How to write your first blog post. My first blog post will be a “how-to” article on how to write your first blog post. After following these five steps, you will be armed with all the tools necessary to begin your blogging career (just like me!).
First and foremost, be as insecure and anxious as possible about each and every word you are going to write. Your words will be a permanent fixture in cyberspace. Each. And. Every. Word. Ooops. Typo. Fuck. Cuss. My mom might read this. Mom’s coworkers might read this. Mom’s boss might read this. A potential employer could read this. A potential client could read this. And… nobody probably will. Well, that’s not 100% correct. Some people will. But most people won’t. In fact, of the 6 billion people on earth, only billion speak English, and even fewer can read. And even a smaller fraction have internet access. And the smallest fraction of all actually gives a shit what I/you have to write (yet). This polarized sensation will give you the motivating belief that what you are doing is worthwhile and the demoralizing insight that you are wasting your time. You are going through a painful experience for all the world to see.
Second – find a topic you are passionate about. If you are interested in education, write about your plans to destroy the infrastructure of organized, authoritative education to liberate the world’s knowledge into the public space. If you are passionate about lighting, tell the world about the health benefits of lighting that matches the sun’s spectrum and regulates your circadian rhythms and hormone levels. And if you are good with dick jokes, drop a big fat one in between the literary legs of an intellectually stimulating and well-articulated, yet uninformative run-on sentence. Try not to mention psychiatric patients in your first blog article as it is a distraction for some readers unfamiliar with these experiences. And don’t cater to an elderly audience since they won’t have internet access anyways. But remember – whatever you are doing must be worth your time so as to not waste the time of the reader. After all – why are you writing this blog? Why am I writing this blog? Hmmmm…. Should I continue writing? Meh – When in doubt, choose a cheesy topic which will provide you with hits from search engines for topics people are frequently searching for, such as “How to write your first blog post.”
Third – Choose a target length for your blog entries. Will you be posting chapters from your autobiography, essays, or poems? If you are aiming for long entries, will this goal unexpectedly cause you to fill your paragraphs with extra phrases and bullshit to pump up the word count to fulfill your quota? Or will you critique each and every word on your page to ensure they all deserve to be there? Pondering pointless questions like these is a great way to procrastinate for an extra six months before putting words on the web. Best yet – ask a few people how long they think a blog should be, fixate on the first response you get (700-1000 words), and start writing! And whatever you do, don’t google “How long should a blog be” because then you’ll realize the collective blogger agreement is that you weren’t supposed to go over 600 words. Fuck.
Fourth – reconsider. Is this really worth your time? Once you realize just how long a 700-1000 word article is, you may realize you don’t have that many worthwhile words to share with the world. Around the 500 word mark is a good place to quit. It’s perfect, because you’ve made it just past the halfway mark, just enough to feel like you’ve lived the exhilarating experience of your first article, yet far enough away from done that you don’t need to feel bad about quitting. After all – nobody will read your abandoned writing. And how many people have you even told that you were going to start writing? Hopefully zero! If you told anyone you’d start, you made a big mistake which cannot be undone. By voicing your intent to do something, you have entered into a binding contract to follow through with it or else feel the undue shame of having made an empty promise to deliver on something with no tangible value to anyone in the first place. Always keep your creative desires a secret to avoid this sensation. Or worse yet, the experience of having someone ask, “Want me to take a look at what you’ve done so far?”
Fifth – Feel guilt that your original intention to write powerful, meaningful words that would change the world has evolved into an exercise at best. Convince yourself that your first blog article will be practice for the next one… that’s the one that will be the riveting world-changing document you’ve dreamt of. Liberating youth from the constructs of their education system… liberating psychiatric patients from their unjust chains… freeing prisoners from the walls which condemn their souls to a lifetime of suffering… and empowering the elderly to make positive contributions to society with the wisdom they possess…. those are topics for your next article. Or maybe the one after that. But at least you’ve got your first article done, making you qualified to teach others how to write their first article. And now you can add “blogger” to your resume. Damn! Very impressive work.
And now you can start worrying about how to follow up after such a masterpiece.