When you first start blogging, its pretty common to think about starting a blog based on your interests.
ALL of your interests.
“I’ll write a blog about Fishing, Wrestling, Hydrogen Fuel Cells, and Comic Books! I love all those things, I’m sure there are millions of people just like me that will want to read all those things too!”
It’s true - there are millions of people out there that will be interested in those topics - but not all together.
For a blog to be accessible to a new reader they need to know what they’re going to get. They also need to know that when they subscribe to your blog, they’re going to get what they’re expecting to get. If you write about wrestling one day, and someone subscribes, they will probably be surprised to find posts about fuel cell research in their RSS feed in a few days when you write about it.
It’s very likely that they will continue to read your blog if they don’t know what they’re going to get.
For that reason, its very important that you stay on a specific topic on your blog. If you’re interested in more than one topic, then you need to start more than one blog.
For example, if you’re a fan of fishing and wrestling as mentioned above, you should start one blog for fishing, and another for wrestling. That way, you can focus on one topic per blog.
A blog with only one post a day that’s on one topic, is much more likely to attract a reader than a blog with 5 different posts about 5 different subjects.
Most blogging platforms make it easy to run more than one blog. Sites like Blogger and Wordpress do a good job of making it easy for you to blog about multiple subjects on multiple blogs.
Once you have more than one blog set up, you’ve created your own mini blog network. You can cross promote your various topics through your blogroll and links on your sites, without bombarding your readers with information about topics that they’re not interested in.
Keeping focused on one topic for you blog is also beneficial for contextual advertising as well. Google Adsense depends on the content of your site to generate ads for you. If you are focused on one topic, you’re ads will be more focused on that topic, and your readers will be much more likely to be interested in them, and thus - click on them.
The only warning I would offer on this is to make sure you don’t create too many blogs in the beginning. Make sure you’re going to actually stick with the content of each blog you create before you promote it.
If you’re not sure about your commitment to a topic, feel free to start a simple blog and write about the topic for a while before you promote it. I know the need for feedback and validation is great, but try to keep it in check, and make sure you’re going to keep committed to the topic before you unleash it on the world.
Staying Focused: One Topic per Blog
- MichaelMurphey
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