A Genuine Article

What I learned from my own websites in 2013

By Marc Carson · Thursday January 2, 2014

Above: In 2013 my blogs were extremely useful. In 2014 I’m kicking them into turbo

How’s your website doing? Are you using it? I used my websites a lot to communicate, innovate, and record my experiences in 2013. Here’s what I learned in the process:

You should blog.

People hate to hear “you should blog,” but you really should be doing it. Blogging is not going away. Even I hate the word “blogging,” but I work on a huge variety of websites every year, and “blogging is important” couldn’t be more obvious to me right now. You see, blogging is just writing. It’s communication. Successful companies are built on effective writing and communication.

Writing is also therapeutic on a personal level. During a time of extremely high personal stress and insomnia, I discovered that if I wrote 1,000 words before bed, I could sleep like a baby and wake up more easily the next day. I’d open up a document on my laptop and start writing whatever came to mind. I wrote down things that stressed me out, things that excited me—whatever came to mind. Pretty soon the word count reached 1,000 and I no longer felt such a huge weight on my shoulders. This requires reaching deep for some self-honesty, but it’s a good idea to develop that characteristic anyway.

Show, don’t tell, how great you are.

A great blog offers helpful information or experiences rather than constantly talking about “me, me, me” or even “we, we, we.” A business blog is not a selfish platform where you write about how great you are. You should be sharing information, tips, products, etc. that directly help your peers, or your clients, or clients of your clients in some way. They all want to be better people living under better circumstances, and sharing your experience can help them with that.

Be ready to write when inspiration hits.

You think you’re an uncertain writer? You’ll like this: Watch as multi-millionaire venture capitalist Paul Graham composes a blog post in real time.

See those outline sentences at the bottom of his document? It should take less than five minutes to outline a blog post, less than ten to thicken up the outline, and within twenty to thirty minutes you should be ready to publish a standard blog post to your website.

Paul’s post above is really an essay. If you want to add fine details to a normal blog post, go back and edit your post and add them in later. Ask yourself how many times a day you could accomplish this, then ask yourself how many times in the last week or month you’ve blogged about anything.

Fix your stale home page.

If your website’s front page never changes, but your blog, news section, or products section is being updated frequently, you should probably put those things on your front page instead of whatever’s there now. If you aren’t keeping your home page fresh, you are losing potential customers and clients.

Your website sells you.

A strong website presence is worth the effort. On several occasions in 2013, new clients described particular strengths of my business website that impressed them and swayed them to ask me to design and build their websites.

Your website can be a marketing machine.

Several publishers and business owners contacted me to ask for reviews of their products and services because they liked what they saw in one of my websites. They sent me free stuff, I tried it out, and wrote about it. This in turn brought me additional web traffic when they shared the new review. This ended up boosting my search engine presence in ways I didn’t expect, and I started building a new website geared toward my new audience.

You should know your visitor numbers.

If you aren’t tracking the number of people visiting your website, start doing so. I get a complete (anonymous) profile on anybody who views my website. A little card pops up for each visitor, showing how they got here, which pages they viewed, and which pages sent them away. This is common nowadays, but still really cool and helpful as I plan for future changes. If the numbers are low and aren’t increasing over time, you may be working on your website, but you’re not working smart. Write, publish, review, then write more. Minor visual decorations and small layout adjustments probably aren’t adding anything to your bottom line.

Commit to do better.

In 2014, I’ll be doing more blogging than ever before. I’ll accommodate more visitor traffic in 2014 than I ever have, and search terms of my choosing will bring more visitors to my websites. My experience has shown that this will bring me more valuable contacts and more paying customers.

What’s your plan?