Keeping Personal and Technical Blogs Separate

Disclaimer: I’m no expert in blogging. I do not have much knowledge about the Wordpress framework either. The following post is based on my previous couple of hours of reading on multisite blogging. Feel free to enlighten me in the comment section.

Why?

If you are starting/have started blogging as a hobby, at first it may seem that having one blog and blogging everything in it is a good idea. However, after sometime you will feel as if you should keep the posts separate and in their own blogs rather than having them all in under one blog. I was no different; I never gave much time to think about it until one of my readers (second category below) sent me a message.

Keep all the technical crap separate; I don’t care if you are a computer scientist!

So, now back to our question - why? There is no one size fits all answer. The decision to keep the personal and technical blogs separate could be based on many factors such as the audience, the purpose of your blog, You etc.

1. The Audience

Know your audience. More importantly, know if you care about your audience. Audience come in two categories - those who come off of search engines and those who don’t.

The audience coming off search engines visit your site searching for specific information and the search engines are smart enough to land them in the correct page. If you have categorized and tagged your posts consistently, then such users should not have problem finding the information they are looking for. Additionally, you can also provide related posts, internal links, custom search options. You don’t have to worry about the search engine users. Retaining such users is up to you and the information on your site and also their willingness to commit to the mistakes again. 😝

The other kind of audience - friends, family, co-workers, those choose to follow your blog, loyal readers, stalkers, potential employers etc. It’s rare that this audience is interested in everything you write. You might regularly get comments such as the one I mentioned above. Here it is up to you to decide. You can have multiple blogs to cater different audience or you can have a good categorization and tagging in your blog to make their life easier. Or like me, just have faith in your audience ability to find what they want and ignore what they don’t.

For the loyal readers, you can always provide subscription options such as categorized feeds, email notifications based on their interest and even phone calls! haha!

2. The purpose of your blog

If you are like me, who is into blogging just for the fun of it you are probably better off with a single blog. If you are blogging about only one specific subject, why do you need a second blog?

If you are serious about your blog, then it’s completely a different ball game. If you are into blogging for money (full time blogging) then you should definitely go with different blogs and stick to the niche you select. It is easier for you and for the advertisers to target the visitors this way. Would it be appropriate to display a smart-phone ad on one of your cooking posts? (Of-course you can display ads based on category of the post but that’s a different story). The purpose of the blog has a large influence on the decision.

3. Finally, You!

Well, it all comes down to you and your needs, ideas, thinking. You can think about all these points and then make a decision or just say screw it and go with one blog.

One thing which I didn’t mention is all this time is time. Yep, TIME. Multiple blogs take up a lot of time. Even a single blog for that matter needs a lot of your time, devotion and love. If you are not into full time blogging, you are better off with a single blog.

If you are not into full time blogging and have multiple successful blogs, you are a rockstar. You probably type with your hands and foot at the same time and beat Chuck Norris in typing! 😃

I’m not done yet, come back for another installment on this topic. Leave me your phone number so that I can call you when I post it. Yep, I’m into that kind of notifications!