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0.
You don’t need any.
I’m not kidding.
You’ll get as much organic traffic from zero blog posts in the first few months as you would if you had three or four.
I’ve started many blogs (I must be in double digits now), and every time I’ve started a new one, I’ve done it slightly differently.
I could get a new blog up and running in under an hour now, I’d say – buy a domain, point my hosting towards it, get all the plugins I need, download a theme (GeneratePress. Every time), create a quick header and logo.
Done.
This post will explain:
- How many posts you should have ready before you launch your blog
- How I launch a blog
- How important is it to be consistent with publishing blog posts
- What to do if you can’t commit to writing articles consistently
Why should you have x number of posts published before launching your blog?
Ok, so. You’ve got your blog set up and ready to go. You’ve a written and AWESOME post that’s optimised for SEO, it has a beautiful, engaging pin to be posted to your awesome new Pinterest account.
You publish your post. People come and read your post.
THEY LOVE IT.
Great. But then they go to find another post. And there’s nothing else there. They leave, never to return. Even if you have a great email opt in incentive, people are unlikely to sign up for your list on their first time visiting your site.
You see, 95% of blogs are abandoned. Well, not necessarily, abandoned, but they have been updated in the last 120 days. To be fair, I don’t always post new content every 120 days and my sites aren’t abandoned, but even if 50% of blogs are regularly updated (and that’s a pretty rosy guestimate) 45% of blogs aren’t updated.
People are aware of this. If they come to your site and you only have one post up – they may assume you lost interest. Unless you’re publishing gold, they’re unlikely to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Is it best to launch a blog with 10 posts published?
In that case, it’s a far better idea to have a few posts ready to go. Ten would be a great amount – whilst users are unlikely to read all ten, they have a few different topics to choose from.
So is that the answer then? Don’t launch your blog until you have ten posts published?
In a perfect world, sure. If you can publish ten awesome posts in a couple of weeks, then you can publish them all on the same day, and satisfy the hordes of people that are visiting your site.
Are you sensing my tone?
I get the logic between having 10 posts published before launch, I really do. Especially if you’re planning your blog journey as being one long battle against social media.
If you’re looking to get traffic via Facebook and Twitter, then every page view is costing you time. You need to maximise your results by getting each user to read multiple posts.
Good luck to you, but it couldn’t be me.
I started this site specifically to help people that love to write and create content. If you’re a social media guru that plans to outsource your content-writing, then go ahed, publish 100 posts at once.
How I prepare my blog for launch (and how many posts I have prepared)
I launched a blog this morning, called House Rabbit Hub. If you’re extremely quick off the mark, you’ll notice that I don’t have any posts published.
Unlikely, because by the time this post has ranked on Google, I’ll probably have a few posts written.
Like I said at the beginning of this article, launching a website can be done in a morning.
Granted, I can knock out a logo in minutes, since I can just create a copy of an old logo in Canva, change the text and colours, and boom, done. I use the same theme and don’t really switch up the fonts.
As you can imagine, my websites don’t launch with a big bang. They just slip online, quiet as a mouse.
How many page views will I get in the first month?
If you go to Pinterest you’ll find dozens of bloggers lamenting their dismal traffic in the first month of blogging. Then they managed to get thousands daily from Pinterest, presumably by selling their soul to the algorithm.
No one will visit your site in the first month unless you actively promote it.
Personally, I hate promoting my blog. Hate it. I’m here for the words, which is why I choose SEO as my primary traffic driver.
And for SEO to work, it needs time. Like, months. Even years.
So why hold back my posts in order to ‘launch’ my blog that no one will see for months?
If you want to follow my methods for driving traffic to your website using SEO, then write your posts and then publish them immediately. You can always go back and edit them if you remember that you missed something out.
I’m not saying that you should rush your posts. Just that there’s little point in waiting until you have a certain before publishing them. The quicker they’re online, the quicker they’ll rank.
Will having more blog posts increase my SEO
Yes, absolutely. But right in the beginning stages of launching a blog, Google won’t be watching you like a hawk. You’re a tiny fish in a MASSIVE sea.
I’m not saying that google won’t notice you – it will – but it won’t be that interested. The more posts you have, the more chances you’ll have at catching its eye.
But if you publish ten posts on one day won’t impress Google any more than publishing ten posts over the course of a month.
What about consistency? Does consistency in blogging matter any more?
Right, listen up writers, because I’m about to flip a big blogging myth.
Kind of.
If you google ‘blogging tips’ one tip that crops up over and over again is how you must be consistent. Commit to publishing a blog post once a week or whatever, and traffic will magically come your way.
I hate this tip.
What if you don’t have time?
Say you work in an industry that involves you working 80 hour weeks for 1o months of the year, and you really want to start a blog.
Wouldn’t you be discouraged if you heard you’d have to publish a post every week, rather than writing like a demon for those two months?
Or worse, you wrote those posts and then, horror or horrors, scheduled them out so that one post was published per week.
Don’t. Do. That.
Blogging consistency matters if…
- You have a large following on social media that expect it of you
And even in this case, you can post mini-posts on Instagram if it’s more convenient.
I follow a lot of blogs on Bloglovin’, and I like that they upload regularly. But I’m pretty sure I’m the only person that does that any more, and I like lifestyle blogs.
- You’re doing something thats time-sensitive
This is a sneaky way of getting traffic to saturated niches. or example, diet challenges, recipe challenges, savings challenges etc. Again, micro-blogging is probably the best way to do this, with a separate blog to explain everything in a more detail. Which doesn’t need to be posted to consistently.
How I blog consistently enough
Ok, so I’m currently adding content to three blogs, and I’m posting five blog posts a week to each one. I literally have nothing else to do, so why not?
But if I were working a ‘normal’ job, I would aim to add ten pieces of quality content to my blog per month.
That’s my aim – 10 blog posts per month.
How you make that work around your lifestyle and other commitments is entirely up to you.
There are a lot of options:
- Pump out 120 posts in your two months off
- Writing three posts a week
- Write all 10 posts in one weekend of the month
etc etc etc
And, for the love of god, publish them when they’re done so that they can get ranking.
Final thoughts
I know that this goes against everything all the other blogs about blogging say, but I PROMISE you don’t have to have ten posts published before you launch your blog. I launched a blog this morning, and it doesn’t have ANY articles.
It doesn’t matter! Unless you picked an incredibly niche…niche and no other articles about it exist online then NO ONE will come to your blog.
I mean that in a nice way.
My new website is all about house rabbits. Literally the only way I’d get traffic is if one of you click on the link or if someone randomly types the exact URL into the search bar. Unlikely.
Similarly, I don’t want you to be put off starting a blog if you can’t commit to posting articles weekly. Obviously, the more content you have, the quicker you’ll get traffic but you won’t be punished writing 10 posts in a week rather than one post every week for ten weeks.
