To Post or Not to Post
Posted on January 20, 2008
Filed Under Beginning Blogging |
By now, if you have been following along with the blogging lessons, you should have a plan and have selected the blog platform and theme and you are ready to write your first post. Well, ok, almost ready. You will want to plan not only your first post but also the follow-up posts to it.
If you don’t have a plan, you will end up doing what I have done in the past and still do on occasion. I come home from work exhausted. I want to work on my blog and I end up posting something that is not well thought out and may or may not be in the plan for my blog. Create a plan and check your posts against it before you hit the publish button!
In my previous post on First Steps to Blogging, I talked about mind mapping. This is the process of taking a piece of paper or one of several software packages and graphically writing down the topics. Think of it as a brain storming session.
You can do the same thing by writing a list on a piece of paper. Sit down in a quiet area for 15 minutes and just write down everything that you can think of that relates to your topic. Some will be good, some won’t be and that’s ok. The important thing right now is just to get it all down. You will refer to this list or mind map frequently.
To make a mind map, you will take the central idea of the blog and write it in the center of the paper. Draw a circle around it or if you are feeling creative, a light bulb. Then draw a line coming off from it and write down an idea for a category. You can see in the picture below the beginnings of a mind map for Lupus. Once you have several ideas for major categories, you can and should go deeper and add additional topics off of each category.
I find that as I build my mind map, and actually look at the categories on paper, new ideas or ways to approach a topic occur to me. I usually start out with one topic and end up with several that build on the first one. This is a great tool to channel and stimulate your creativity and also a check to make sure that your posts will relate back to your original topic. If you find that your idea for a post doesn’t seem to fit with your original light bulb, you should question whether it belongs on your blog.
Once you have your mind map, you are ready to start writing. I, personally, try to write mine in a word processor first. It makes it easier to check grammar and spelling although I always end up reformatting them when I paste it into my blog. Line spacing and fonts don’t always translate well from one program to the other.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also want to check out:
- Ten Tips for Writing a Blog Post by Lyndon on ProBlogger. This is a quick list of tips that may help you write better posts.
- Why and How to Create Unique Valuable Content on Improve the Web. This one might make you think about what you are writing and what difference it will make to your visitors.
- Discover Hundreds of Post Ideas for Your Blog with Mind Mapping Darren Rowse has a very detailed explanation of Mind Mapping and how to use it to increase your creativity.
- Strategic Blogging: Creating the Right Content to Achieve Your Income Goals by Dosh Dosh. This is a look at creating content specifically to create income.
Free Mind Mapping Tools
- Free Mind This is the one that I use. It’s pretty simple and easy and gets the job done.
- SmartDraw. This is another free trial package. I haven’t tried it so you are on your own here.
- Head Case - 28 day free trial. Some might like the different graphics in this one.
- Mindomo - This one is web based. It’s easy to use but I am so often offline that I went with Free Mind.
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