Creating a Blog with Focus

The Creative Penn on Twitter posted a link to a site that had some interesting information on it. The article is found at Penelope Trunk's blog and the article is called, "Blogs without topics are a waste of time." You can read it here. I'd first recommend reading that site to form your own opinion then return here to see my take (if you're interested).

A blog without focus...basically calling for bloggers to have a central theme to their blog and stick with it.

My wife has said that one of the reasons I don't have a larger readership (aside from the whole drop-in-the-ocean-of-voices thing) is that I don't have a focus on this blog. She's right that I don't have a specific focus. On this blog there are some book reviews, information about bariatrics, complaints about technology, and information on writing stories and novels among other things.

Would I have more people interested if I had a central topic?

Maybe.

I started this blog with the intent of publicly documenting my surgery and aftermath. I thought it would be a handy reference for other people considering the surgery and might give another viewpoint in the surgery decision. At the same time, it was a retrospective for my own accountability and memory on what's happened.

I knew that the surgery was a big step and that I'd probably have something to write about for months ahead. And I did, more or less.

And I knew that eventually the surgery wounds would heal and life would move on. I'm not defined by my operation. I was strongly defined by my weight issues and later by the related issues for which I ended up going to a therapist to work on, brought out more strongly by the weight loss and surgery (and job stresses and life stresses...)

Key point I should have considered: I didn't want to be defined by my surgery.

To continue working with the blog and having incentive to work with the blog, I put right in that it was about comics (sometimes), technology (sometimes), bariatric surgery (sometimes), and generally whatever interested me.

In reading Penelope's blog post I saw that I had set myself up a bit for misleading a potential readership. Barry Atric; the pseudonym alone would say this is about the surgery. Yet as time passed my surgery was less a factor in who I was as a person. Other things happened and my life changed. I moved on, posting updates on weight on occasion and when I had to go in for some followup appointment. Otherwise I had a goal of just keeping new content going into the feed and not skipping a day...if someone tuned in with the RSS feed they'd have something new every morning.

Perhaps that blog is right. Without focus, I may have content, but to what end? People may not appreciate having the ramblings of some random person who one day gripes about religious hypocrisy and the next is lauding a book about training your body to be like Batman.

At this point the blog was about practice and determinism. I was keeping a rigorous schedule of blogging, journaling, and working on a first draft of a novel. Keeping the blog up to date was a matter of pride that I could juggle the task along with my day job and family and other responsibilities.

In other words, the blog has meaning to me, but may not resonate with others at all. It was a crippled journal (which I am already keeping in private). I wasn't benefiting anyone since my entries are read by all of three or four people. I take pride that I was (hopefully) keeping those three or four people entertained to some degree, but perhaps the time is coming to make some changes.

Blogger has the ability to maintain multiple blogs under the same username/ID. I could split up my non-related interested into multiple blogs. Pros: I would have more focused blogs, and potentially (only potentially) more readers to help make the comments come to life. Cons: I'd have more to maintain, and I'd have to jump through the hoops of setting up each blog and try not to slip too much with content in each blog; a blog with no readers is bad, a blog with no content is worthless. I'd also have to sit down and remember how I did things like working with Google Analytics and the live feed of visitors, re-embedding information into the blogs so they're properly tracked. Definitely falls under the category of "not fun".

I could just stop with the blogging. I don't like that idea too much because I do enjoy having to maintain the discipline that comes with writing something almost every day. Novels are good for this but what good are novels if no one ever potentially sees them? I'm also very opinionated and enjoy knowing that the opinion is being spilled on the webbertubes, even if the number of people reading the material numbers in the less than ten. Still, this is an option.

I could keep doing what I'm doing. That is, this blog, as it has been. Let things go as they do.

I could essentially split this blog up. That's related to the part above where I use multiple blogs, but I'd also carry my baggage along. That means my pseudonym travels with me (I'm somewhat paranoid about someone at my place of employment finding the blog and taking offense at something silly) as well as taking the time to parse out various articles and migrate them to another blog site so the content I've worked on doesn't disappear.

I could just kill Barry Atric. Essentially create a new identity online with Blogger and start multiple blogs with focus, this time as a more generic pseudonym and repost the information from Barry directly into a new blog focused on the surgery information. Turning this over in my head I might also be able to feasibly just delete everything from the Barry blog not related to the surgery and have a new person starting new blogs under the account I use for Barry...just put Barry on a diet. The Barry blog will become more focused and trimmed while other blogs take up the slack. My only hesitation is how Blogger handles this, as I've already got an icon and account registered with little other than my email being "real" and everything else Barry. I'd hate to have tried refocusing on, say, technology with a name attached that says "Barry Atric."

On the other hand...I could stop updating Barry's blog and focus on creating side blogs for different topics.

I don't know what I'm going to choose to do. My schedule is very full for the next month, and dedicating time to planning some kind of migration will be difficult at best. But maybe that is just what I'm going to have to do. I may just start another blog before this post hits the webbertubes and see how that goes, posting specific content to it (or re-posting content from here to a new one) and see if the content specific site garners more attention. If it gets a decent amount of love from Google, I'll adopt more blogsites and start branching out and retrofitting content from this blog to another one.

One obvious con to any of these (except keeping things status quo) is the obvious problem, to me, of no longer keeping a "once a day" schedule. I may have content every day but to one different sites. I'm very afraid that if I break my routine then a site will end up neglected or falling into the dark simply from lack of updates. What time I did invest in it will have been wasted as I flitter among projects.

Anyone else ever have this issue or have advice on tackling it?