Raj writes an interesting post over at Performacing on The Dangers Of Too Many Sites: Blogger’s Dilemma where he outlines some of the options open to bloggers who have too many blogs and not enough resources to run them all.
On a similar note, here’s the first post in a series on how to kill your blog successfully.
It’s an interesting problem and one that I suspect is quite common. I know I’ve left my fair share of dead blogs behind me and know of quite a few bloggers who have done likewise.
I also know of quite a few bloggers who overwhelmed themselves and ended up killing their blogging careers because they bit off more than they could chew with too many blogs too quickly. There’s certainly something to be said for doing a few things well rather than lots of things poorly!
Raj writes “Just focus on 2-3 blogs, with 3-5 posts per day” – 3 to 5 posts a day? Is that for all 3 blogs, or per blog? 3 – 5 posts per day/blog seems a little excessive. Unless your niche area is packed with daily revelations shouldn’t this be closer to 5-7 posts a week? Didn’t Darren just do a survey that indicated too many posts was just as bad as too few. I think you need to remember that Blogger burnout can happen to both the writer or the reader.
I just did a random sampling of Blogspot subdomains to see how many of those “key-word” sites actually have active blogs on them. The answer is: precious few. Unless there is another reason for those placeholder-type pages (like people greedily snapping up popular keywords), domains like sex, bored, tech, fun, in the blogspot.com domain never even got off the ground.
Never mind the blogs that died, think how many there are that didn’t even get a chance at life!
Focusing on 2-3 blogs is good but yeah, 3-5 posts a day? Isn’t that the equal of having more than 3 blogs to begin with?
Or maybe I’m just confusing myself. I plan on putting up two new blogs within the year, maybe then I’ll see how much I could really bite off.
Started many, killed a lot. Only so much time during the day to keep them running well. Maybe if I quit work and become a problogger it might work with many blogs.
I think we have to turn the problem on its head, and focus on the prevention, so to speak, rather than the cure. In my opinion, there cannot be ‘too many blogs.’ In his post, I think Raj already pointed to ways of prevention with his number 7 and number 8 points, or turning the blogs into Web 2.0 communities and turning them into resources using a Content Managment System (CMS).
When I first started dreaming of owning my own blog or blogs, I knew that community participation would be paramount. That’s why I started to look for a Content Management System which would make the creation and building of a community possible. I hopped from one CMS to another until I found the perfect one — Drupal.
The great thing about Drupal is that the basic building block is essentially a blog (strictly speaking, it’s the ‘node’, and it is the ‘node’ on which the blog is built). In other words, you can ‘blog’ (here, I use the term loosely because it is actually easy to create other content types aside from a blog, e.g. article, event, etc.) within the community you’ve created, and once you’ve created a certain amount of traffic, you don’t have to be present 24/7, as it were, to maintain your site. With my first Drupal site FilipinoWriter.com, for example, once it reached a certain level of popularity and presence in search engine rankings, particularly among Filipino users, I didn’t have to worry anymore about regular postings because community members were only too willing to post new content.
Moreover, even if a site is not yet that popular and you decide to abandon it for a while, the site is not totally dead, because there are others in the community to take up the slack while you’re gone. Even if it’s just a handful of site members posting every now and then, the site is just resting as it were, and ready to rise up again from its respite, once you feel you’ve got the energy to bring it back to life again.
:)Dino
[…] Mar 12th, 2007 by basquette I find this post fascinating. I can see the logic in not wanting to overextend yourself – as Darren says, preferring to do “a few things well rather than lots of things poorly.” […]
Ooops. I meant to say, one option is to focus on 2-3 blogs, 3-5 posts per day per blog
I thought Raj at Performancing (thanks for the link, Darren) made an excellent suggestion when he proposed going with a static website instead of a blog, at least for some types of material. In retrospect I realize that one of my blogging topics, wildlife-friendly gardening, is far better suited to a static website than to a blog. Fortunately I own the domain name, have a hosting package, and have Dreamweaver to design it in; in the next few weeks I’m going to concentrate on getting a website up and running even if it means cutting back on the blog posts. I hope to figure out a way that the blog can continue as an adjunct to the website, but I expect that the website will be primary.
I’m relieved to hear people say that three to five posts a day sounds like a lot, at least for one blog. I like to see maybe one fresh post a day from a blog, and I likely won’t read every post.
Wild Flora
But yeah, that can be too many posts per blog, depending on your niche. However, if you want to compete in the tech, auto, or political space, I’m pretty sure you can’t build a much of presence without at least 15 posts per week (or about 3/day, M-F). I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong. On the other hand, bloggers like Steve Pavlina and Brian Clark (Copyblogger) get by fine with 3-5 posts per week in most weeks.
John Chow had a helpful article last week about time-stamping WP posts. In a nutshell he suggests that you always have a few extra articles around and set the time stamps to a future date and time from the right portion of the admin panel in WP. The new blog post won’t get published until that time and date.
From my experience, Sundays tend to be some of the hardest days to get traffic to a site, but I tend to have free time then and will often write several articles. If you set the time stamp to release Monday morning, you could increase your blogs traffic.
This would be very helpful for those running several sites.
I have considered breaking off into other niches simply to vary my reach. My blog is about self improvement/personal development, and I could easily tack on a health/exercise-related blog, a blog that dealt with relationships, career advancement, etc.
However, I personally see the value in focus and I think that (like CopyBlogger or StevePavlina.com) if you focus on one subject, you can excel in that one area.
That being said, I have products and projects that I work on in addition to the blog that are very time consuming. If I didn’t have those, I might consider a blog offshoot.
In the meantime, though, I can still address some of the issues that might be covered in a niche-specific blog because my present self improvement/personal development umbrella gives me quite a bit of leeway.
Hello Darren,
I am a new blogger with a goal of becoming a problogger. I find that having this goal opens me up to the temptation of wanting to start aditional blogs to help propel myself toward actually becoming a problogger.
I have 3 new blogs in mind, and I think that is too many, especially since I don’t have a full time work schedule to devote to them. I may be able to handle one more, but even that will be a challenge.
it even scared me to have more than one blog (even in a same topic), my commitment is to post almost everyday — besides struggling with my undergrad study.
maybe you can share how to have multiple blogs and keep them running in desired pace
How about the problem of too many bloggers? What can be done when the market is entirely oversaturated? To stress my personal problem – this site is a list of just some of the music-related blogs (http://hypem.com/list) out there. I ask – what happens when differentiation does little to help drive traffic?
I definitely encountered this problem at first…but then noticed my blogs content quality started to lack and so did my traffic to others. The ones I worked would grow while others would fall…then vice versa :(
I still read on a lot of famous places that having more than 30 sites, each generating about $100 a day or even a week, makes you a lot of money and is the “only” way to go. =P
I would love to have 30 sites, or even 20, but at the moment, the offline life has a lot of things to do also. Having many blogs simply intrudes on private things, whether online or offline, so having a few blogs while still considering them a normal part of your life can work. We have to see if we want blogging to become part of our lives or if we are willing to change our life for blogs for various reasons [enjoyment, passing time, making money, etc].
“I think you need to remember that Blogger burnout can happen to both the writer or the reader.”
Screw the reader. Seriously, whose blog is it anyway? Its your blog. Sure, there are optimum levels of posting to tempt readers, blah blah blah blah blah. However, UNLESS you are indeed attempting to design your blog posts in some type of income producing fashion, then a blog should be your own personal way of expressing yourself on different topics, collections, your life, your music, your writing, your style, your politics, your WHATEVER.
So how often you post should be, in my opinion, based on upon how often you feel you have something you want to write. Whether that be once a week or twenty times per day. Its a free country. If people don’t want to read your posts, they won’t. Certainly, if you don’t post very often, people will stop visiting your blog. But a blog should be the one place is about self expression, not worrying about the number of your posts one way or the other.
I’m certainly not saying that you shouldn’t strive to make your page attractive and your writing compelling. What I am saying is that blogging, in essence, is about having your say. Online. On your own page.
Its not about letting others have their read. They have search engines for that sort of thing.
[…] Darren Rowse of Problogger.net draws our attention to a post by Raj at Performancing.com that outlines some of the solutions for those of us who have too many blogs but ‘not enough resources to run them all.’ […]
[…] Too many blogs Now this is something to keep in mind. […]
[…] You can read some good tips on coping with a number of blogs over at Raj Dash’s blog. These tips were posted last month, so you may have read them already, but they’re very much so worth the read. And make sure you read the added discussion on that post over at ProBlogger. […]