Terrible hooks sink ships.

Or in this case, sink your business.

Because if you can’t grab your audience immediately, you lose them indefinitely.

You gotta put yourself in your reader’s shoes.

They’re bombarded with hundreds of pieces of content every day.

The default browsing state is, “don’t care.”

You have a couple of seconds to make them think otherwise. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter how good your ideas or offers are—nobody’s gonna see them.

Even the world’s best painting is pointless if there’s no light in the room.

Because that’s the goal of writing.

To shine a light on your business.

The height of your success depends on how good your first few sentences are.

Take email for example.

The point of an email is to entertain, educate, and inspire. But you also need to get someone to click your link for the email to make you money.

And I bet your inbox is riddled with opening lines like:

Have you ever wondered…?

One of the most <important/best/worst etc> things about thing…

Do you ever see/think/feel <thing you haven’t seen, thought, or felt much about>?

There are two problems with these hooks.

First, they begin the conversation by making your reader think.

Have I wondered this? Is it the most important thing? Have I thought that?

But thinking doesn’t draw people in. Feeling does.

You’re appealing to logic when you should entice with emotion.

Second, everyone uses these lines. And if you write like the crowd, you quickly join it.

Instead, you must ‘grab your reader by the throat’.

And you gotta say something unique.

For example, here’s an email I wrote recently:

Does it dive into the action? Yep.

Have you read something like this before? Nope.

Your hooks are the most important part of writing. If you want people to take the time to read, put in the time to write.

Kieran