Blogless

Your public introduction to the world seems, on one hand, earth-shatteringly important, and on the other, totally throwaway. It’s probably a little bit of both (perhaps more the latter). Still, you can’t write a blog without writing a first post. It’s impossible.

Jumping Right In

The experts will tell you (or at least we will) there’s nothing like “jumping right in.” Two of our all-around favorite first posts adopt this strategy, and do it well.

Creating Passionate Users begins with Getting past the brain’s crap filter, an explanation of the brain-focused approach that makes their Head First books so popular.

Copyblogger Brian Clark opens with Sold, where, as one might expect, he soft-sells you on the concept of blogging as the ultimate form of low pressure advertising in language everyone can understand.

What’s smart about both these first posts is they introduce the blog’s reason for being, couched in engaging content. If you liked this one, you’re probably going to like the blog. No reason to wait until the next post to see how it’s really going to unfold.

So, What’s this About Again?

If you aren’t up to “jumping right in”, there’s the staid, but informative “what this blog’s about” style. This strategy was adopted by many popular bloggers, including Joel “on Software” Spolsky, who made good on his 1999 promise to “write several articles about software development in this weblog,” and Russ Olsen, who made the slightly less strict promise to write about “whatever is on my mind at the moment, but what is frequently on my mind is how we in the software business are just trying to solve problems.”

The Public Resume

Many of our favorites also employed the “Hi, I’m me, this is my CV” post. This genre usually includes some spillover from the “what this blog’s about” genre, but is distinguished by the fact that the person is probably relying on his or her experience or credentials to get you interested in the things that are coming.

Some notable examples include, surprisingly, Scott Berkun’s (admittedly sort of charming) CV first post, Microsoft no more. (And yes, we recognize that Berkun’s first post is almost the exact same post as Joel’s [above], and yet, we put it in a different category. The science of first posts is an inexact science.) Additionally, Jeff’s “About me” post at Coding Horror, hits all the high-notes: Who I am, why I blog, and what I’m going to blog about; overall, a fairly inauspicious start to a good blog.

I’ve Got a New Blog!

And speaking of inauspicious beginnings, take a look at BLDGBLOG’s first post, BLDGBLOG 1, which literally starts with “Testing, testing… Is this on…” BLDGBLOG is on all of our RSS readers, and this post is absolutely proof positive that you don’t have to have a strategy on the first day to turn into an amazing blog - you just have to write a lot of posts.

Another good example of the “strategy degree-zero/I’ve got a new blog!”-genre lives at You’ve been Haacked!, the positively goofy The new digs.

Conclusion

Finally, we end our journey through first posts with a stopover at Core77, who began by sharing a link prefaced by this simple missive, a sentiment we hope our readers might one day express to their friends and associates about t-minus: “(We) love this site. You should, too.”

Amusing Footnotes

[1] Jeff Zeldman wins the “I’ve been doing this for too long award” with his first “posts” - which, technically, are probably not posts in the traditional sense, since he was blogging before anyone had really conceived of the term “blog”.

[2] Signal vs. Noise wins the “It’s simpler to organize less information award” for making us use the way-back machine to find its first post and also the “John Cage award for best first blog post title” for its first site-hosted blog post, Warm Idea.

[3] Just to convolute matters further, this post was actually written for another blog (the now defunct t-minus) with our partner Jon. Chew on that.