- The first post is critical! Your first post sets the tone. Take plenty of time thinking about it. Forget your Trungpa — invest the necessary effort. Don’t rush out there with something you’ll regret later.
- The look and feel of the blog is important. Try out a lot of WordPress themes using some dummy “hello world” posts to get a feel for how they look, how they work. Leave each up for a few months so you know what it’s like to really live with them. You can’t be too careful, the web is forever.
- WordPress is pretty straightforward, but there’s plenty of advanced functionality you don’t really understand. You should invest the time in mastering it before you start the blog. Install the latest security, and lock yourself out of your own site a few times.
- You need a clear plan.You don’t really know where this will go. Your ideas for posts so far are all over the map. In your professional life, you would never do anything without a clear set of intentions and at least a rough plan.Without a plan, how will you be sure this will be great?
- Do you have the right title and domain name? It might not be memorable enough. A good blog should have a title and web address that are interesting and unique. What do you want it to evoke? It should evoke the sorts of things you want it to evoke. It should fit your personality. It should be specific enough to have meaning, but be broad enough so that it can’t in some way paint you into a corner 5 years from now. It shouldn’t be too pretentious or self-referential. It should be clear. Can you explain it to your mom? To a future employer or business associate?
- Your social media strategy is incomplete.These days, it’s vital to work out your Twitter and Facebook strategy, whether you will have a YouTube channel or go with Vimeo, or both. How do you fit into Tumblr? What about Pinterest? Ello? And whatever else is very hot right now — don’t overlook it.
- You are building your brand when you blog.You need to work out your brand hierarchy.Are you and your blog one brand, or are you a sub-brand of your blog? Or vice versa. Don’t go live unless you’ve done some branding exercises too. If your blog was an animal, what animal would it be? How will you differentiate from other blogs? Be sure to identify a few big blogs as your enemies, so you can strengthen your brand by picking fights and contrasting against them.
- All this talk is about content, but before you start blogging, you need to find your voice. You want to be sure you come across as confident, smart, and amusing. You need to develop a consistent voice, but at the same time avoid clichés and repetitive structures. Once you have found your voice you’ll be able to write freely and beautifully, like Kerouac on benzedrine.
- You really should re-read Strunk & White before you start posting, to avoid embarrassing mistakes. Maybe scan the Chicago Manual and AP Style Guide as well. And scan through Urban Dictionary for a few hours as well.
- Absolutely do not start without a good backlog of posts. You need to have quite a few posts drafted and mostly complete. Too many people start a blog, then lose their momentum. Then the whole thing sits sadly dormant, with the most recent post dusty and over a year old. Or, just to keep up appearances, people resort to cheating, doing posts that are just references to other posts. Or worse, simple numbered lists of overly self-conscious content.