When you are starting a new blog, there are several things that you need to plan from the outset. What will your blog be called? What kinds of topics will it cover? How often do you intend to post? What will your writing style be? The rest of this article will look at those aspects in more detail.
What To Call Your Blog
The first decision to be made is of course the name (and domain) of your blog. There are general two choices – using your own name or using a name related to the primary topic of the blog.
Your choice here will depend on the aims of your blog. If you intend to use it to promote some kind of personal service then using your name can be a good idea because it will always remain relevant even if your services differ over time. If you’re blogging about a specifc topic and you intend to monetize it via external methods then it can be better to use a name that is related to the topic.
What Topics Will You Blog About?
Some people find that their first blog starts out as a bit of a broad mish-mash of anything and everything they can think of and as such it ends up covering a large number of possibly unrelated topics. This is not really a good idea as most readers will only want to read a handful of your posts.
When it comes to writing your posts you will be able to organise them into categories which makes it much easier for new readers to find your posts and its easy for them to see at a glance what your blog is about. When you just post a mish-mash of posts on all sorts of topics that are not really related then it can be more difficult to turn a one-off visitor into a regular subscriber.
Coming Up With a Blog Posting Schedule
Many people advise you to blog every day when launching a new blog with the theory being that the more you post the more people will come to your blog. However many blog readers find that blogs that post every day or even multiple times a day are simply too much and they can’t keep up with them.
To be honest it doesn’t matter so much what your posting frequency or schedule is, as long as it is consistent. There are some blogs that post only once a week and do very well as they readers look forward to that weekly post and others that find that they do best when publishing multiple short posts every day. Every blog is different.
Another danger with trying to post too much, especially in the beginning, is that you may not be able to maintain your pace. You may run out of ideas, find the time committment to be too much or simply burn out and if you start posting less and less, this looks bad and it looks as though the blog is dying. Many readers will unsubscribe when this begins to happen.
A much better idea is to start off with a gentle posting schedule (you wont have many readers at the start anyway) and if you feel that you want to do more, to increase it slowly over time. Don’t do it the other way around!
What Style of Writing Will You Use?
Your writing style is a slightly tricky area. Your writing is a reflection of who you are, what your opinions are, your values and passions etc. A blog is all about the writing and in my experience when bloggers do best when they write freely from the heart in their own unique style.
I would recommend that you simply write in whatever way suits you. Everybody is different. Some people are conservative in their writing, others like to use language as a shock factor, some like controversy, others prefer a dry factual style. None of these are right or wrong – simply be who you are.
The only area where I might suggest that you alter your default style slightly is that of post length. A blog that is publishing 10 posts a day would probably do better with shorter, snappier posts than a blog that is publishing only once per week.
One thing to remember is that you can’t please all of the people all of the time anyway so trying to modify your posting style to fit in with some idea of what your readers might like is an exercise in futility. At the end of the day some people will like your style and some won’t. Those that do will hopefully subscribe and those that don’t will not but that’s just life and nothing to worry about!
