I’ve been preparing for our last call in the six figure blogging course and we’re talking a little about hiring bloggers and blog networks. As a result I’ve been doing a bit of a tour of some of the newer blog networks to see how they are traveling. Some are doing better than others (at b5 we’ve had a few server issues as we swap from one server to another to another) and fine fools looks like they are in expansion.
In contrast to Fine Fools which is adding new blogs over time is Instablogs which launched with many blogs. A quick tour of them this morning reveals that while they have many blogs that over half of them haven’t been updated in almost two weeks.
I wonder if there is a lesson here for future blog networks. While it might be impressive to launch a network with close to 50 blogs – perhaps doing so stretches the resources of the network too far.
I’ll be advising our six figure blogger participants this morning to diversify their blogging interests in a variety of ways – but not at the expense of the quality of the projects that they work on. Stretch yourself too thin and everything suffers.
My advice – build your blogging up over time, adding projects as you find yourself able to do so.
Hanging with the digerati
Last night I attended the launch of ITPro Australia at the MCA in Sydney. Special guest was Senator…
Very true, there is definately a limited capacity of how much one can blog, and also manage.
I note also that instablogs are nicking (well rewriting) posts from weblogs inc – one of mine to be precise; full links but really – nothing original.
It’s true – I’m at my limit right now. I blog on Jurgle.com, Blog-blog.org, b5’s Newlinuxuser.com, my personal blog, and my GNU/Linux User Show podcast blog. It’s all I can do to ensure I make a single post daily on each of them.
There is definitely a limit to how much blogging one can do in a day before dropping off the corporate radar :)
But one thing’s for sure: Instablogs’s launch brought it a lot of (negative) publicity. For many blog networks, any publicity helps.
Darren,
I totally agree with this point. I personally had a cell phone blog. This was just one blog. For some reason I felt that I had to post thirty times a day, which does not look normal by anyones perpective. At any rate the blog looked spammy. The blog was called cellounge. I have since then retooled this blog using Serendipity as the blogging engine. I used the original cellounge domain which was about cell phones and reused it to talk about giving your brain cells a rest in the cellounge (get it).
I am not ready to launch my one man network yet, however I am starting off with six blogs, and am only going to post when things catch my eye. I actually have nine blogs I want to do, but I am working my way into it like Darren suggests. I have google ads, amazon, and most of the time I am letting people know if its an affiliate link or not. Once I get everything the way I want it, I am going to add the minimalls.
I have decided this time, I am going to write for me, and not try to keep up with every little press release that comes out.
You know I am not sure that I can call it a network if its just little ol’ me.
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It would be nice to know what is going on. They launched with 8 interesting posts on their wedding site wedlog.org back on the 6th Oct and then nothing. Maybe they should have done one every 2 days. I try to build up a portfolio of posts that aren’t date critical, so I have stuff to post in the future – not all at once. The last thing I want is for people to wonder where I have gone – which is whats happening at Instablogs.
Well the cool thing with Fine Fools is that all the new sites launching aren’t written by me so I only launch sites that have writers attached to them. No reason for me to take on more work than I can handle (which I probably do now).
With Instablogs, when I see 50 blogs launching I expect to see at least 35-40 writers. From what I understand at most they might have 4-5.
Scrivs – same with wurk.net. There’s three live right now (I take care of one of them), and in the next 7 days, we’ll also have education.wurk.net, it.wurk.net, secs.wurk.net and food.wurk.net. Then a few more during the next couple of weeks, for which i’m stil talking to writers about. Hopefully 30 in total by Christmas.
But yep, I’ll only launch a new one when I’ve found a writer to look after it.
B
That’s true, it’s easy to get overstretched, particularly early on when all the setup work is going on. But once you’re launched, it gets better. I think my present number of 6 blogs (2 for b5, 4 for Syntagma Media) is probably just enough and gives some diversification. Although, if there’s a synergy between blog topics it helps because your research efforts tend to overlap.
Ooooh. Timely reminder for me. I’ve been getting overly excited lately about starting new blogs. Perhaps I should let each one mature a bit before starting another.
Slow and steady wins the race! :)
Hi could somebody tell me how you could get hundreds of links to your blog so it could rank high on search engines? I know its hard but theres has to be a way to make it easier.
I learned that if someone wants a a good blog they have patience. Time well pass and your blog well start growing. But you also have to do a lot of work.