boring content and attention-grabbing writing:

1) Be Like Steve

Ever have that friend that always knew the right thing to say? 

The sort of guy that goes through life as though they’re the sole inspiration for the song Smooth Operator?

Well I knew one. And his name was Steve.

We used go to stand-up shows at comedy clubs together.

And one night the club was packed, but the acts were criminally boring.

The comedian was getting viciously heckled, and my friend Steve decided to get in on the action too.

After a while of getting annihilated by Steve and the rest of the audience, the guy on stage yells: 

“If you think you’re so good, why don’t you get up here?”

Without batting an eyelid, Steve gets up onto the stage, grabs the mic, and starts firing off jokes as though he’s Eddie Murphy during his prime.

It was so unexpected but so good that the crowd went wild and cheered him on wanting to hear more!

At the end of the night, I asked him: “where did that all come from?”

Turns out the guy had been preparing and practising a set for days in front of smaller audiences.

Tweaking and refining it constantly until he had it down to a T.

And this is the first ingredient.

Behind all good content, there’s a shedload of iterations that came before it.

Write your first draft. 

Let it marinate overnight. 

Test it.

Update it again tomorrow. 

Rinse and repeat...

2) Let It Slide

Name a single person that loves going through the terms and conditions of legal documents.

Think of any?

Probably not.

Most people don’t want to go through all that gobbledygook. It takes way too much time and brain power to decipher all that jargon.

People want easy lives. And your content should be easy to consume too.

One of the best ways to do this? 

Use simple words that are easy to read.

You don't need to add technical terms and nonsense jargon to sound smart.

Your words should glide smoothly from one point to the next.

3) Write Like An Actual Human Being

A lot of content these days starts with:

“At this company we value this cliché and that cliché. This is where some nonsense meets even more meaningless drivel.”

Doesn’t this annoy you?

The other day I got an email saying my account on an Automation website was going to be shut down and the data erased as I hadn’t been on it in a while.

So I go on the website to find out how to stop this from happening. 

Turns out you can’t talk to an actual human operator until you go through an AI chatbot first…

And in typical AI fashion, the thing didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

To make things even better, you had to wait a couple of days before an actual human operator would get back to you (days after the account was due to shut down).

The struggle was real…

Lost an hour of my life and almost threw my computer out the window in the process.

Imagine how I felt when I finally got in touch with someone who understood the problem and managed to fix it all within a couple of minutes.

And it’s the same thing with your audience. People much prefer interacting with other people.

They can smell when the content isn’t man-made.

It’s way easier to connect to an actual human being instead of a lifeless robot.

And you can tailor your stuff specifically to your ideal client instead of barraging them with a load of generic AI content.

It’s a much easier way to skyrocket your engagement.

The Bottom Line Is…

Attention is earned sentence by sentence - paragraph to paragraph.

If you want to learn more about writing that sells, check out our other articles here.

Want to know what we can do for your marketing?

Get in touch here.

Talk soon,

Pritesh Chauhan