Here’s the challenge that is weighing rather heavily on me as we enter the new year. As a blogger, I just don’t feel I can keep up with two primary professional blogs and a business blog for BaileyHill Media (let alone trying to continually grow BaileyHill Media’s business). I now realize that what I once loved to do has become an arduous chore and I don’t like it. So while there’s no perfect solution I’m trying to figure out what will allow me to sustain my passion for blogging ideas, my desire for further building a community here, and my commitment to helping our growing stable of clients at BaileyHill Media.
My chief challenge is that my interests don’t fall into one particular niche. I might talk about employee engagement issues one day, online community development another day, and finish the week with thoughts on creativity. I see these somewhat eclectic interests as a personal strength but understand they can also be a detriment to generating salient content that folks want to read. If you subscribe to read more about improving organizational leadership, you may not care at all about how to build a better Facebook community. And I really don’t want to be hamstrung into only writing about one thing…that wouldn’t be authentic to who I am.
I need your help and would love to get your feedback on what I’m considering as my next step.
The option I’m heavily considering right now is to consolidate Alchemy of Soulful Work and Gravit8 Interactivity into a single online presence (likely to be located at chrisbaileyworks.com) that would serve all niches. It would be focused on me and the somewhat disparate interests I have: future of work, organizational development, management and leadership, social business, business anthropology, online communities, social media and web communication, etc., etc. In many ways, I can see the overlap…but here’s what I really want to know: would you still subscribe and read my writing? As much as I sometimes try to pretend it doesn’t matter, I do need you as a reader and commenter. Your thoughtful feedback to my posts are part of the dialogue that I value.
So, there’s the question that I want to pose to you. If you’re a reader of Alchemy, would you mind reading more of the things I write about at Gravit8; and it’s the same question if you’re a reader of Gravit8. Or would you prefer and advise that I continue to keep the niches separate and find ways to maintain a writing regimen that emphasizes both of these blogs?
For this post – perhaps more than almost any other that I’ve written in a while – I do need your comments and advice. Thanks so much.
I went through this exact same exercise myself, which is how I ended up with http://SocialMediaIsMyMiddleName.com, where I blog about social media...and Austin, politics, business, my family, poetry, etc.
I wonder, really, how many people truly sit and read everything someone posts to any given blog any more. So many people are using things like Google Alerts or other search tools, letting Twitter and StumbleUpon be their filters, etc. -- I don't know that it really matters so much any more if you combine topics on your blog.
Besides, if people are really only interested in one topic on your blog, the cool thing with WordPress is that they can subscribe just to that one category or tag -- each has its own RSS feed.
My recent post Geeks Love Pizza
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