Mixing business and personal is becoming a bit too much of a tightrope act for me. Mitch Ratcliffe told me — don’t go to a multiple-blog format, it’s a nightmare — and given my inabilities to keep one blog alive without the help of the master, Mark Cahill, why would I think two or three blogs would be any better.
Maybe Peter Kim’s designation of this as a top ten client marketing blog has me a little freaked out. I don’t pay a lot of attention to my technorati rank and it shows, but mixing in posts about clams, wind farms, beach rights, and rats in the roses with pedantic displays of professional insight into page views, metrics, engagement marketing, and customer satisfaction is way too diverse. Sure, people can sort by the tags, but ….
So, I am seriously thinking of subdividing ….
UPDATE: ok, ok, no subdivision. Screw it. One blog, indivisible, and lead us not into Penn Station ….amen.
I’ve had the same thoughts. Cars dominate my topics most of the time and what do I do with the other little pearls of wisdom that make their way out there? Multiple blogs came to mind. Stronger segmenting within the blog came to mind: have a main page that directs people to a particular topic (i.e. category), then people can stay on one topic without a formal front page that mixes them all together. I’m not sure what the right way is, but I’m in agreement that if your goal is to gain readership then you need a solid topic.
Tim,
You more than most know the hassle of managing multiple blogs, let alone authoring them. I am very pessimistic about administering and writing more than one blog — it comes down to focus of topic versus focus of the byline.
Yeah when you have a wide variety of interests, it is very hard to specialize or sub-specialize. I’ve tried and I always end up with ‘blog scope creep’.
My question is: do you think readership and resonance would increase or decrease if you only posted about say Cotuit Sailing, or in my case, DJing?
I have also been thinking about it; although I guess I’d have to sort of split in 3; personal (and off-topic), linux and Apache and “marketing”… or maybe a 4th for “philosophical rants”… and then one for betas… no, wait…
I think I’ll keep everything into one, I’ve been having a hard time finding enough time to update the one I own already. On the other hand if I could do the “Aviansh Approach” of 1 excellent post per week on a blog it could also work.
I still haven’t decided what to do myself…
Focused blogs are boring.
If you’re making the Top Ten Marketing Blogs list while still covering whatever enters your occasionally (dare I say it? you probably won’t object) scattered brain … I says good on ya.
my vote – not that i have one – is to not subdivide. one of the beauties of syndication is that it makes skipping content that you’re not interested in a trivial exercise. so for those readers that aren’t interested in, say, clamming strategies, can skip them.
that said, if you do go to a multiple blog format, you might want to consider if you haven’t already preserving one master blog, and siphoning selected content off from it via reblogging tools (AKA the same thing sploggers use). i’m contemplating pulling out my personal entries for republication on a site maintained strictly for friends for many of the same reasons.
this way, at least, you mitigate the primary problem with multiple blogs: deciding where to post content. you post everything to one location, and let the system work out the rest.
The thing that everyone misses about blogs is that they come pre-subdivided. You just take advantage of the category function. I’ve done it before by linking not to the blog homepage, but to a category page, or by passing in a catergory via a session variable. No muss, no fuss, you just tell the post where you want it, give a link that redirects with the variable set to anyone you want to just get the business stuff.
But personally, I think every C-level exec I ever met needs more info on clamming strategy it gives them a perspective they are sorely lacking.
David,
I think you contemplated this last year, and consensus was to maintain a unified blog.
That was my thought last time, and still is today.
Your a modern renaissance man, and I think that’s a lot of your appeal. Certainly, you are inspired at each thing you do and write about. Ask yourself, “Is the world better off with yet another marketing blog, or hearing from this really diverse guy that can take inspiration from almost anywhere and has a few thoughts on marketing, sailing, sculling, and clamming…..?”
Going dedicated concedes the element of suprise….
Not like my $0.02 is worth much but here’s what a wildly subdivided blog looks like and it’s heinous, and I’m not just talking about asthetics or form. I can say this because I’m somewhat responsible for helping create this beast since it’s mostly my dept. that supports and runs it with about a dozen contributors and a full-time content admin:
http://www.voxpopnetwork.org
Of course, what you propose is a bird of a different feather (and what we are doing here are probably dog of a different fur) altogether. Things have gotten better since we added that drop down but that’s enough site whoring from me for now…
I especially agree with Stephen and mark’s comments above on the subject. Categories are your friend.
I kind of like it as it is because you Just Never Know what the next entry will be all about.
Just one mouse’s opinion…
For what it’s worth, I’ve followed links back to your blog a few times in the past, before the “M20” list. I think a personal voice makes a blog more valuable and definitely more interesting.
BTW my in-laws live over in Dennis – maybe we can catch up sometime down on the Cape!
It sounds like many of your concerns about subdividing are around the tech — the mechanics of setting up and maintaining another blog.
Which makes sense, since self-hosting can be a real pain. So for your next blog, put it on typepad or blogger or wordpress.com, hosted on their servers, and use one of the supplied templates, so all you have to do to publish is enter the content. No technical headaches.
By the way, typepad and blogger can both host under your own domain, i.e. churbuckonmarketing.com or whatever. I think wordpress.com can to but am not as sure. Blogger even does this for free, if I recall correctly, though you’ll have to pay the domain name registration costs.
I guess I’m just going to echo what many others have already said here…Don’t segment. What keeps this blog interesting is that I never know what I’m going to find. I know I’m not the target market for your Internet marketing missives, but when they’re here, I DO read them and learn a bit. If you segmented them away, I would probably never make my way over there — and I think a lot of readers would be the same way.
I think about the HP VP who has a marketing blog. He’s an excellent writer, but I never go there because it is all the same. Variety is what has made you so successful. Tinkering is okay. Overhauling isn’t.
Don’t do it! One of the main appeals of reading this blog is the breadth of topics from, as you say, technical to personal …. from clams to page views …. that makes it one of the most entertaining blogs out there. Anybody can write about one topic well but you write so well about multiple topics. And you’re educating us non-technical knuckleheads whilst your at it.
So don’t do it!!