I have aimed this article mainly at bloggers who are starting out on a new blog project but the techniques described here can also be used when you need to take a break from blogging, perhaps for a vacation 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 a blog grows it develops a large repository of past posts and you can use these to entice new readers to subscribe but of course you don’t have this when you first launch.
Write 6 Posts (roughly) in Advance
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.
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.
Make Sure You Introduce 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.
Change The Focus So It’s Not 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.
Once you have written some introductory material use the remainder of these early posts to create some good quality content that acts as an example of what is to come. Try to cover some of your major topics and give people a reason to want to come back for more in the future.
Making Use of Timestamps in WordPress
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.
This can work in two ways. When you are writing your initial post repository you will write these posts before you launch your blog but you don’t want to publish them all on the same day as it looks a little odd. Instead use the timestamp feature to backdate them so that it looks as though you have been writing for some time.
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.
