I Stumbled Upon this post at Rauru today that suggests when blogging that you should write your headlines before you write the actual post. Ikki says:
As I said on a previous post, headings are the first impression you make on your audience. Focusing on crafting a great headline for your blog post will entice them to keep reading what you have to say.
Furthermore, writing your headline first will help you keep your contents well-structured. What lies behind this statement is the fact that you’re developing your contents from the idea expressed in your heading – instead of backwards. This will keep your writing closely aligned to the engaging promise delivered by your headline to your readers.
I respect this strategy (and with all due respect to Ikki), and if it works for you than that’s great, but I find the opposite to be true for my own writing. I almost always write the post first and then determine what I think the headline should be based on what I have written. The biggest reason for this is that when I start writing, I don’t always know what I am going to say for the duration of the entire post, and therefore surprise myself in the end.
I understand Ikki’s point about keeping your post structured by starting with the headline. I could see how it might keep you focused on what you’re trying to say, but on the flipside, I like to be able to have free roam in my writing, and let it take me where it wants to go naturally. Sometimes I will find that I have written a different post than what I had originally set out to do, but that’s ok, because often times, it will turn out better than the original idea I started with.
To me, staying confined to your initial idea of what a post should be about can hinder your writing, and I just don’t see how that would benefit the finished product. That is unless you have been assigned a specific topic to write about with little room for your own thought, which could be the case in some instances if you are blogging for someone else.
This is just my opinion. What do you think? Which method do you prefer?
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