That's it. You've taken the plunge. You've done all the technical stuff, chosen a nice design and fiddled around with your logo. You've mucked around with your blog CMS and worked out how to do all sorts of clever stuff like adding hyperlinks and funny pictures you've found on iStock of people wearing gas masks or eating ice creams. So what do you write in that all-important first blog post?
Before you put fingertip to keyboard, you will of course have asked yourself some pretty important questions:
- Why you are writing your blog in the first place?
- What are your objectives and how will you know when those objectives have been met?
- What "semantic space" do you fill (that's basically defining what search terms are most relevant to what you're writing about)
- Who are you writing your blog for?
- What are you going to write about? What are you NOT going to write about?
For example, this is my first blog post for Big Star Content. My primary (but not exclusive) aim with the blog is to open a conversation with people that are interested in my products and services.
That's not to say that I'm going to ram sales messages down everyone's faces. That would be unpleasant for everybody, especially me. But let's be honest, my intentions are not altruistic - I want people to find this content interesting, engaging and useful but if it doesn't support my business objectives then it's not really a good use of our time.
I'll be happy that it's worked when I've created a community of people that are interested in my blog and want to engage in conversation with us about what we do. I'll be ecstatic when someone contacts me to engage us for a full content strategy review or to book onto one of our courses.
The kind of keywords I'm interested in targeting are things like "web copywriter", "SEO copywriter" and "copywriting service". I know these phrases are effective at generating business for us. For a start they accurately describe what we do. They also work - I've been running PPC campaigns based on these phrases for four years and have an SEO strategy that pulls in a good deal of business.
If I've got it right then I'm going to be talking to two groups of people: one is marketing professionals who are interested in content services, the other is people interested in training. I'm sure I'll also pull in other copywriters who want to check out the competition, comment on our blogs and point out our typos - if you're in this group, you're more than welcome.
These groups will almost certainly overlap and at some stage in the future, once we have built up a following, we'll probably create separate channels of content so that you get to choose what stuff is most relevant to you. But that's not important right now.
What is important, now I've defined all this, is what am I going to write about right now?
The great thing is that once you've answered all those questions, your first blog post should be easy.
It's the ones that come later that are going to be trickier. Fortunately, you can always check back here for advice and useful commentary. Cheers!