After you’ve decided to launch a new blog, have chosen your niche, and have come up with a marketing plan and overall content strategy, it’s time to create some start-up content for your new blog (before launching).
Why Pre-Write Start-Up Content?
A lot of new bloggers are overwhelmed pretty quickly when they realize not only how much time they can spend posting, but also how much time they can spend marketing.
While some bloggers may prefer to “wing it,” launching a blog with a single post and trying to get right into a regular schedule, I prefer putting together a set of start-up content first, set to automatically post for at least the first week, but preferably enough content for a month or more. That’s on top of several articles that will be publicly available on the day you launch.
What Makes Good Start-Up Content?
It’s a good idea to start a new blog not just with a bit of background about yourself and the niche topic, but with a few primary articles that will attract your earliest readers. Think of linkbait (in the most positive sense of the word), and you’ll come up with ideas for useful content ideal for launching a blog (such as resource lists, advice not already available all over the Web, an interview with a “player” in the niche, etc.).
Most blog platforms will allow you to “drip” posts – you write them now and set a post date when they’ll automatically go live (so you don’t have to save them as drafts and remember to come back later to post them). Look into your specific blog host or blog platform to find out exactly how you can do this on your own blog.
This post was originally featured on January 24, 2008.
