How many blogs?

[orion_joel]

Just got two question on this topic here.

First, How many blogs do you manage and/or write for?

and, how many blogs do you believe a single person should be able to handle before the quality gets impacted?

thanks for you comments.

[vangogh]

At the moment I write for just the one blog. I think the number you can write for depends on you. How well do you write? How prolific a writer are you? At some point you'll spread yourself too thin, but is that point three blogs or eight? I think the number varies for each blogger.

It also depends on the type of blog. A news blog needs to be updated several times a day while a tutorial blog could be updated once a week.

Odds are you'll know when you're quality is being impacted when you hit that point.

[Harold Mansfield]

Right now I have 6 blogs going, and countless others in the works. I have a writer on one, and I write the others, although one of them is suffering.
I am certainly spread too thin, and the quality on a few of my blogs suffers on some days, but other days I hit a home run.

Right now the ones that make money are first, but I have other blogs in the works that will help some others sites that are making a sale or 2 a week, and maybe boost it to a sale or two a day and then some.

I'll get it down to a pattern soon enough and I'll be able to keep at least 10 updated at least 3 times a week.

[orion_joel]

I can see both sides of the argument here, while i can understand putting the time and effort into a single blog could potentially give much better results then multiple blogs, i cannot see myself being content with a single blog.

At this point i have three blogs, which for the most part i update 2 to 3 times per week. I have just set up a schedule so that i am making at least one post every day, alternating each day between blogs. This means that every third week each blog will each an extra post that week.

I think it would probably be able to handle maybe up to about 6 myself, and could maybe go 9 if they were topics that really interested me. Anything beyond this i think i would definitely need to be buying in content, or something. It would really just be a case of separating up my day to dedicate it in 2 or 3 parts.

[vangogh]

You don't have to limit yourself to one blog. Many people run more than one. You just can't run more blogs than you can realistically run well. There's no point having one more blog if it means letting one of your other blogs sit idle and wither. The only limit is you and how much you can do.

[orion_joel]

Yeah well i mean currently i am running three, and pretty much still have a lot of spare time. This is not to say that i am running the ones i have perfectly, there is still lots to do, i know i could improve the content quality, i think everyone can always improve in this area somewhat. Also i could probably doing more promotion then i am, however am trying to make it feel natural, reading a few blogs and comment where i feel i have something to say and trying to build some social networks.

I think the biggest problem you would face with having multiple blogs is the promotion part, trying to ensure that you are promoting to a reasonable level and across all blogs well, without letting one sit without promotion, even though you are continually creating content for it.

[vangogh]

It's really a matter that each blog takes up a larger slice of your available time. You probably need to find the balance between having more blogs and being able to maintain the level of quality you want. Seems at the moment you're able to do that with three blogs. Yes everything can always be improved, but for now you seem to be able to maintain all three.

Perhaps in time you'll find you can only promote two in a way you want and perhaps you'll discover you can handle a fourth blog.

[orion_joel]

Another thought that i have had, which i am to some extent following through on, is combining having the blogs, with pure content sites. I first started trying to do this with my articles site, however while this is still there with about a dozen articles and does get a little traffic each month. I soon realized most of what i wanted to put on there i also wanted to put on my blog. So it really came to the point i don't want to have to try and create to articles on the same topic to promote at two different places, so why not just put them all in one place and promote that. However now i do have another site in the work that is a separate topic that is just going to be a whole bunch of information, and see how that goes.

[vangogh]

Makes sense. No reason to run those as separate sites. I'd move the articles over to your blog, but keep the article site and 301 redirect the old articles to the new posts. That should also help give your blog a boost in traffic and transfer any search engine benefit from the old site to the blog as well.

[KristineS]

I write for six blogs at present. Two are totally mine, two are corporate, one is an organizational blog, and for one I'm a contributing writer. All of them have suffered at various times from my lack of time to write, but I think, if I had nothing but time to write, I could write for more. Right now, my main impediment to starting more venues is that I have a full time job. If I were getting paid to write blogs I'd have a lot more of them.