For twenty years I had this singular blog: the one you are looking at right now, Ubergeek Kelly’s World. It definitely has served its purpose as a brain-dump blog of all the things that interest me.
But for years I have felt that some topics on the blog just didn’t ‘fit’, and this posed some challenges. I began my plan to address these challenges when I split out my motorcycle related content earlier this year to a new blog: Geek on a Harley. Now I’m beginning the second stage of my changes by moving my gaming related content to a new location: Words of the AgingGamer (https://www.aginggamer.net).
More about splitting content
Kelly’s World has been a ‘brain dump’ of all the things that interest me since I initially created it. This worked well enough initially, but as the years wore on I sometimes felt ‘wrong’ posting about my motorcycle and gaming interests here as my family and friends may have limited interest in these topics.
This sense of ‘wrongness’ presented an obstacle to my motivation to write. I felt obligated to explain to people who just wanted to know what was happening in my life in more general terms why I was writing such detailed posts about gaming or motorcycles.
It is also true that the lack of a clearly defined topic for the blog prevents new readers from finding my site or remaining interested. Someone looking for gaming posts doesn’t really want to read about my acreage or the last vacation I took. And search engines like Google prioritize websites that can be classified based on their post content. If the content is all over the map then Google will down-rank its content.
My hope is that people who want to know about my life and my more ‘general’ thoughts will continue to come here to Ubergeek Kelly’s World. This will still be my main blog, and I’ll aim to provide links to recent content on my motorcycle and gaming blogs for people to check out if that interests them.
There’s been plenty of discussion on this topic in Blaugust over the years. People differ in whether they think it’s better to have everything in one place or to split it off into special interest blogs. I think it depends on a couple of things with the most important obviously being what you as the blogger prefers. These are personal blogs for the most part, after all, and ought to reflect the wishes of the creator.
The second big factor, though, is whether you believe your readers come here because they like to read your writing and/or hear about what you’re up to, or whether you believe they come mostly for information. If it’s the former, it doesn’t make as much sense to make them go to three different sites because they’re going to want to read everything you post bcause you posted it.
I’m always toying with splitting my content up. I’ve wanted to do a music blog for years, for example. There are countless music blogs, though, and I feel it’s unlikely a new one would gain any traction, whereas if I include music posts in the blog I already have, some of the established readership will at least glance at them, while eveyone else can just skip those posts. It’s what I do on lots of blogs myself – if people post about a topic that interests me I’ll read it but if they are talking about some hobby I don’t have any interest in, I’ll pass on that post. I still want to be able to have that choice, though, so on balance I think keeping it all in one place is preferable for the regular reader, even if it isn’t much use for the person arriving from Google search.
I’ve added your new blog to both my Feedly along with the other two and also to my blog roll. Good luck with it!
Thanks, Bhagpuss! The decision to separate out my different content isn’t an absolute right or wrong, and I’m still not sure I’m making the correct choice.
I’ve been pondering the pros and cons of splitting my blog for a long time- at least four or five years. What triggered me to action was realizing I was second-guessing every motorcycle or gaming post I contemplated making to my main blog. That wasn’t a fully rational process, and more often than not I ended up just not writing a post at all.
I’m very good at coming up with excuses that prevent me from writing, and the ‘mixed’ blog content was one of those excuses. Blaugust taught me that removing ‘friction’ to the posting process makes me a more regular blogger. In the end, that is probably the main outcome I’m aiming for.
Good luck on the gaming blog. I don’t find it a problem to maintain three blogs and I doubt you will either.
I doubt I’ll be as frequent a poster as you are, Lou. If I have a ‘goal’ it is very simple: post more frequently in general than I did with my single blog. That’s easy: I was posting a handful of times a year before Blaugust 2024, and have proven to myself that I can post pretty easily a couple of times a week.
I will be happy if I can manage roughly one post per week per blog, maybe ten posts a month in total. We’ll see how the next year or so pans out, though!