Bud Parr’s post about Wordpress inspired me to start up a blog there. I haven’t done anything with it and not sure I will. But it got me to thinking about something: Is having multiple blogs a good idea?

I started with one blog, Weirdwriter, and then spun off a second blog to concentrate on my interest in giant monster movies (Giant Monster Blog). My original thought in doing this was that people who were coming to Weirdwriter for my posts about books, speculative fiction and Forteana wouldn’t be all that interested in my posts about Godzilla and King Kong. For the most part, this has worked out fine. Each blog seems to have its own particular audience.

On the other hand, I wonder if it dilutes my first blog. By taking away a subject matter from Weirdwriter, does it take away some of its interest? Might the quirkiness of posts about Godzilla next to posts about my writing life create a more interesting blog? Or is Giant Monster Blog a better blog because of its laser focus on one thing?

I’m just thinking out loud here. Anybody have any thoughts on this?

No.  Don’t do multiple blogs.  One blog per writer.  That’s the rule.  If anything, the rule should be that there is only one blog per dozen writers.  I’m pointing fingers at myself.  I had two blogs for about a year.  What I learned was that developing a consistent readership for one blog was more than a full time job.  Unless you have no life outside your computer, having more than one blog is going to result in nobody paying any attention.  Focus on what you do best and make that work for you.  One blog, that’s the answer, or join a group blog.

My blog, Catch & Release, is not focused.  I have five subscribers.  Not a model for success.  I write about my four loves: beer, literature, jazz, and French film.  I’m sure I could get my subscriber numbers up to 20 if I focused on any one of those subjects, but that’s not my style.  I like being unfocused with my blog.  (I do use WordPress, by the way, and think it’s great.)

I hear you. That’s why I don’t think I’ll do anything with the WordPress blog (unless I switch the whole thing over to that system). Still, I’ll probably also keep two blogs. I haven’t had much problem maintaining them and I do think they have different audiences. But if I was starting again today, I probably wouldn’t have separated the two blogs.

I tend to cram everything that I’m working on (that is even loosely book-related) into my one blog. I guess if I divided it up into multiple ones there would be the main blog (about reading the Modern Library) and another one for my side project, and another one about my family, and another one about the rest of my life. I can see myself getting confused in all that. Plus, shoehorning everything into one site means all my stuff is easily accessible and I will never have to wonder where that one post on Nietzsche is.

I guess it depends on how much you write, and how different your subjects are. I like sites that show a mix of interests, but I think that’s because I have a short attention span.

I have a far-roving blog myself, and I wonder especially about it on the few days I get blasted with hits from other, more popular sites.  Whether it’s a crosslink for humor or fashion or politics or art or the bookish or odd animal news, I assume it all brings a different readership who won’t like most of the other stuff I post.  As such, I think I build up my regulars slowly from those who like whiplash variety, but I often consider splitting it out.  Still, now that I’m doing the blog and the forums here and some online book reviews, I haven’t done a thing with a new site I reserved, and feel I might be spread too thin.  I do think a group blog is the sweetest way to build traffic with prolific, fresh content and without killing yourself.  I’ve got to go make me some friends.

Well, Return of the Reluctant and The Bat Segundo Show are both separate WordPress blogs—one designed for blogging, the other tweaked for RSS/iTunes stuff.  I’d say that if you have different goals, setups, designs or needs that you can’t entirely fit on one blog that a second blog might not be a bad idea.  Just be prepared for lots of content management! 

If the topics, audience, purpose, and functionality are vastly different, I could see setting up a new blog.  In most cases, though, I think a single blog is the way to go.

I have a single blog, built on WordPress software, and just use the category function to keep things straight (at least for myself).  Of course, I just started blogging a month or two ago, so I don’t even really know what I’m doing.  But I agree that multiple blogs will tend to dilute your readership and probably your own voice.  Things blur between any boundaries we try to establish, and that was one of my main reasons for keeping a single blog.  Plenty of things I want to blog about fit in more than one category (and with WordPress you can assign more than one category to an entry).

As a serial blogger I can say that it’s a decision you have to think about, because it’s a lot of work to have multiple blogs. My 400 Windmills site is special purpose, so I didn’t worry about that too much. But I have a blog about TypePad that gets virtually no traffic - about 20 hits a day, but I only post to it when I feel like it (there’s a traffic-posting loop of course).

I did have an extra blog on my budparr.com domain that I was trying to post about media issues and such - but ultimately I didn’t feel like carrying the extra weight, so gave it up and turned that site into just links to my other sites. It’s probably good (unless you really just have nothing better to do) to limit yourself to what you think you can sustain for one audience on a blog. Thus, I keep CM fairly constrained to literature or occasional asides that might be relevant to my audience. That’s not pandering to a readership, in my view, it’s sustaining a more focused site that in itself is interesting.

I contribute to a blog with thirty other authors, http://www.storytellersunplugged.com - but that’s once a month.  I think keeping your personal blog singular is the best bet.  If you have multiple topics covered in that one journal or blog you can use headers, or make seperate entries and warn people in the title of the post.  In most cases, dynamic content and diversity seem to be the best way to build a readership.  If I kept multiple blogs, I’d have no time left to write.

I do take advantage of Feedburner’s Buzzboost feature, which takes my current blog and posts it on my web page at Publisher’s Marketplace without my having to cut and paste the content myself…

DNW

I have two: one for personal life, kvetching, politics, and more kvetching, and one exclusively for literature stuff. My sister and a handful of online friends read the first; most of them have no particular interest in children’s literature, and most people who are interested in children’s literature have no particular interest in my kvetching, so...I think it works out better that way. I don’t care if my Livejournal has a very tiny readership; I don’t write it to get read.

Well Emily, as I review Fantasy and some YA and read them both, I enjoyed surfing your kidlit blog.  It’s not totally kvetch-free, you know- thank Jah.

At least I kvetch on-topic. Also--my real name is attached to it. It can be googled.

If I have an urge to blog, “I’m coold! I don’t want to go to school tomorrow! I hope it snows and ices!"--that doesn’t particularly need to be somewhere employers can Google it.

Weirdwriter - 27 January 2006 11:46 AM

Bud Parr’s post about Wordpress inspired me to start up a blog there. I haven’t done anything with it and not sure I will. But it got me to thinking about something: Is having multiple blogs a good idea?

I think it depends on the person. As for myself, I have two blogs - a writing blog and a personal blog. I have my writing blog on the front page of my “official” website (athough I may end up moving it to a back page), and my personal blog is hosted elsewhere. I keep them strictly apart from each other. I try to keep my official page as professional as possible, and some fo the stuff that goes on my personal blog is the furthest thing from professional.

I don’t think one takes away from the other. They’re used for different purposes. And while I have some folks who read both, I have some folks who read one or the other.

Hello, all.  I’m a new arrival to MetaxuCafe.  I’m pleased, in advance, to make your acquaintance.

I have two blogs; the second one, In-A-Bloga-Da-Vida (http://innablogadavida.blogspot.com), is devoted to postings of parodies I’ve written and links to “good” parodies I’ve found elsewhere.  I also hope, quixotically, to encourage discussion there about various questions that parody raises.  There’s not a lot of content there, due mostly to the fact that it’s not even a month old, and it’s not intended to be or become some great hulking presence in the blogosphere.  It’s just a place where I can focus more directly on a hobby-horse of mine that others might also like.

But having said that, I have found it something of a distraction from Blog Meridian--or vice-versa.  BM, though modest, has been attracting more traffic of late, and thus feels as though it needs “feeding"--not in terms of quantity but of quality (or what passes for “quality” there).  Building and gathering content and links at “Bloga” is a different sort of work, given the specificity of its content, but I need to do it sometime . . . unless I’m happy with the average of 3 visitors/day, most of that traffic accidental, that it’s presently getting.

I think the angst you hear above is due more to the fact that “Bloga” is still very much in start-up mode than it is to some larger problem that multiple blogs present to their keepers.  The initial inertia that each new blogger experiences, once the thrill of starting one of these things wears off a bit, is harder to get past than I had anticipated for a blog of this sort.  But I still think it something worth pursuing.  BM ranges across a wide range of cultural territory, and I and my tens of readers seem okay with that.  If “Bloga” were also similarly broad in its contents, I’d not even consider doing it.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m running multiple blogs for widely different purposes.  And I believe, if “hulking” isn’t one’s goal, that providing consistently toned or themed content in a niche is the best way to build regular readership and conversations.

My regular blog is the most wide-ranging of mine, but it generally touches favorite cultural topics among news of the weird.  I do have regular readers, but the largest number find me from a variety of oddball search strings that pull up such a mixed bag as mine.  However, I have higher purposes for my other projects, so I’m staying narrow with them, and likely, Sense of Soot will migrate into being just one branch of a tree that bears dicrete, varied fruit.