Some people would benefit from the sense of security, others might be far more willing to just write things on the fly.

Brad, I had to get rid of Adsense (a href=”http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/06/22/do-you-advertise-your-blog/#comment-363346″>see my comment on the Do You Advertise Your Blog thread for more)

Kanwal, if only I could wait a whole week between tweaking my blog’s design. I must have made a dozen big changes to my design, each time getting more ‘minimalist’. Several ideas have been inspired by Problogger, including having all subscription info (email and rss) ‘above the fold’ and my very simple explanation of what RSS is good for.

I made that mistake with my current blog and I got some horrible ads running on my site. They were so bad (also had nothing to do with my subject) that I considered pulling them until my content improved.

Luckily for me I never had to delete my adsense ads. But I wonder what effect that had on my reader/s, having bad ads and all.

Just a thought!

I have also started asking people on how to improve the site, its always good to get a second, third, tenth opinion. I’m always surprised at how people think and interact with a site. Its intriguing to know visually how we all percieve things differently and collectively how we view them so similiarly.

I have also written plenty of posts since my launch. In fact, I’m not having any problems reaching my 5 posts a week goal.

In addition, I have a running list of post ideas. It currently is about 30 posts long.

I just don’t think you have to write up tens of articles before you actually launch a blog. Having a backlog is every blogger’s dream. But I don’t think it’s a prerequisite to start a blog.

I have my own backlog of short how-to posts and news items. But I wrote them after I launched gridbuzz, not before.

Unless you have an especially fertile imagination, having a backlog of posts is a great idea. You can run the site instead of writing content for the first few weeks, which means you can fix up the inevitable mistakes, go promoting and so on.

Of course, if a new good idea hits in that time, you should feel free to write and post about it. If organic growth does happen, good. But if it is slow, a store of new posts will be handy.

I started my site with only the first article, and am now realising how hard it can be to turn out a long-ish (maybe 1500-4000 words) feature article once a week (my goal). I might announce a hibernation of 6-8 weeks with only occasional short posts to give me time to make a list of feature ideas, do some writing, build up the local event calendar in my sidebar so that it is a selling point in its own right, and so on.

The way I went about it was I have a main blog with about 50 RSS subscribers and an equal amount of uniques per day. I then made a basic design and wrote for a month or so on each. Then I used my traffic on my main blog to promote the site and gain a few readers.

Things I did wrong:

Didn’t have enough posts on all blogs.
Should have had at least one series per blog where applicable.
Should have done like Ian and had at least 20 posts backlogged so I could have a steady 10 -20 days of posts, post-launch.

Things I did right:

I just went for it. The blogs are doing well and gaining more traffic every week. I even was able to get a guest author on one of them and I’m working on another.
I had a simple design that gives the blogs some type of blog network recognition. It’s a basic design but is working well.

Preparing a bunch of evergreen articles beforehand might be good for keeping up with continuity of the blog. But other than that, I am a believer of blogs growing organically and being shaped with reader/writer interaction.