Is This Post A Landing Page?

Seth Godin recently posted on landing pages and when he discussed it at a whiteboard session that I attended last year, the impact on the website effectiveness of one attendee (a real estate developer from Florida) was dramatic. If a potential customer searches on a key word, then they are giving you permission to have a conversation with them based on that keyword and that keyword alone. It's a no brainer of course. But, equally obviously, it shows you how many brainless people there are out there.

His revisiting of the subject made me wonder about its application to blogs. Now I'm far from 100 days of blogging and I'm making loads of heinous errors, but it's clear to me that to some extent you're only as good as your last post. Even if people come to your blog via a link to an old post, it is to be hoped that they peruse your blog from the latest post thereafter as indeed will anyone inclined to subscribe to your blog. That's quite a pressure - though no more than applies to a business - if you're putting yourself out there, you've got to bring your A game every time.

So that's easy enough. Post only when you have something remarkable to say.

But it's not that simple - part of the conventional wisdom is that one needs to post regulalry and often or your audience will lose interest. Thus even an aspirant essayist blogger like Guy Kawasaki has been posting at a prodigious rate. He has the advantage over most of us of being really interesting and, as he generously admits, having eight books to draw upon. But what if you have nothing to say? Is a glib throw away entry better than a blank day? I'm not sure.

For me, one of the big blogging turn-offs is the motormouth - the uberlinker - akin to Guy's human newsbot characterisation. In an allegedly time-poor world, we are all seeking filters for information and ideas and if I subscribe to your blog I don't want to click on bloglines after a couple of days and find you've made 30 posts because I won't click through and the next time it'll be up to 50 and before long youre blog is off my radar. So self-filtering is, I think, a key blogging discipline.

I've posted almost daily so far in order to build up a critical mass of reading for anyone who might have come my way since April 1, but I think I may slow down from now on in order to ensure that every landing page is a good one. Thereby, I may get people's long-term permisison to write to them when I have something to say that I think will interest them. Let's see if I keep my nerve.