Writing your First Blog Post

At last, you’ve decided on a blog name, chosen your hosting account, setup your WordPress site and spent hours choosing the perfect theme, then you take a step back and you look at your site and see the ‘Hello World‘ post and your heart sinks because it looks awful.

If you are ready to get started but have never used WordPress before here is a WordPress Quick Start Guide that will show you some of the basics. It’s really easy, once you dive in.

Now you have learned a few of the basics you should be ready for your first blog post.

Go ahead and click ‘New Post’

Writing you first blog post should actually happen before styling your website with a fancy template because until you have written something you won’t know what shape your blog will take. Knowing if your blog be full colour, have a magazine style or if you are going for a more minimalist style with black and white pictures or even no pictures at all will depend on what, and how you write.

Let it flow

If you are already having writers block then you may have chosen the wrong topic. It might be what you wanted to write about but not necessarily was in your depth of knowledge. Prolific writers are prolific because the words flow from their thoughts. If you have chosen a topic that you aim to learn more about then now is the time to do the research and read more books and blogs on the topic. As you learn more, you’ll find it will be easier to write, and you’ll find that flow you are looking for.

Sometimes it’s easier to start with an introduction of yourself because, it’s likely you already know plenty about that subject. Anyway you are going to need an ‘About’ page so maybe select a ‘New Page‘ instead of that ‘New Post‘ for your first article. Starting there to see how your writing develops is the best advice I can give you.

If you need help with your writing style then here is a great article that I started with, The five features of effective writing, which will give you a great head-start and covers the writing basics that you might not have been taught in school or have simply forgotten.

Another great tip is to write first and edit later. So many people get caught up in the detail, and they lose their train of thought along the way. Nothing will be published until you hit the publish button but even then you can always unpublish just as quickly.

When you’ve finished your first draft, hit the preview button and you’ll see how this looks to your readers. I usually do my editing whilst referring to this page as it let’s me get a feel for the copy and if anything needs breaks or emphasizing. But everyone is different so find your own flow.

Ok, I’m going to let you get on with writing your first blog post, but one last tip before I go is to remove your distractions before you start to write, also known as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, mobile phone etc. You’ll want to keep focused to produce consistent copy.

Good luck on your journey and if you found this useful please share with your friends because this helps me get the message out there about how easy it is to start a blog. Plus feel free to leave any questions in the comments below.