When first starting your mental health blog, you’ve got a blank canvas. You don’t have a community. You can’t see what’s worked for you before. So how then do you start?
I’m going to go over a few ideas here of what you can write for your first blogs. You’re there at the keyboard ready to introduce your thoughts to the world.
I’d first recommend starting with an introduction blog to tell the world who you are. Feel free to dive right in, but if you’re going to start sharing your story sharing a bit of backstory will feed your readers in.
You may not be comfortable saying everything straight away. Graphic details such as domestic violence, sexual assault or childhood abuse may not be things you want to put out there. And that’s ok.
Feel free to go back as far as you want. The idea of an intro is so people can get to know you and understand what has lead to the point where your writing from.
You’ve come on a journey. And while you don’t need to give your readers every step, letting them see the challenges you face and have overcome can help them connect through your blog.
Building that connection means you can keep people coming back to your blog and build a community around it. But people may also be able to see similarities with what they’re going through, and that can help them too.
You should include some details that make people feel connected and able to relate to you. You are sharing your personal story, so you want people to be able to relate and connect with you.
When you first start your blog, your going to have a small community around you. If you want to start growing that quickly, you’ve got to give people a reason to come back to your blog.
Let people know what they can expect to come. You may not know all the content that you’re going to make straight away. You’re on a journey, too, with this blog, and that’s something you can share with your readers.
You should have already decided what content you’d like on your website. Now is the time to get it off the ground.
Once you’ve introduced yourself, it’s time to start getting into blogging. When you write your blogs, keep them all with a similar theme. This way, you’ve got an idea of what to write for your next blog, and people can expect content.
You want to get in your flow for writing. If you’re looking for articles on blogging, many would suggest keeping to the same niche or theme using terms like topic clusters for your writing.
But this is your mental health blog. This is your story. Your life may not have one theme running through it, rather different themes all coming together in a random order to make you, you.
Your blog is representing who you are. It doesn’t need to be perfectly planned; it doesn’t need to follow in an orderly way. This is your journey. The raw story that you tell can add much more value than something flawlessly edited.
And that’s the one thing I want you to take away from this post. While you may want to follow the content marketing guides out there in keeping to a niche and the way you edit and write, I’d recommend you keep to yourself as much as you can.
You’re allowed to make this random. You’re allowed to be honest. This is your blog, your story.
Tell it how you want.
Jake Symons is an entrepreneur and passionate mental health advocate determined to share his story to help others. Alongside writing on this blog he hosts Mental Monday: Mental Health Live a biweekly intimate and unscripted conversation about mental health.
