One not-infrequent problem that comes up for writers is whether to have one blog or two.
As one reader put it, "[I] have 2 areas I will be writing about (book reviews & genealogy) and have no idea how to structure the
blog. Do I need 2 separate ones or just 2 pages?"
If you have two (or more!) distinct areas of interest – or if you write both fiction and non-fiction – then you need to make the tricky decision of whether to have a single blog, or whether to have two or more blogs at the same time.
There's no perfect solution, but here are a few things to think about:
#1: You May Not Have Time to Run Two
Blogs
Over the years, I've seen quite a few bloggers attempt to run more than one blog at a time (me included!) – and I've very rarely seen it work.
If you're blogging to build an audience, rather than just for fun, it's definitely easiest to have a single blog where you focus all your efforts. Otherwise, you end up having to duplicate almost everything (even social media accounts, if you want to stay on-topic for each blog's
audience).
#2: But ... It's Hard to Build an Audience for a Multi-Topic Blog
While there's nothing stopping you starting a blog that covers all your areas of interest, that's not a great way to build an audience. Most bloggers who go down this route either give up, or switch things around so their blog focuses on one particular topic.
Of course, your interests might fit together fairly
well (e.g. if you write about genealogy and historical fiction, you might potentially find an audience that's interested in both ... even then, it could be tough to create a coherent website).
#3: Author Websites Take Less Time to Maintain than Fully-Fledged Blogs
It's worth thinking about the purpose of your prospective blog. If you simply want an online "home" where you have details about your fiction, then a more static
website might be perfectly appropriate (and a lot less work to maintain than a blog where you publish new content every week or two).
You can still use blogging software to build your site, but you'll likely have a static homepage and perhaps a "news" section that you occasionally update with a new post. For a good example, check out JF Penn's site
http://jfpenn.com (you may well know her better as Joanna Penn, through her blog
www.thecreativepenn.com). K.M. Weiland has a great author site too at
www.kmweiland.com, with a regularly-updated news section – she blogs about fiction-writing at
www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com.
Ultimately, if you're interested in two or more topics, I'd suggest:
- Pick ONE topic to
blog about; build a blog and brand around that. I'd suggest choosing whichever topic you could happily write about for years!
- If you really want to write about the other topic too, use it for your freelance work (paid blogging, magazine articles), guest posts, or occasionally bring aspects of it into your blog.
You can mix topics if they're pretty closely related, or if there's a sufficiently large audience interested in
both. You'd need to focus your posts accordingly. For instance, I could plausibly start a blog about "writing when you have young children" – quite a lot of people are in that situation! – but I wouldn't be posting generic parenting tips there.
If you write fiction and non-fiction, I'd suggest keeping those fairly separate. Of course you can mention your novels on your blog, like Joanna Penn and K.M. Weiland do – but if you're, say, a freelance writer, then
your clients will probably not be interested in your fiction (and having it featured too prominently on your website may actually put them off).
I hope this helps a bit ... and good luck!
