You've Heard of Minimalism? How About Essentialism?
There's a good new book out called Essentialism, by Greg McKeown.
You've heard of minimalism no doubt, and the concepts are very similar. Essentialism is summed up this way:
At the most basic level, an Essentialist gives themselves the permission to stop trying to do it all, so that they can focus all of their energy and time on the things that truly matter. In a world that demands more and more of you every day, this is a rallying call to learn how to start saying no.
So, who needs some of that?
The book refers to Steve Jobs' return to Apple, at which time he cut their product offerings from 350 down to 10. Essentialism has worked pretty well for Apple.
Applied to blogging, I just redesigned my homepage at http://brandonacox.com to eliminate the non-essentials. Even the blog got pushed to another page. Only the most recent headlines are visible.
Basically, I wanted people to land on the homepage and know in seconds what I would love to do for them.
The biggest win of all for me would be to have someone subscribe to my email list, right? So that's front and center. It's obviously the one thing I hope people will do. Everything else is below that.
If you think of your homepage as the window to your blog, reverse your thinking! Begin to think of your blog posts as gateways to the homepage.
While minimalism refers to design, essentialism really refers to the content and primary marketing message of a website.
So what, on your blog, do you need to say 'no' to?
Recent Comments
10
It's hard to define what is bare bones and varies from site to site. You've got a good point.
See more comments
On my book blog, I would say no to books I'm never going to write about since I have a little interest in them.
Awesome!