When You Blog, Here’s How to Not Be Like the Chinese Hermit Poet Who Scratched His Poems Into the Sides of Cliffs

Not making this up.

In the 9th century, deep in China, a man named Han Shen wrote incredible poetry that he did not intend anyone to ever read. To quote his Wikipedia entry, no one knows who he was, or when he lived and died. Little is known of his work, since he was a recluse living in a remote region and his poems were written on rocks in the mountains he called home. About 300 of his poems were found, literally scratched into the sides of cliffs on a peak known as Cold Mountain, and collected and preserved. They are very beautiful, and as you might expect, many of them are also quite sad.

I am sometimes asked the way to the Cold Mountain.
There is no path that goes all the way.
Even in summer the ice never melts;
Far into the morning the mists gather thick.
How, you may ask, did I manage to get here?
My heart is not like your heart.
If only your heart were like mine
You too would be living where I live now.

When you blog, you don’t want to be like Han Shen. Along with not writing beautiful, sad poems, you also want people to read what you write. That’s kind of the whole point, right?

In which case, there are all kinds of tools available to help. Most people, when they blog, think pretty hard about what they’re going to write, but then kind of drop the ball and don’t leverage all the tools available to them to make sure someone actually notices and reds the damn thing. Mistake. Marketing is, firstly, always about getting noticed.

One of the best tools is this checklist, prepared by Chris Ducker, providing a great process for your blog posts. Most blogging software is designed to help you maximize the chances that someone searching the Web will find what you’ve written, and when you combine that with a process that helps you write, lay out and promote your post as effectively as possible. This stuff is simple, you can make it routine, and it works.

And you can, you know, always scratch poetry into the sides of cliffs in your spare time, right?