This lesson primarily applies if you are starting a new blog from
scratch but you can also use it to prepare for a period of absence
from your blog such as when you might go on holiday for example.

Never launch an empty blog! When you first start thinking about
your blog you will know what kind of direction that you intend to
go in, what topics you'll be blogging about, your posting style etc
but if when you're brand new readers arrive at your blog all they
see is a single, "Welcome to my blog!" type post they won't know
any of those things and they'll have little reason to hang around
and 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
----------------------------------

The trick is to compromise - in my case I choose to write around
half a dozen posts in advance. In this way when you launch your
readers have a nice selection of posts to read and hopefully you
will have given them enough reason to remember you and to subscribe
to your feed.

With my IM blog I was posting daily so I wrote the first six all in
one go and then used the WordPress timestamp feature to back date
them so that it looked like I had posted them over the period of
about a week.

For the second blog that I launched I actually posted them live and
simply held off announcing the blog itself until I had 6 posts
live. What I wanted to do was set out a schedule of posting (3
times a week - Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) and show some of
the topics I would cover.

Introduce Yourself
------------------

Another thing to do in your first few posts is show something of
yourself, who you are and how you came to be writing this blog.
This may not be relevant in all cases but even the most technical
blogs can often benefit from a human touch as it encourages
interaction from readers when they are reminded that there is a
real person behind the writing.

Don't Make it ALL About You!
----------------------------

In the case of my second blog, it is deeply personal in nature and
much of what I write will come from my own history and so one of
the things I want to do is share my own background story so that I
can draw from it in future posts. As I started to sketch out the
chapters of the story I realised that I was looking at around a
dozen posts and that is way too much to dump on a new blog!

The problem is that if all you do is talk about yourself, the blog
becomes boring and unless the reader is very personally interested
in you, again you are not giving them any real reason to subscribe.
What I decided to do was post my story in weekly chunks - just one
post per week on Fridays. In this way I free up two slots per week
to show my real content and my own story acts like a bit of a soap
opera and in this way it may even encourage people to subscribe if
they want to know what happens next!

The strategy worked as I started to get comments from people on my
story posts telling me that they couldn't wait to hear what
happened next!

Using the WordPress Timestamp Feature
=====================================

When you write a post in WordPress there is a big button called
"Publish" that will make your post go live. If you just push this
as-is then your post is immediately published. However there is a
link there called "edit" and if you click that it opens up a
date/time panel that allows you to specify the date and time that
the post should be published.

This can work in two ways. When I launched my Internet Marketing
blog, I wrote 6 posts and then set the dates to several days before
so it looked as though I had been writing the blog for about a
week. However I will also use this time stamp feature to schedule
my posts for appearance in the future which is a great way of
ensuring that your blog does not dry up whilst you are away on
holiday!

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I teach everyone free, how to Make Money with Free Blogs at my new website www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com.