K.I.S.S. or “Keep it simple, stupid” has become a cornerstone of blogging.  Readers’ attention spans are falling fast, and if you’re going to build an audience, you have to make your site is clear, concise and reduce as much noise as possible.

Photo cred: Don Solo

Here are some areas of your blog that you can simplify, without sacrificing value.  In fact, the key is to focus on value.

1. The Sidebar

Wow…you’ve got a lot of widgets over there.  A couple badges? Perhaps even an ad or two?  One thing that many bloggers do is PACK as much as they can into that sidebar.  Sometimes, the sidebar runs lower on the page than the content itself!

Now widgets, badges and ads are great, but too much of anything great can spoil their value really fast.  Think about what you’re adding to your sidebar.  Does it benefit the reader? How is it helping you?  Is it effective?  Perhaps, instead of having 6 small adds, you can use 1 or 2 bigger ads, or just focus on the ads that work best.

If you win a contest or something, it’s great to feature the badge on your site.  After a few months, that badge might not be very relevant anymore.  Keep your sidebar up to date.

2. The Toolbar

This depends on your blog and what you use it for.  For businesses, they tend to need more pages in their toolbar.  For the average blogger, you probably don’t need that many.

Do you have an about page for you and another one for your blog? Can you combine that into one?  You can put multiple things in a page as long as you make it organized and easy to read.

Which pages are the most important?  If there are 10 pages to look through, will that hurt readers ability to find the pages they need?

3. The Comments

Comments are getting busier and busier lately.  Now we have twitter feeds in there, information about the commenter, facebook shares, and more.  There’s a certain level of functionality that you should use in your comments, and then there’s too much.

The comments section can be one of the most vital aspects of your blog.  Make sure it’s easy for readers to browse through the comments and get an idea of the conversation without being distracted by too much information.

I really like the balance that disqus provides.

4. The Content

Some say brevity is king.  Others find more value in longer posts.  There is no “magic” length for blog posting.  You can be extremely successful writing really short but thought provoking posts like Carlos Miceli does, or you can write really long and thorough posts like Olivier Blanchard does.

When you’re writing about something that you’re passionate about, it can be very easy to write “too much”.  It might seem necessary to you, but to the reader, it can be repetitive or unfocused.

Copyblogger had a great post discussing how to avoid taking tangents when writing blog posts.

So take a look at your site.  Is there anywhere where you can simplify things?  Can you find any cluttered areas that are taking away from the valuable content you’re providing?

How else can you simplify your blog?