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Accentuate the Negative?

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“Eliminate the negative an’ latch on to the affirmative” was Johnny Mercer’s musical advice back in 1945.dog food Playing to one’s strengths has, in fact, been a popular fad in management development circles. As a blog content writer, though, sometimes I wonder.

The latest issue of Modern Dog magazine features eight article titles on its cover:

  • How Not to Train Your Puppy
  • Gift ideas galore
  • Big Dogs and their Puppy Counterparts
  • Winter Survival Tips
  • Great Gear
  • I’m Adoptable
  • Find a New Best Friend
  • Why is My Dog Staring at Me?

Guess which one attracted my attention the most – Yeah, gotta admit… it was the negative one telling me how NOT to train my puppy. And guess what? It’s not just me.  People are drawn to articles with negative titles, my friend and fellow blogger Lorraine Ball pointed out a year ago. Posts with negative titles stand out in a blog roll, on a Twitter feed or LinkedIn page, and the negative posts are more likely to be shared, retweeted and read.

What’s with us? Well, “edgy language draws attention”, Lorraine explains. (Lorraine’s title “Why Your Blog Titles Suck” is a bit too edgy for me, but I get the idea. I do.) Fact is, I would’ve picked “Why is My Dog Staring at Me?” before “How to Train Your Puppy”.  It was that How-NOT-to that drew my attention.

But that doesn’t jibe at all with Rich Brook’s advice on socialmediaexaminer: “The how-to is the most powerful of all the blogging archetpyes.”  Your prospects and customers have a problem and you can help them solve it by creating a step-by-step post that walks them through a solution, he says. That may be true, counters Lorraine Ball, but fear of failure is core to who we are as people, and it’s hard to resist reading material about how to avoid it.

Could it be that accentuating the negative, and only then latching on to the affirmative is the best advice for us business blog content writers?

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Blog Writers’ Opening Lines have a Big Job to Do

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Curiosity concept“The first words of a novel can be enough to set the tone for the whole book,” explain the editors of The Book of Random Oddities.

Some of the most famous first lines quoted in the book include:

  • All children, except one, grow up”.  (“Peter and Wendy”)
  • Marley was dead, to begin with.”  (“A Christmas Carol”)
  • “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times (“A Tale of Two Cities”)
  • “Call me Ishmael.” (“Moby Dick”)

Each one of those four openers arouses our curiosity. (Who is the child who never grows up? Why is the fact Marley is dead only a fact to begin with? How can the times be both the best and the worst?  Why should we call him Ishmael – is that really his name?)

But, unlike novelists, can we blog content writers afford to be that enigmatic in order to arouse curiosity?  We know how essential for us to assure readers that they’ve come to the right place to find the information that satisfies the needs that brought them online to find answers – otherwise they’ll bounce away from our site before we get to share our thoughts!  What I call “pow opening lines” are great, but if we fail at showing how that “pow” answers readers’ needs, we won’t be given the chance to tell them the “how” (how what we have to offer will better their lives in some way).

One solution comes in the form of “Huh?” blog titles or opening lines.  “Huh”s need subtitles to make clear what our post is going to be about. The “Huh” startles and arouses curiosity; the subtitles or second sentences clarify what the focus will be.

The “Call me Ishmael” line introduces the narrator of the piece. Although the central figure of “Moby Dick” is Captain Ahab, readers are going to be told the story by Ishmael. The same literary device might be useful for a business blog post, so that readers understand who’s talking. “Call me Jeffrey. Before I started my Slimbo exercise program, I weighed 345 pounds and could hardly walk around the block.”

“Marley was dead, to begin with.”  The same format might be used in a blog post for home remodeling company. “My kitchen was cramped, to begin with.”

The point for business bloggers: As with a novel, in blogging, the title and opening line will set the tone for your entire post. Arousing interest and curiosity is much to be desired, but be quick to clarify where you’re going with the content of the post.

Blog posts’ opening lines set the tone and arouse curiosity, but it’s best not to sustain the mystery for very long.

 

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