1st Blog Post Ideas & What to Avoid

Let’s suppose you just bought a domain, set up your blog with the blog host of your choice and are now ready to write your first blog post.

That’s so exciting, right!

But wait, there is a small problem…

You don’t know what you should actually write in your first blog post, right?!?

If that’s what you are struggling with, I can probably help you!

In this article, we are going to have a look at some great 1st blog post ideas, regardless of what niche you might be in!

 

Don’t overthink it

The truth is that it doesn’t really matter that much what your first blog post is going to be.

What really matters is that you get your content out there….the faster, the better!

I have been blogging for many many years and one of the worst mistakes I have people seen doing is that they overthink stuff…and thinking for too logn what their first blog post could be is a perfect example for that!

Let’s be realistic here: Your first blog post (ever) is most likely going to be a blog post that won’t see a lot of success.

There are many reasons for that.

First of all, it is very difficult to know what kind of content will do well on your blog. It is very much a learning by doing process.

You post a blog post and it fails. You will post another kind of article and it might fail too.

Then after posting 50 posts, you might have one or two blog posts that perform well. And then it is up to you to find out why these posts performed so well.

But the important thing here is to remember that with every blog post that you publish, your writing will become better, the process of writing is getting faster, you will gain more experience overall, which will ultimately lead to you becoming a master in blogging.

Just make sure that once you published your first blog post, that your WordPress website is really live and is indexed by Google.

That said, I would still like to give you guys some good advice on what kind of post could work well for you.

After all, I have published over 1000 blog posts so far and do have a basic understanding of what generally works well and what does not.

 

Focus on your audience

Who is likely to read your blog? What is your target audience? If you haven’t thought about that, you should definitely think about that…right now!

Because one of the best advice I can give you at this point is that for most blogs, it makes much more sense to focus on what your audience would like to read rather than focusing on what you would like to write about.

This problably sounds very obvious but you would be surprised about how many people actually don’t do this right and end up writing about topics that they personally find interesting, only to find out that nobody actually reads their texts.

So, try to write about something that you are sure of that it is of interest to your target audience.

Maybe there are some blogs out there that are kind of in the same niche as you (and that you enjoy reading). Have a look at these blogs and check out what topics they are writing about. That could already help a bit.

 

Don’t introduce yourself

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with you introducing yourself to your audience. But please, don’t do this as part of your first blog post.

Well, why not?

The thing is just that a blog post (especially not in the first blog post) is not the right place to do that.

You will want to introduce yourself or your team in the “About me/About us” section.

Or maybe you will want to have some introduction text about yourself in the sidebar that will go with a picture of yourself.

But your first blog post should not be the place to do that, really.

 

1st Blog Post Ideas: DO THIS!

Ok, so could you finally tell me what I should write in my first blog post, then!

I can certainly not tell you exactly what the content in your first blog post should be but I can point you in the right direction. Here are a few things to consider

The first blog post is actually only special to you. Chances are that your audience will never even know that this was your first blog post. Why is that? Well, because chances are that most of the people will find your blog post through Google.

And when your article pops up there, the link will lead directly to your blog post.

So, that means that people are not even likely to see that this was your first blog post, because they generally don’t use your website navigation to get to this post in the first place.

Focus on a small topic (a keyword with minimal competition) when writing your first blog post. The second piece of advice that I would like to give you is to focus on a rather small topic for your first blog post.

So let’s say your topic is fly fishing. So you might think that it would be a good idea to write your first article on “What is fly fishing?”

And that, ladies and gentleman, would be an absolute horrible topic for your first post.

And why is that?

Because this topic (keyword) is far too competitive. And with a new website, you seriously have 0 chance to rank for that.

So it is better to focus on some less-competitive keywords.

In fact, it might be ideal to start your blogging journey with some incredibly granular topic. Try to answer some very specific question that people in your niche might have.

This will give you far better chances in ranking your article. The less competition, the better. It should still be something that people will look for, though.

But how do you know what people look for in your niche?

Oh boy, I don’t even know where to start. There is so much to say about this topic.

So, let me just give you one good idea at this point. Head over to Google and use Google’s Autosuggest feature.

As simple as this feature is, this is an absolute killer feature that can provide you with material for literally 100’s of great blog posts.

Now, on Google, insert fly fishing into the search box.

This is about what you will get when doing that.

So, you can see that Google will autosuggest topics for you. And you can rest assured that whatever Google shows you here are topics that people really search for. And this is pure gold.

Because now you can easily find out what kind of topics are of interest to your potential readers and you can just simply cherry-pick the ones that you like.

And you can get much more granular with the search than I just did. Just add some word(s) or choose some search strings from the autosuggest feature and Google will suggest you more topics/keywords.

Also, you can just type fly fishing followed by the letter a, for instance, and you will get all the keywords that have fly fishing to begin with and then have another word that starts with the letter a.

You see how awesome this autosuggest feature truly is? By now, you should already have a couple of good ideas about how your first post could look like, right?

And if you don’t, just keep on using this method and I am sure you will stumble upon some nice keywords/topics that you could write about in your first blog post sooner or later!

This method does work for literally any topic. Be it fly fishing, indoor gardening, table tennis, drones or whatever topic you would like to write about. Use this to your advantage!

 

Your 1st Blog Post: Make it look like this

Now, that you should have a pretty good idea about what to write in your firt blog post, let me also tell you HOW you should go about writing it.

Ok, I am not going into too much detail here but I would like to give you some advice here already because I would hate to see you waste too much time for nothing or let’s say too little success.

So here are some golden rules to consider for your first blog post (and basically any blog post that will follow after this)

 

Longer is better

This is actually incredibly important. It might sound counter-intuitive but longer blog posts almost always perform better than shorter blog posts.

It is actually one of the biggest myths in blogging that short posts perform well. No, they don’t.

That said, aim for something like 1500 words in your first blog post. That might sound like a lot but it is very well worth your efforts.

If you are writing a 300 word blog post (and especially if that is going to be your first blog post), you can almost be sure that this post will not rank and probably never will.

 

Keep it simple

Fancy formatting takes time and often does more harm than good. So I advise you to keep it simple in your first blog post. Keeping it simple is actually also a good idea for blog posts that follow your 1st blog post.

 

Write short sentences

Try to write short sentences (this is actually also some great advice and reminder for myself, as I do have a hard time to keep sentences short at times…as you can see in this very sentence and in this very blog post…ouch).

The reason why this is important is that short sentences are easier to read and are, therefore, more user-friendly.

Google attaches a lot of importance to user-friendliness these days.

 

Make extensive use of paragraphs and subheadings

Remember that this is not a book that you are writing here. That said, it makes perfect sense to make a lot of line breaks.

I usually start a new line after about every second sentence. This further improves the user experience. As far as subheadings go, it is best to use plenty of these.

If your text is about 1500 words, you should have at least 3-6 subheadings that further divide your content into more digestable chunks.

It is best practice to just use h1, h2 and maybe h3 headings. I wouln’t advise you to go deeper than that (well, if your text is 6000 words long then it might become necessary at some point).

 

1st Blog Post Ideas: Wrapping it all up

There you have it. All you need to know to make your 1st blog post a success!

Many of the things I shared with you in this blog post actually took me years to find out. I wish I would have had some guide like this when I first started creating blogs.

That said, I hope that you enjoyed this article and found it somehow useful.

And please remember: It takes time to become a great blogger.

Your first blog post will certainly not be perfect but if you just do half of the things right that I mentioned in this article here, you are definitely on the right track!

Now, it is finally time for you to craft your first blog post…EVER! And I guarantee you it will be such a great feeling to hit that publish button for the very first time! PURE MAGIC.

And just remember: Having success in the blogging business takes a loooooong time, so certainly don’t delete your WordPress blog if you don’t see see the desired results after a short period of time.

Good things take time, blogging is no different!

Please also don’t worry too much about the name of your website at a very early stage either because you can always change the name of your WordPress blog & website later.

Ideally, you would like the name of the website match the URL of the website, of course, but if you would really like to have a different name for it one day, then that can be done as well by redirecting your old URL to a new URL.

But don’t let that bother you for now.

What is important is that you actually start creating and get to publish that first blog post!

Before you do that, however, please also make sure to change the “Just another WordPress site” tagline!

Good luck!