I’ve got over a year of blogging under my belt now (along with a big bacon classic), and one question is burning in my mind.
Did I make a mistake by going with multiple blogs? This is my personal blog, and as you can see, I blog about all kinds of stupid stuff, right along with some other, perhaps interesting stuff. I use this blog for sometimes random, sometimes technology, and sometimes personal/family thoughts. Then I have ColoradoStartups.com (which is more widely read) where I try to stay very much “on topic”.
On the one hand, it’s really nice to be able to blog about stuff only my mother would care about, and not annoy my ColoradoStartups.com readers with that kind of junk. It’s also really nice to know I can post any random, silly thought that my friends might care about without dumbing down the content for more “serious” readers on ColoradoStartups.com.
On the other hand, I’m not building my “personal brand” (like Feld.com, or AlexKing.org). And I’m not giving my readers the full “experience of me” (as dumb as it sometimes can be). That makes me wonder if I should have just one blog.
Things got worse this summer, when I picked up the tempo on the TechStars blog. Now there are three. That one is a bit easier to decide about, because it’s a “company blog” and it gets contributions by several people, not just me. But there are certainly some articles being written on there that ColoradoStartups.com readers would enjoy.
I also maintain a blog for my league tennis team, come to think of it.
So what’s a guy to do? Is it best to keep the blogs focused and cross post the relevant stuff on an as needed basis? Or did I make a mistake when I decided not to just blog everything on my personal blog?
Popularity: 9% [?]
June 7th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Since frequency of posts matters for blog traffic, I would migrate your personal stuff over to ColoradoStartUps or vice versa, since you don’t post to either one daily.
Agreed it would have been better to do it all on your personal to begin with, since — unlike TechCrunch — you don’t have a lot of guest bloggers, so it’s all you.
June 7th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Ah, the rub. Until a few weeks ago I had and wrote these blogs:
http://www.MedicalSpaMD.com
http://www.NimbleTheory.com
http://www.fightclub.squarespace.com
and kinda ran these:
http://www.PonyTailClub.com
http://www.KidAgent.net
http://www.WildBlue.squarespace.com
http://www.nimbleit.com
Whew, yeah too much. I cut loose the bottom half and made the real owners(my wife ,daughter, sister, and partners)learn how to run them.
The Fight Club blog I gave away to a good home.
I’ve kept Nimble Theory for my internet, entrepreneur and angel angles. And I still write the Medical Spa MD regularly. (Someone was kind enough to point out that it also reads “Medical Spamd”. Forgot to look I guess.) My blog load is now about 25% of what it was and is manageable.
I’d keep two. One for substance and one for BS.
June 7th, 2007 at 11:24 am
It’s up to you I would say. Perhaps this would be a better question to ask your Colorado Startups readers? I would say a majority of the people who read your personal blog also read your Colorado Startups blog, so it probably doesn’t affect them as much.
June 7th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I’d say the only huge disadvantage to multiple blogs is the time commitment and the control factor. It’s harder to have a grip and keep an eye on multiple sites, including comments to each post.
If you don’t have a full time job like me, you can do it though
June 7th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
I keep blogs separated on subject as well. Well, not really. My personal blog is a jungle: anything goes. However, the blog I keep for my baby girl is separated. I did consider including it too, to minimize maintenance, but that argument hardly holds since I use one-click-installs to install/upgrade (in most cases). Comments of several blogs can be easily tracked using rss feeds.
I wouldn’t put family related stuff in a “serious” (tech) blog. That way your blog becomes unreadable for your family and probably would look to amateurishly for your (tech) audience.
Just my € 0.02
June 10th, 2007 at 7:56 am
[…] One blog, or two? Or three? Or four? - I’m firmly in the “1 blog” camp. […]
June 10th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
i’m not voting in the poll, because the answers lack nuance. at the moment i keep 2 blogs. 1 is direct to my real name ™. one is intentionally not. the one with the real name has some responsibility to topic (although i have a good three or four, i don’t think that’s unreasonable). it’s personal to a point, but anything thats a) about my cat b) NSFW, in the “i wouldn’t want my boss to know” sense, goes in the second blog.
June 24th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
[…] Then the blog came. Almost like the Borg from Star Trek, blogs have permeated our online life completely. Even someone like me, who would rather go throw a lacrosse ball around, or play with my dogs, finds a strange enjoyment in writing for my blog, regardless of the size of my readership (Hi Mom!). So, now people are having conversations about if they have too many blogs much like people used to wonder if they had too many e-mail addresses, websites, phone numbers, etc. The ease at which starting and building and posting to a blog has become, there is little standing in the way of anyone blogging. […]