I maintain a lot of blogs, and I’m beginning to wonder where the line lies between a lot of blogs, and just plain too many blogs.
One of the reasons for the blog sprawl is that I try to do a decent job of targeting the blogs to an appropriate subject matter. Some of this is absolutely required — I maintain a blog for my day job, and that blog clearly needs to be (more of less) about work stuff.
But then I have a blog about WoW, where I talk about WoW stuff. I recently started a web store experiment (more on that another day) and I have a blog for that. I have this blog, I have a bunch of others, each dedicated to a specific topic. The idea is that the audience for each blog is different, and I want to keep each one focused on what those readers will want to see.
But, you know, it’s hard to keep them all going. Even if I don’t have something super meaningful to say on one particular topic any given day, I still need some kind of update. I believe that fluff is worthwhile in blogging — better to have the occasional fluff filler post than the occasional day without updating. Regular readers expect to have something new every day, and are content to have the occasional somewhat off-topic filler and in fact prefer it to the alternative of showing up at the blog and seeing nothing.
But sometimes I wonder if it’s not possible to build a more general blog that covers a broad variety of topics. I post there every day, maybe even multiple times a day, about topics relevant to various broad categories. So the WoW stuff is categorized as WoW, and if you aren’t here for the WoW blog you don’t read that section — let people subscribe to category feeds, and set categories as their landing pages.
So instead of just a WoW blogs, it’s a WoW blog and a dice blog, and a blog about blogging. Each has their own audience and their own section. But every one of these broad categories has its own “Off-Topic” subcategory. So when you have a filler or off-topic post, you can post it in the off topic category of them all. Similarly when you have something you really want to promote, you can put it there as well, and it then serves the filler purposes for all of the blogs.
In fact, you can even work to make better filler posts, since you only have to do one — try to come up with some nice funny general interest stories.
And this method would give you a SEO advantage too. Anyone who links to the domain for any one of the sub-sites would actually be helping the backlink profile of all of the sites, giving the TLD a massive amount of backlink juice to distribute to them all.
I think it has potential… but it’s much harder to implement after the fact than it is to do it that way from the start. When you have a site that gets 20k visits a day, any major format change is going to make them pretty unhappy.
The one big SEO downside is you would have to come up with a more or less generic brand name for your site, which means that you’d lose any domain match potential for blogs that you’re trying to promote.
It’s something I’m thinking about, though. Because to be honest, if I could get my 20k visit site to be combined with the smaller sites, the benefit for the smaller sites would be positively massive.
Oh crap… but then I’d have to re-categorize everything. Oh god…. thousands of posts…. maybe this isn’t the greatest idea…