Your First Few Blog Posts

Your First Few Blog Posts

by Caroline Middlebrook

This article primarily applies if you are starting a new blog from scratch but you can also use it to prepare for a period of absence from your blog such as when you might go on holiday for example.

The golden rule is not to launch an empty blog! If you have done some planning before launching you will have an idea of what your blog is about, the major topics you will be covering and so on but your brand new readers don't know any of this. If all they see is a single introductory post then you have not given them any reason to come back to your blog again or to subscribe.

As the blog matures over time it builds a collection of posts and there are many ways in which you can use these to encourage new visitors to subscribe but you don't have this advantage when you first start a new blog.

Write 6 Posts (roughly) in Advance

The trick is to compromise - I recommend writing about half a dozen posts in advance. In this way when you launch your readers have a nice selection of posts to read and hopefully you will have given them enough reason to remember you and to subscribe to your feed.

Later in the article I'll show you how to manage the timing of these intial posts but for now just get them written. Now let's talk about what you should write about in those early posts.

Write An Introduction To Yourself

A good start for the first post or two is to write some kind of introduction to yourself. You can discuss who you are and how you came to be writing this blog. Some blog styles are more receptive to this kind of personal information than others but all blogs can benefit from a human touch as it reminds readers that there is a real human being behind the writing.

Don't Make it ALL About You!

Unless your blog happens to be all about you and your life, you want to be careful not to go overboard here - don't make those first few posts all about you! Only those with a particular interest in you will find it interesting and you come back to the problem of not demonstrating what your blog is about.

By all means take a couple of posts to give a bit of personal background but then use your remaining ones to create some good quality content that centers on some of the major topics that your blog will cover. Ask yourself if what you are writing is likely to encourage people to come back for more.

Using the WordPress Timestamp Feature

If you are using WordPress to write your blog, when you publish a blog post it will immediately appear live on your blog. However there is an option to allow you to edit the timestamp of the post.

You can use this timestamp feature in one of two ways. Firstly when you are writing your initial posts as I have described in this article, you may well write them all at the same time but you want to make it look as though you have written over perhaps a week or two. You can set the timestamps in the past to backdate them so it looks like your blog has been active for a while.

You can also set the dates in the future and what this does it schedules your post for future publication. This is especially useful if you know you are going to be away for a while and wont be able to publish posts live. - 20490

Caroline Middlebrook has been writing a popular blog since August 2007 which earns a 4-figure monthly income. She teaches how to (http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/make-money-blogging-bloggers-bible-fast-track/) earn money blogging and offers free downloads of her (http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/books-guides/) free guides & courses.