I've been writing 2 blogs for the past couple of years, one focused on Software Engineering and the other on general life things (e.g. philosophy, psychology, self-improvement, etc). Recently, I've created another blog focused on Entrepreneurship. At the moment, they all live on their own domains.
My purpose in writing the blogs is (1) I really enjoy writing, and (2) I want to build a personal brand (all of my blogs mention my name, and each link to another). However, it's becoming hard to maintain the blogs. They each run their own instance of the software, meaning any change I make in terms of design/security fixes/SEO/etc, needs to be replicated to other blogs (where applicable). I need to keep separate contact emails per blog, and in general this setup is too complicated, thus discouraging me from writing. Moreover, building domain authority is hard, since every blog essentially starts from 0.
I also own a domain for my name. It shows some about me information and links to all the blogs. I was considering consolidating all the 3 blogs into one under my domain name, and do a 301 redirect from the old domains to the new one (I don't mind owning the domains for some time, as links to them are circulating on the web already). This will eliminate the hassle of bootstrapping and managing each blog individually.
In order to keep proper audience segmentations, I could create a high level category and put each blog into its own category (for example, as subdirectory `https://examples.com/blog/category/software-engineering`). I doubt many people check the blogs themselves, and most traffic is coming from me sharing links to new content, or people searching for a particular thing that is indexed by Google, thus leading to a specific blog post. But even if there are people who read the blogs by RSS or check the website directly, they still can use dedicated RSS per category, or just access a domain with subdirectory for the category.
I understand that it will probably hurt SEO in the beginning, but I'm fine with that. It can also lead to some readers churning, however with proper categorization I don't see a reason why (things like "similar posts" or "next/previous" could be category segmented, thus creating the illusion that the reader still reads a blog about, say, software engineering).
What are your thoughts about it? Am I missing something? Is it a good or a bad plan?
At the risk of exaggerating, “my whole life” blogs are for young people and for people who don’t care about building an audience. LiveJournal was for teenagers.
The more specific the blog, the more you are able to develop an audience for that niche.
By contrast, a blog that contains everything in your life will only appeal to your friends.
There is a deceptive almost exception: people who are funny. They seem to break the rule. They seem able to talk about whatever they want, and they still have an audience. But in that case, they actually have a niche: humor. Everything they write is funny, so people who like humor read it all.
But unless you are reliably funny, stick to narrow topics.
I've been a SWE for 25+ years and an artist for longer, showing art online as early as 1993 (anybody remember Gopher?), and blogging semi-regularly since the early 2000s. Originally I kept a strict separation between the two out of fear that people interested in one topic wouldn't take me seriously if I had any trace of another.
A few years ago I finally decided that being "taken seriously" was perhaps not that important and I just threw everything together in the same pot, under a single domain and implementation. I do tag each post with one or more topics, and I have an RSS feed for each topic, so people with more specialized interests can subscribe just to the topics they care about. I also eliminated all analytics and comment features as distractions not relevant to my main goals, namely: capturing, refining, and sharing my thoughts about whatever topics I care about.
As a result, I've found I've enjoyed writing and looking back at my previous work more. I realized that my blog was for me, and the maybe five other people in the world who like it the way I do.
As for "building a personal brand" and "developing an audience," others would know much more about that -- I believe, without much evidence to support it, that it will lead to more happiness if you focus on finding your true voice and writing with integrity about things you care about, rather than thinking about ways to get more eyeballs on your pages. YMMV.
I hope you'll consider sharing your URL when you're ready. (http://johnj.com is mine.)
I've been told that my blog allows me to skip interviews because I am able to demonstrate competency in more than one field.
Try it and see!
Unless you’re being followed as a celebrity, the full context of your life is simply not that interesting.
So the answer is more often than not: publish different topics under different brands. Cross-link in the about section, if you think there’s more upside than downside.
Or in other words: if I love your software-engineering content, but your general life content turns me off, there’s a good chance that I’ll stop reading your stuff entirely. And if you commingle topics, that’s on you. If you keep them separate and I commingle, that’s on me.
So unless you’re a super rare source of unique insight,
I used to have only one blog. Now I have a tech/professional blog and a personal one.
(I literally copied the repo and removed posts from each copy.)
Before I split them, I would get a ton of personal attacks here on HN and on Reddit because people would go to other posts on the blog, find some personal issue, real or imagined, that they didn't like. Once I split, people focused on the tech stuff.
I don't know for sure, but it got so bad that I suspect dang considered downranking posts from my domain. I think he even considered banning me. (I had thinner skin back then.)
Many ways to go about doing that. Wordpress supports it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4751530/wordpress-multip...
As do many other platforms (namely ghost, which seems to have good google visibility)
1. Jekyll's becoming increasingly complicated to work with in $CURRENT_YEAR due to increasingly-out-of-date components, so I'm trying to decide between Fossil's wiki functionality¹ v. Scroll² (both of which seem to be right up my alley) as the migration path; and
2. it's a single personal website, and there's a psychological block of "well do I really want to have political posts next to religious posts next to technical posts next to musical posts next to miscellaneous posts?"
I haven't exactly figured out my end-goal with this, aside from possibly keeping the entirety of my main webserver's `/var/www/htdocs` (or some subdirectory) as a giant Fossil monorepo full of .scroll files (if I go with the Scroll approach) or a bunch of individual Fossil repos with wikis (if I go with the Fossil approach). But in any case, segregating topics would just be a matter of pointing the right domains to the right subfolders or repos.
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1) writing things out to clarify your thoughts on something, or make notes about how you did something to refer to later, or otherwise for your own purposes, and then once it's written why not share it as long as it's easy
2) writing things for other people, to reach them (to persuade, to get hired, etc.)
For purpose 1, do what's easier, which is probably one blog. For purpose 2, the SEO hit matters more, but you say you don't care too much about that. BUT, what you don't want to do is combine them, and then spend a lot of time trying to make them completely separable, and some of what you mention planning sounds like doing that. It can actually end up being more trouble than just having separate blogs.
So, if you want to combine them, great, but beyond some very basic tagging or searching (if it's super-easy), don't try to keep them separate, on one domain. If you want to do that, it's probably a sign that separate domains is the right way after all.
I got lucky with that decision (no, no strategy, no nothing). I sold quite a few of the blogs during the blog boom of 2000-2010. Some barely had about 10 articles or so but were on some good domain names. Right now, I just checked up a few of the domains/sites to see how they are doing -- most have become Spam farms, and another is doing pretty well as a Real Estate (Properties) website.
My personal domain, brajeshwar.com, was also offered good sums quite a few times around 2006-2008, but my ego seemed bigger than the offered price, and I never sold it.
Keep your online assets separate, just in case you need to walk out.
Think of the websites as frontend interfaces that hook up to the same database. You can have one website (interface) for software engineering, one for general life things, one for entrepreneurship, and one for everything. Give them all targeted SEO, but cross-link the pages together in case somebody who reads one of your entrepreneurship articles wants to see one of your other interests.
As far as the complication of maintaining different blogs, it's fairly easy to set up and maintain a multisite wordpress instance. That will let you share articles across sites.
- https://breckyunits.com/code
I designed scroll.pub to make it easy to manage multiple blogs.
However, I know where you are coming from (#2) and there is good reason to maintain separation .. really identity.
I am trying to find time to make rather low friction approach to doing this as a side project when I get some time away from my day job
I decided to write on separate blogs instead and now I see that people are actually reading my stuff. I also receive emails from a few readers thanking me for my articles.
That's why I recommend keeping your domains separate so that people can read what they're actually interested in.
So, if you provide separate RSS feeds for different topics, I would be more inclined to subscribe to those of interest to me.
But if the RSS feed is a firehose of low signal to noise ratio for our overlapping interests, I’ll soon unsubscribe.
Do what makes sense for you.
Do you want to care about SEO?
Do you want a single aesthetic?
Do you want compartmentalization or a mashup?
So I wrote that and realized it is not an either or. You can have several focused blogs and another blog that aggregates them if you want. And if you care about statistics, you can AB...or reach different audiences with the same material. Yes it's probably more work. Maybe you want that and maybe you don't. They're your blogs, do what makes you happy. Good luck.
You can syndicate however you want
Ignore SEO and all that shite and do you. Quite literally: you do you. Don't equivocate and fiddle around. Dump your thoughts on the world.
Did Shake that fucking spear bloke give a shit about SEO? No. What about a Yank wot said "Four score years and ..."
Keep us informed.
PS URLs of your blogs please!
This blew up a little. Thanks everyone for replying. Don't want to repeat myself in replying to everyone individually, so I'll add a comment.
Many people suggest keeping them separate for the sake of lower signal:noise ratio. I get it, but I also feel like comparison to YouTube is unfair. YouTube is a different platform, and you generally don't watch individual content pieces of a creator, but rather subscribe to a creator as a whole. I agree that in the case of YouTube, it's harder to keep a broad channel. I have subscribed to people who provided content on Software Engineering, tolerated when they pivoted towards indie-hacking, and unsubscribed when their content turned into anti-government/establishment rants or personal story of how they overcame adversity over and over again.
But in the case of blogs, you can subscribe to a particular category. Say, you are interested in software engineering content, then just subscribe to it via RSS and get relevant content.
I tried to look at other blogs, one of them is Patrick McKenzie (patio11)[0], and I can't say that his blog is super niched down. Some content is very valuable for me, while other is not interesting.
Another thing is that I think most people misunderstood the "general life" thing. I don't intend, and never planned to, post about the food I ate or how I prepared lasagna on Saturday. I was aiming more towards self-improvement content, for example tips on time management. Where would you put that kind of content? In a software engineering blog? In entrepreneurial blog? It is relevant for both disciplines, yet it does not fit any niche if you plan to niche down.
One suggestion that I liked from the comments, is to treat the content as a DB. So essentially, I can keep 4 blogs: the one under my name domain will be the master, and the one I'll update. I can design the URL scheme is such a way that I can point individual blog domains to a particular category, so my software engineering blog will https://xyz.com, but the domain is pointing to http://me.com/blog/category/software-engineering. This might simplify things, while still keeping them separate.
Thanks everyone for the comments, I appreciate it.
Edit: after giving it some more though, I came to the conclusion that my problem is unnecessary complications in the way I manage my blogs. And as a good software engineer, I will probably redo my statically generated blog, unify everything to one big repo that will use common building blocks, but each piece of content will be segmented to one blog, under its own domain, and they all will be built from the same repo.
This will ensure that I can reuse common building blocks like OG image generators, JSONLD tags, and reuse parts of theme, while minimizing the maintenance to just a single repo.