You set up the blog. Domain, theme, the whole thing. And now you’re staring at an empty page, asking the question that kills more blogs than any technical problem ever could:

What do I even write about?

I’ve been there. And I’ve watched hundreds of people get stuck in exactly this spot — not because they have nothing to say, but because they think what they have to say isn’t enough.

It is.

#The “Content Strategy” Trap

Search for “what to write about” and you’ll find articles telling you to do keyword research, analyze competitors, build a content calendar, and map posts to buyer personas.

That’s advice for a media company. You’re a person with a blog.

The blogs I keep going back to — the ones bookmarked, shared, trusted — didn’t start with a spreadsheet. They started with someone writing about what they were already thinking about. The strategy, if it came at all, came later.

You don’t need a plan. You need a first post.

#Write What You Explained Last Week

Think about the last time you explained something to a colleague, a friend, or someone online. Maybe it was:

• How you set up a particular tool
• Why you made a decision differently than most people would
• A mistake you made and what you learned
• Something you believe that people in your field tend to disagree with

That explanation is a blog post. You already wrote it — out loud, in a Slack message, in a comment thread. All that’s left is writing it down in a way that makes sense to someone who wasn’t in the room.

This is the simplest, most reliable source of blog post ideas: things you already know that someone else hasn’t figured out yet. You don’t notice your own expertise because it feels obvious to you. It isn’t obvious to everyone.

#The “Too Basic” Lie

“But someone already wrote about this.”

Yes. And someone already wrote a cookbook. People still buy new ones because different voices explain things in different ways that click for different brains.

The post that gets someone unstuck might not be the most comprehensive or the most technically precise. It might be the one that uses the analogy that finally makes the concept click. That’s a contribution only you can make, because only you have your exact combination of experience, context, and way of explaining things.

“Too basic” is almost never the real objection. The real objection is “what if people judge me for not knowing more?” They won’t. And even if they did — the person who needed that explanation doesn’t care.

#Seven Kinds of Posts That Actually Work

If you need a place to start, here’s what I’ve seen work for personal and small blogs, ordered from easiest to hardest:

1. The “Today I Learned” post. Something you just figured out. Doesn’t need to be groundbreaking. “I spent two hours debugging this, and it turned out to be one line” is a useful post.

2. The tool review. Not a listicle of ten tools. Your honest experience using one specific tool for a specific purpose. What worked, what didn’t, what you’d do differently.

3. The process post. How you actually do something — not the ideal version, the real version. How you take notes, how you plan a project, how you organize your files. People are endlessly curious about other people’s workflows.

4. The opinion post. Something you believe about your work or field. “I think X is overrated” or “Here’s why I stopped doing Y.” These are the posts that get shared, because they give people language for something they already felt but hadn’t articulated.

5. The “before and after” post. You changed something — a tool, a habit, a belief. Here’s what it was like before, here’s what it’s like now, here’s what caused the switch.

6. The curated list. Not a “top 50 resources” post. A short, opinionated list of the 3-5 things you actually use, with a sentence about why each one matters to you specifically.

7. The narrative post. Something that happened to you that illustrates a larger point. These take more craft, but they’re the posts people remember.

Pick one. Write it badly. Fix it later. Or don’t fix it — most first posts are better than their authors think.

#The Length Question

“How long should a blog post be?”

Long enough to make your point. Short enough that you don’t pad it.

The average blog post has crept up from around 800 words in 2014 to nearly 1,400 by 2024, according to Orbit Media’s annual blogging survey. That’s not because ideas got bigger. It’s because word count became a proxy for ranking.

Ignore the SEO advice that says posts need to be 2,000+ words. Some of the best blog posts ever written are 300 words. Some are 3,000. The length follows the idea, not the other way around.

If your first post is 400 words and it says something honest, that’s better than 2,000 words of padding to hit some arbitrary target.

#The Real Blocker Isn’t the Topic

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after building a publishing tool and watching people use it: the topic isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the gap between having a thought and making it public.

Choosing a topic feels like the problem because it’s the first decision. But the actual friction is emotional — the vulnerability of saying “here’s what I think” and putting your name on it.

If you’ve been “trying to figure out what to write about” for more than a week, you probably already know what you want to write about. You’re just not sure you’re allowed to.

You are.

#Start Before You’re Ready

The best time to publish your first post is before you feel ready. Not because urgency matters, but because readiness is a feeling that never arrives. There’s always one more thing to figure out, one more post idea to evaluate, one more reason to wait.

Open a blank file. Write a title — any title. Write the first sentence. It doesn’t have to be good. It has to exist.

The second post is easier than the first. The tenth is easier than the second. The habit of writing is built by writing, not by planning to write.

Your blog doesn’t need a content strategy. It needs a first post.

Write it today.