Minimalist Blogging: Getting More Out of Doing Less

Any writer will tell you that more isn’t better. Quite the opposite, it’s sometimes a curse, and too much bulk can sabotage what might otherwise have been a good bit of text. It’s easy enough to get tangled up in a sentence, let alone an article. When minimalist blogging, more can be a real disaster. It can also be messy, and pretty useless in terms of core site values like SEO. Reiterating and going into extreme detail isn’t particularly useful writing technique, either.

If you’ve seen the Bloomberg style of writing, a lot of Bloomberg’s content is based on short pieces, which is a good way of maintaining their very high rate of information flow. If you’re writing a real time news blog, it’s best practice, and it’s also an extremely efficient way of managing information.

The Minimalist Approach- The Good News for Writers :

Many writers prefer a “bare bones” drafting style. This is actually good technique, and allows a good structure for an article to be created quickly and easily. Ironically, this is a minimalist style. Minimalist writers simply don’t add the extra content, and stick with their structure, perhaps with some minor panel beating on text content.

For bloggers, minimalism is a baseline option that can achieve a lot, particularly if you’re stuck for time and space for producing content. This is a great way of getting through a lot of different bits of material and creating separate pieces on different subjects.

This type of minimalism isn’t “Twitter fodder”. It’s a size thing, based usually on about 100-200 words, which is a useful bandwidth for good bare bones writing, and it’s also a good time manager, particularly for professionals. 200 words is a few minutes, and it allows for better editing, which is another aspect of writing which can be turned into a tooth-gnashing exercise with a lot of text.

The Technical side of Minimalist Blogging :

The primary benefits of minimalist blogging are:

Search engine optimization: The minimal approach allows useful keywords to stand out, and makes the text more searchable. That’s a very handy option for tagging lots of blogs easily and quickly. It works well with WordPress and can even be a simple cut and paste exercise.

Site loading: Although blogs themselves are easy enough to load, when you’re adding features like media and getting your site organized, time is always valuable. The quick, easy minimalist blogging style always creates space and time for better blog management, and most importantly, thinking time.

Quality controls on the blog: Quality control of the small, efficient minimalist blogs is a true blessing for content producers. It’s easy enough to take apart and reassemble a piece of text at the 100-200 word size. At 1000 words, it can be a few hours of pretty grim word-grinding, particularly if there’s technical material or fact checking involved. Quality naturally suffers.