How to Write Your First Blog Post
Brands spend way too much time wondering how to write the absolute best first blog post. The simple solution to this quandary: stop wondering, and write!
So you’ve got a great looking site and a fresh blog through which to share your story. But, you’re wondering what your first post should be. It’s your very first, so it needs to be good, right?
In fact, most brands probably don’t have enough information to make a thoughtful, data-driven decision on this front. With that in mind, we propose a simple idea: any article relevant to your space makes an excellent first post.
Blank Page Syndrome
I once had a sales call with a prospect in high tech manufacturing. He had a beautiful site, and a blog with no content. I asked him about the blog. He responded by saying that every time he sat down to write an article, he could never decide what his first post should be.
He felt that the first post he put up should represent fully what his company stood for. As such, he was faced with an impossible decision — because there was no one concept or topic that fully represented his brand. Meanwhile, he had no idea what would be the most effective post to write in terms of lead generation or ROI.
Post Agnosticism
This executive was missing two liberating facts:
- As long as your first post has useful, brand-relevant information in it, it doesn’t matter what it’s about.
- The only way to write the perfect post is to write a whole lot of them, which will generate the search data necessary to inform your future writing (corollary: there is no ‘best’ first blog post).
See the meme below, borrowed from Jonathan Allen, our co-founder and President.
Data is Your Friend
Search data will give you:
- The actual language people use to look for what your company offers
- The nature of their needs and questions
- And, most importantly, the questions that they are asking
However, incoming search data like this doesn’t exist in the abstract: it is generated when the content you create is noticed by Google, ranks, and gets clicks and impressions. The data you get comes from the content you publish.
So? Write about a lot. Experiment. The more you write, the more data you’ll gather and the more you’ll be able to zero in on the best blog post.
In the above graph, the relationship between the search data you generate and your content should be pretty clear. Think of your blog’s potential audience as occupying a dark room, and the only way to light it up is to write.
So, to conclude, there really is no such thing as the perfect first post. Your first post should not be a mission statement; rather, it should represent a simple question, aimed at you audience: what are you interested in? The cogency, relevance, and targeting of your brand publication will evolve as you publish.