Your First Few Blog Posts
This article is really geared towards those who are starting a new blog from the start but you can also use the technique to cover a period of time when you might not be able to blog such as when you might take a vacation.
Never launch an empty blog! When you first start thinking about your blog you will know what kind of direction that you intend to go in, what topics you’ll be blogging about, your posting style etc but if when you’re brand new readers arrive at your blog all they see is a single, “Welcome to my blog!” type post they won’t know any of those things and they’ll have little reason to hang around and 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.
Begin WIth Approximately Half a Dozen Posts
You should never launch an empty blog so you need a few posts written up front. How many is enough? I would say around half a dozen - this gives your readers enough information for them to know whether or not they like your writing enough to subscribe to your feed.
If you use WordPress you can control the timing of these initial posts but for now don’t worry about that and just get some draft posts written. So what material should go into these initial posts?
Make Sure You Introduce Yourself
One of the first things you can do in your first few posts is show something of yourself, who you are and how you came to be writing this blog. This may not be relevant in all cases but even the most technical blogs can often benefit from a human touch as it encourages interaction from readers when they are reminded that there is a real person behind the writing.
Make Sure It’s Not Solely 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.
How To Use a WordPress Timestamp
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.
Secondly, you can also use this feature to set a date in the future and what this does is schedule the post for future publishing. This is a brilliant way to keep your blog going when you are not physically there such as when you are on holiay.
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