I’ve had a couple blog reading all-nighters within the past week, and suddenly a truism comes to me as I sit here sifting through dozens more fascinating blogs: Simplicity is King in the blogosphere.

John Moore from Brand Autopsy has a great post about simplicity. You really should read it.

What’s more striking to me, in terms of the idea of simplicity, is not John’s post but the entire Brand Autopsy blog itself. It’s so darn simple, yet very effective and attractive.

I would argue that within 30 seconds, the average blog reader could easily figure out how to do the following on their first visit to Brand Autopsy (note, in the world of blogs, 30 seconds may be all the time you have to sell a new visitor on the merits of your blog. Past 30 they are already off to something else if your blog doesn’t speak to them):

  1. Purchase the book “Tribal Knowledge“
  2. Download their free whitepaper PDF “Manifesto“
  3. Subscribe to the RSS feed

These are probably three of the top goals of this particular blog, and the fact that one can so easily find how to do these things is absolutely key. Have a deeper look at this blog. In my opinion, they do a whole lot of very savvy things that one could and should model for their own blogging “bag of tricks.”

Now lets look at a blog on crack. It hurts to even look at it, doesn’t it? Here’s one on MySpace crack (MySpace blogs are a rare combination of utterly simplistic and stunningly ugly). Finally, I just had to throw this one in there for good measure. Very popular and very annoying.

As an afterthought, I do believe that Adwords tend to degrade the visual effectiveness of a blog. That’s to be expected and it’s up to you to decide whether or not it’s worth it to use them. In our case, we have decided not to in favor of selling books and audio courses down the road. Of course our main revenue stream from this blog is consulting business that finds its way to our company as a result of our content.

I suspect this is the same model that John Moore at Brand Autopsy uses, and that’s why we don’t see any Google Adwords cluttering up his great-looking blog.

Tony Valle
Promethius Consulting, LLC