This is part 8 of a new series on how to start a business blog, and is aimed at businesses of all sizes. In these articles, I’m going to address business-specific concerns and requirements for business blogging.
Conventional Wisdom
It’s been given out as good advice that a blog should have something more than a few measly posts for people to read if you’re going to make a big production out of announcing the blog’s existence. If you’re not going to make a big noise about starting a blog, then this isn’t as crucial. But if you’re an established business with a bit of longevity and presence in the market, then when you announce the launch of your blog, the standard good advice really is pretty good: there had better be something to read.
Many companies have one foot in the old-school world of business management, and the other foot is testing the waters of technological empowerment and its consequences. A good old-fashioned press release can drive an initial surge of traffic to the new blog, so, you know, first impressions and all that.
What are you going to offer your new readers that will impress them and convert them into RSS subscribers and long-term readers? Something good, I hope! Many other great bloggers have written plenty of excellent material on creating initial content for a blog. Yaro Starak calls it pillar articles, Chris Garrett calls it flagship content. Whatever you want to call it, it needs to be written before the blog launches.
How Much Initial Content?
How much initial content should your blog have? There’s no single answer to this. There’s no formula you can apply. But you can answer a question for yourself: when you visit a blog and see there’s hardly any posts older than a month, what’s your gut reaction about the trustworthiness of that blog? It depends! Some blogs (like Skelliewag didn’t have much content when starting but what was there was great and the newborn status of the blog didn’t matter. But think about how much content you’d want to see at a blog before you would ever consider trusting it or subscribing to it. My own personal threshold for this sort of thing is usually more than a couple months. The exceptions to that aren’t businesses.
Should You Backdate Your Initial Content?
Simple answer: no. You cannot fool people by backdating your content. This sort of thing can easily be exposed on the internet, so don’t even think about it. You will be found out.
Instead, do a soft launch. A soft launch is when you make the blog public and you begin posting, but you don’t blare the trumpets from the mountaintops about it. Some of your customers might naturally discover the blog before you’ve launched it officially. That’s fine, think of these people as allies to help you get started. Recruit them. Write them personal emails thanking them for any feedback they might care to give. Once you’ve built up some material then you show yourself to the world officially.
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