Your First Post Isn't a Content Funnel
The UW–Madison Writing Center has a sober guide to blog posts — no funnel diagrams, no “target a low-volume keyword,” no twelve-step monetization arc. I wish I’d read it before my first dozen posts elsewhere.
What makes blogs so different from journalism, as the authors of The Elements of Blogging: Expanding the Conversation of Journalism suggest, is the discussion between writer and reader.
That’s the whole game. Not PageRank. Not a lead magnet. A conversation — sometimes with comments, sometimes just with the person who keeps showing up because you said one true thing plainly.
The Center’s practical advice is almost aggressively reasonable: short headlines, a lede that states the point, at most two or three focused ideas, evidence, then stop. The internet is full of guides that tell beginners to engineer their first post for discovery. This one tells you to write something worth answering.
I’m starting riphone with that in mind. Post one isn’t a strategy document. It’s a link, a pull quote, and whatever I have to add — which is the only part that has to be mine.