Copywriting: Introductions

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The Introduction Is Useless

If you had opened this article and found a long introduction before it got to the point, what would you have done?

You probably would have started scrolling down the page looking for the answer or - like most readers would have done - you would have closed the article and looked for one that got straight to the point.

That's exactly why I almost always avoid introductions in my articles.

The reader is already here: I don't need to explain why they should be here.

"In this article, I'll explain how to write an introduction."

"Thanks," you'd think, "that's exactly why I'm here, I already knew that!"

When someone opens a business article after conducting a specific search, they already know what they're looking for.

If they search for how to calculate profit margin, they want to understand how to calculate profit margin.

They don't need to read three paragraphs about the importance of profitability for a business, because that kind of introduction only delays the moment when they get the information that brought them to your website in the first place, and on the web - but also in business reading in general - readers are impatient.

Over time, I've learned to think of the first few lines of an article as extremely expensive real estate.

That's where you have the reader's full attention, and wasting it by telling them something they already know means losing them for good.

Don't Make an Article Longer Just for SEO

One reason unnecessarily long introductions exist is the belief that an article has to reach a certain word count to rank on Google... well, that's not how it works.

Google clearly states that content length, by itself, is not important for ranking.

There is no minimum word count you have to reach, just as there is no ideal maximum length.

A piece of content should be as long as it needs to be to answer the reader's question properly.

Sometimes that will require a very in-depth article, while in other cases a few lines will be enough.

If a question can be answered completely in a single paragraph, turning that paragraph into two thousand words doesn't automatically make the content better, because all you're doing is forcing the reader to hunt for the answer inside a larger amount of text.

And no one is going to do that, because it's easier to close your content when it keeps circling around the answer without providing it and look for something else.

If You Want an Introduction, Keep It Very Short

If you've read my other lessons and the weekly content where I answer questions, you've probably noticed that I don't use introductions.

I recommend that you do the same.

But if you don't trust me and still want to include an introduction, limit it to one or two lines.

However, I'm not exactly sure what you could put there that would genuinely help the reader more than simply starting with the answer to their question, which, after all, is the only reason they're on your website in the first place.