Zen and the Art of Blogging

At a recent conference in London, the entrepreneur and former Dragons Den TV series panellist James Caan said he was amazed to discover some of the businesses he discussed making investments in had websites that clearly hadn’t been updated for two or three years! Let’s hope he never encountered a certain Midlands law firm that once won a local newspaper award for its website, despite the fact its home page contained a picture of a partner who’d died six months previously but was still there because nobody knew how to amend the site.

OK, so the guaranteed way to prevent cobweb sites is to ensure the home page – which may be the only page visitors to your site ever look at before moving on – is regularly refreshed. And, the simplest way to do this is by having an easy to update news section. Sure, we know you are trying to write a novel (or whatever) and are not running a media business but it should not be beyond your capabilities to update the site at least once a week, particularly as modern sites are increasing built around easy-to-update blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger or TypePad.

So what is stopping you? It’s not as if there is a shortage of topics to write about!

I think one of the issues is psychology – the mindset that goes into Creative Writing School mode and begins planning out a blog posting of such length and complexity that it would impress your college tutors if you presented it as your end-semester dissertation

Don’t! Nobody is going to read such a missive. Keep it short and punchy – it need only be two or three paragraphs long. For a great example of how to do this, check out Seth Godin’s Blog:


Seth's Blog

Godin is a US marketing guru whose blog posts are worth reading for the content however it is the brevity of his style I’m more interested in here, with some of his posts little longer than a tweet on Twitter. The key message here is what you post on the website does not have to be a lengthy missive. Keep it short, make it snappy – and the more regularly you update the site the better.