Jun 19, 2014 / Advanced

Is One the Loneliest Number? Starting a Second Blog

You’ve got a lot to say — is it time to start a second blog? Ask yourself these four questions to figure out whether it’s time to expand your blogging empire.

Blogging is addictive — “I’ll take a minute to finish this post” hurtles down the slippery slope past “I’ll skim the Reader for an hour ” before skidding to a halt in front of “I’ll spend two hours commenting, preview 47 themes, start four drafts, and stumble to bed at 2am.” Compounding the problem, blogs are like potato chips and tattoos: many people find it difficult to stop at one.

Is starting a second (or third, or fourth) blog a good idea? You already have an audience, so you’ve got a head start — but you already have an audience, so you might be spreading yourself thin.

If you’re not sure what your next move is, these four questions can help.

1. Do I have content for a second blog?

Maybe you normally blog about your experience moving from a big city to a small town, and are posting about gardening more and more. Does this dilute your blog? Is it time to start a gardening blog?

This depends on whether you simply enjoy talking about gardening or have the focus and passion to build a robust new blog. Think about how an all-gardening blog would be different — or not — than what you publish right now. Take a look at popular gardening blogs; are you excited about a project like these?

Then, take a look at what you’re blogging now. Do your gardening posts feel like clutter? Do your regular readers seem disinterested in your gardening content? Do you have many posts you’d like to write, but are holding back?

If you opt not to announce the new blog, no harm done — now you have a collection of finished posts to weave into your current blog.

Action time! If you think it’s time to become a franchise, test the hypothesis by blogging on your new topic privately for 30 or 60 days.

  • It will give you a sense of how much you have to say about the new topic.
  • It’s a real-world test of whether you can devote energy to two sites.
  • It builds a cache of posts, so you can launch your new blog pre-filled with resources.

2. How much do the audiences overlap?

A big chunk of the audience for a blog on rural life might be excited about gardening. Maybe your audience consists of rural homesteaders, or city friends who live vicariously through your pumpkin patch.

If there’s overlap in the audiences of your current blog and the new one you’re considering, it might not make sense to split them up — you’re just putting an extra step between your readers and the thing they want (more of you). If they’re very different, and your city friends’ eyes glaze over when you write about different kinds of manure, a second blog may be the way to go.

Action time!  If you’re not sure what your audience wants or how they’ll react to change, you’ve got tools:

  • Create a short poll or ask them to leave a comment about what interests them.
  • Test the new content by creating a new weekly feature for your gardening posts. You can gauge your audience’s interest, and readers who aren’t interested can skip those posts.

Chances are, your readers are drawn to your unique voice, and they’re just fine reading the odd post about staking tomato plants mixed with your musings on small-town life. Maybe not, though — so do some digging and find out.

3. Do I want to write a new blog, or do I want something shiny and new?

Some of us just want to write, and the setup is a necessary evil to having a blog. Some of us love creating, designing, and playing with layouts more than actually keeping up a whole new blog. Which one are you? Are you excited about writing the new posts, or about starting something from scratch?

If “new and improved” is what excites you, you can also suggest your setup and design services to other bloggers, like the folks looking for feedback in the Community Pool. Indulge your love of makeovers while giving back to the blogosphere!

Action time! If you just want to write, or the impetus to start a new blog is really about wanting a blog do-over, try:

  • Guest posting on other blogs, or writing one-off posts for other websites — all the blogging, none of the administering!
  • Giving your blog a makeover. Blogs are fluid and flexible in both content and layout; if you want to rebuild, just do it.

4. Do I have time?

The road to an empty, inactive blog is paved with great post ideas. Many of us find it challenging to devote as much time as we’d like to one blog: to crafting great posts, perfecting our design, engaging on other social networks, and reading and commenting on other blogs.

Can you do this for two blogs? If you want your new blog to be separate from your first, can you handle two posting schedules, two communities, and maybe two logins, Twitter handles, and Facebook Fan Pages? Does all this drag down the actual content you want to publish, or do you thrive on the chaos?

Action time! Remember when we suggested blogging private for one or two months? Do that. Really. The best way to see if you can maintain two blogs without either of them suffering, one of which will need more tending to grow, is to write two blogs.

  • If New Blog is going strong at the end of the month, throw open the doors and tell the world.
  • If New Blog shrivels on the vine after a few weeks or Current Blog stagnates, pull down the shades and head back to the drawing board.

There are lots of bloggers who have more than one blog, and all their bloggy gardens thrive. Great ideas aren’t enough, though; they need great execution. That takes time and energy, so be honest about yours.

If you maintain multiple blogs, we’d love to hear what prompted that decision, how it’s going, and any tips for managing more than one site.

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  1. It’s hard enough promoting the one! I like mine and feel happy with the freedom of my content, as parenting can cover lots and lots of different topics and styles!

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  3. I have four – my first one arose from a writing challenge to write exactly 100 words each day (and tends to be only used now when I have a theme to focus on over several weeks), then I started one to keep friends and family on my daughter’s progress through her various heart surgeries, added a third private one so my second daughter’s milestones were also recorded on a blog and now I have my wordpress one which is my outlet for my reflections and writing.

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  4. I’ve never considered having two blogs. My topics vary from time to time, however I feel they fit into my categories well. If I had a specific topic of interest later on, then I would jump on the bandwagon and create a second đŸ™‚

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  5. Ha, that first paragraph says it all!
    I started with 4 blogs over a year ago – one for travel writing and the other three mainly photoblogs so I could publish some of my hundreds of photos in the digital shoebox. One on flowers and gardens, one mainly travel photos and photo challenge responses and the final one on architecture/urban images. At the beginning of this year I stopped two of the photo blogs as I found that I could incorporate what I was doing on them into my main travel blog, even though they are not always necessarily travel-related.
    https://smallbluegreenwords.wordpress.com/
    Readers don’t seem to mind though and I have more people commenting now than I did on the photo blogs. The one I still keep separate is the garden/flower blog.

    Home

    which has a much smaller following. OK I could post the gardens on the travel blog and have done so occasionally, but single flower photos? Maybe not.
    The main challenge is for me to visit my visitors and comment on their blogs! But I am slowing down the number of posts I do on both blogs so hopefully I’ll not be stumbling to bed at 2 am for much longer đŸ˜‰

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  6. I write two blogs. One is my serious travel blog where I write stories about our travels and highlight unusual experiences we’ve had and the other is pure fiction and, I hope, humorous. The second doesn’t have as many followers as the first but those who do follow are dedicated and seem to enjoy my writing. I post once a week on each and I do the photo challenge every weekend. That’s four posts a week and is all I can manage. I’ve been blogging for two years and it has become a very necessary part of my life. My head is always buzzing with new stories.

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  7. Im on the same boat as a few members here, i have started my personal blog years ago, but i did want to expand and talk about the things i learned, teach other people, in a crash course style about anthropology and arts. but because i wanted to write about my daily life as a migrant in new zealand, and about anthropology and fine arts without looking odd, i separated my blog into categories, as if each category was a blog on its own. I renamed my blog from my own name to something broader. Then filtering the personal posts from the main page made me realise that the fun bits are gone from my front page. I started to wonder if a second blog would be the way to go, big no no, i can barely make time for One!!! but now i am in this horrible dilemma, what do i actually want my visitors to see when they come to my blog? Personal files or my academic research?
    Should they land in the front page and decide which way to go or should they land directly into the category they are after? Like, friends would be given the address with the category in it, and colleagues would be given the url with the cat included, now im just a bit lost. This post was very interesting because it tackles exactly that, do or not do another blog? Thank you very much.

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  8. Over the winter I began to feel this pull to take my writing to the next level. I’d apprenticed myself, and now it was time to start focusing. Yet I still have all these different things I want to write about – hence, the creation of my new writing blog – thepersianflaw.wordpress.com.

    I have no idea yet exactly in what direction thetemenosjournal.com is going, as it was where I began. Lately I’ve been leaning towards making it like a magazine style…having a bit of everything – Gardening, History, Stories, and perhaps some Design. I’m an amateur photographer, and it’s impossible to not want to utilize my work in some way.

    So…my THIRD blog is just straight photos…thrualensonly.com

    đŸ™‚ perhaps I’m just a renaissance gal…and I just can’t help having an outlet for this spring of ideas that seems to be bubbling up to the surface lately. I guess you could say all three of them feed my soul in one way or another.

    I’m thinking that in time I will probably re-align the three back into one, but for now it gives me the challenge I crave.

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  9. I often think about making a second blog, because mine is so all over the place (every kind of creative writing, opinions, memoir posts, personal stuff, research papers and essays, photos). But, I’ve talked to a few of my followers and they seem to enjoy that they can find so much different content on one blog, and I just don’t think I have it in me to obsess about another one.

    I keep the idea open in the back of my mind for later down the line when I have posted more, but for now I think I’m sticking to this. Even just reading this list made me feel overwhelmed.

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  10. I’ve got two, no three blogs. The first one was supposed to be my base support for makkng media presence for a business I was planning to make in the future. Then I made an extension for challenges since it was becoming too scattered. But then, I started a third one because I needed some me space.

    However it turns out that I would rather keep the third blog! I like it more since I’ve got a lot more freedom.

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  11. I did create and run 2 blogs, also guest wrote for a 3rd blog (a Vancouver tourism blog). 2 blogs are similar in topics (cycling oriented) but for completely different purposes. 1st one was for my partner’s business and the other is my personal blog.

    I don’t know how people maintain 2 blogs with the same amount of blogging frequency. I just could barely keep at it because I have other non-blogging interests that happily take up other chunks of personal time.

    My partner took over the blog that I started up for him, he started and writes for 2 other blogs. 3rd blog is a true, collaborative effort among a team of volunteer writers for a non-profit cycling organization he has steered for the past year. He’s now working on a 4th e-commerce blog to support his son’s business, a sandwich and butcher shop.

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  13. I loved this:
    “…can you handle two posting schedules, two communities, and maybe two logins, Twitter handles, and Facebook Fan Pages? Does all this drag down the actual content you want to publish, or do you thrive on the chaos?”

    I have thought about this a lot. Especially if your blog/website contains your products. Is it better to not confuse your audience, or should you stop splitting your audience? Good questions.

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  14. Hello! I’m new to the WordPress blogging community, but not new to blogging itself. Sometime ago I created a hobby blog (on Blogger) – I found it quite easy, pleasing and addictive, and also I got to be in an environment full of people that are interested in the same thing as I am. On my first blog I’m posting in my mother tongue, and I have to stick to the blog topic when writing posts. As I discovered I had much more to say to the world;), on different topics and not only about one of my hobbies, I decided to create another blog, in English, which is more or less a universal language, to be able to share more; plus I want it to be more of a lifestyle blog. I begun two days ago, posted one thing so far, but already have some drafts in line. Wish me luck! đŸ˜‰

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  15. Addictted? Who’s addicted? I’ll be starting blogs 4 & 5 later this year with little or no overlap between all 5. I started slow but I love it so much; the planning, the writing, the photos, now it over takes my afternoons đŸ™‚ Thank you WordPress for feeding my addiction. I could be worse

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  16. I have occasionally flirted with the idea of a second blog, but I don’t think I could manage the time at this point in my life. When I think about the writers whose work I personally admire most, I tend to like what they write regardless of theme or genre, so I figure if someone is following my blog because they like my writing they will tolerate a bit of variety.

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  17. I guess I should answer your question. I started my first blog not to blog but as an online journal for folks back home to keep up with my two year road trip, this has turned into an inspirational/Christian blog. My second blog fulfilled my desire to have an online photography portfolio but also have tales of my travels. The third one started in my mind nearly 15 years ago, I wanted an online place of social studies/geography education and lesson plans (still a work in progress). My up coming blogs 1. low carb living/recipes and 2. my life with kai will have stories and photos of my grandson and is intended mainly for family and friends.

    I struggles with keeping up with the first two for a long time until I started putting it in my calendar. I use MS Outlook and since that first wordpress calendar I found it easier to have a separate calendar for each blog. I have the name of the post on the day I want to post it. When opening the item I have the post (or idea) written inside?

    Another helpful practice is that I plan my blogs a month in advance then I spend a few day writing outlines, rough drafts and I also prepare all photos. I use the scheduler and post all at once. After that it’s easy to maintain and update links. This gives me more time to read my favorite bloggers and keep up with likes and comments.

    This has definitely been a work of art and a work in progress. Keep looking for ways to make it easier and it will be so very rewarding.

    Liked by 1 person

  19. On my current blog I talk about the only thing i have a passion for, for me to start another would mean me finding something new.
    What Hope Is There For Humanity

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  20. I started blogging because I was learning the Korean language. Then posts about gardening, poetry, software crash courses, and linguistics popped up. I concluded as long as each post tied back to learning a language or Korean, then it was fine. My journey of learning a language includes communicating with my language exchange partner in Korea about my garden (and the Korean terms for flowers), singing along with KPop to KTalk (Korean lessons about lyrics to Korean Pop songs), Korean poets, software I’ve had to learn to be a successful self-learner, and lessons learned from linguists about how to study. It all ties back to my central reason for starting the blog. It is all about learning Korean.

    So for me, I’ll stick with one blog. One is enough to keep me plenty busy.

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  21. I had two to start with (I had the time), but suddenly (new job) I found it was too much work to maintain both. I had to give up some of the content. I combined them, finding a way to marry the two different perspectives. And so far, so good. No one has complained.

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  22. I just figured I’d create categories for each topic which would give me opportunity to write about many different things while giving readers the option of sitting through to find what they want to read.

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  23. I originally wanted to start a second blog for my flash fiction work. (My first blog leans toward book reviewing.) But the thought of managing multiple blogs seem overwhelming. I’m already drowning in my other social media accounts. :O

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  24. Thanks for these thoughts! Just in time for me. I’ve been writing about enterprise collaboration and college education (more on the first topic) for three months, and was thinking about adding a new topic, which is information security for end-users.
    I didn’t know if it was a good idea to mix the security topic into my existing blog. I did it. I post one piece per week regularly, and I wanted to keep this regime, so I posted about the new topic this week. I haven’t yet got many reads but it’s less than a day since I posted… It might have been a better idea to keep the regular Thursday posts for my original topic, and add a new stream on another day (Tuesday or Wednesday).
    I don’t know… It’s just one odd post about security. I can still go back and implement a new schedule.
    What would be your advice?

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  25. That might also be a good time for the expanding writer to join up with another already established blog, write away and not bother with needing to manage yet another site. If you happen to be looking to start a gardening blog as your second site, there might be a permanent place for you on mine (or others of similar high quality of course)!

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  26. Nice post..Its my second blog as well that I started a couple of days ago. My first blog was a college assignment where I wrote about latest fashion trends and how I incorporated them into my wardrobe. But now I write about anything that comes to my mind…my second blog is more interesting for me to write and for others to read too. So though its technically my second blog, it feels like the first real one!

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  27. These are excellent questions! I asked myself most of them before I started a second blog this past winter. I’m glad I did. My first blog, From the Seasonally Occupied Territories, is about being a year-round resident of Martha’s Vineyard, a summer resort. I’m an editor by trade, a writer by avocation, and I was finally, after a long layoff, working on my second novel, which is set on the Vineyard. I’d occasionally blog about writing in my Vineyard blog, but so much of what I’ve learned over the years about writing and editing has nothing to do with where I live. So in February 2014 I started Write Through It: On Writing, Editing, and How to Keep Going. Despite the vast number of writing blogs out there, it’s doing pretty well. It was Freshly Pressed at the end of March, before it was two months old.

    At first I doubted that I could manage two blogs. I’m working on a novel and working full-time, after all. I briefly considered shutting down the Vineyard blog, but several loyal followers said no no no, don’t do that. Instead I’ve leaned toward shorter, more anecdotal posts and featured more photos. I used to write blog posts start to finish in one sitting. These days I’ll more often start a post, play with it over two or three days in draft mode, then polish and publish it when it’s ready to go.

    The big drawback for me of running two blogs (and working on a novel) is that I can’t spend too much time reading, liking, and commenting on other people’s blogs. There’s so much wonderful work out there! I’m inspired and encouraged by the people who like and comment on my blogs, and I want to do the same for others — but there’s only so much I can do and still keep writing.

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  29. I just started my blog and I am trying to figure everything out. Your posts are very helpful for me just getting started. I look forward to reading more. I am working to set time aside to dedicate to my blog. I have knowledge and opinions that I would like to share. Now I have to get reading more of your prior posts!

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  30. Right now, I actually have four blogs. It’s a wait-and-see to report any significant results of trying to maintain all four, but here’s how it started:

    I started my first blog, SWIMMING IN THE MUD, to write about anything on my mind, though the general emphasis was that I was going through a major life transition and my posts primarily reflected as much. The tone has been fairly deep and introspective, sometimes sad. I often used nature as a useful metaphor to relate my stories to my readers. I’ve acquired a decent following where I engage in deep discussions with my readers. At some point, when I wanted to post something light-hearted, creative, or even entirely outdoors adventure’ish, it felt out of place tone-wise. So I considered spawning a second blog on nature and the outdoors.

    Before I ventured out with a second blog, I went through the exercise of brainstorming possible topics with a bubble chart to see if I had enough material for a second blog. I did, and so the second blog was born, TEARDROP ADVENTURES, which is loosely centered around my home-built vintage-style teardrop trailer and the travels my partner, dog and I take with it; the blog also covers my hiking, backpacking, and travel adventures as well as nature topics that grab my attention.

    My third blog, SNEAKERS IN THE DRYER, came into being because I still needed a place to just be creative. It’s here that I play with flash fiction, jewelry making, baking, graphic design and anything else that comes to mind.

    My fourth blog, WHAT’S NEW AT SUE’S?, came about because I felt a need to tie it all together. It’s really just a master blog or jumping-off point to all my blogs. It’s the place that tries to say, “This is me, or at least some of the many facets of me.” I occasionally post a newsletter’ish update about what I’ve been up to generally speaking, with links to the latest posts on all my blogs. I haven’t yet decided whether or not this is working for me, but I still like the concept.

    FINAL NOTE: Since I spun off TEARDROP ADVENTURES, I took a big turn on the tone I wish to achieve on my SWIMMING IN THE MUD blog. I now prefer to post mostly uplifting, positive messages after a brief discussion of the difficult life challenge it addresses. (Previously, I had focused heavily on the difficult life challenge, with a lighter note or lesson at the end.) I’m walking this path carefully, as I’m not sure if I will lose readers in the process. At least one of my readers encouraged me with the reminder that ‘swimming in the mud’ may be a great metaphor representing struggle, but it can also be an actual real-life FUN thing to do.

    I love blogging. I love creating blog sites, too. I’ve also completely altered my existing blogs by switching WordPress themes several times over. I guess I just love being in the Director’s Chair of the ultimate production . . . my own life! đŸ™‚

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    1. I love reading about how other writers think! I also like your blog title Swimming in the Mud. My first (and so far only) novel is The Mud of the Place. Its title comes from its epigraph, by the late writer-activist Grace Paley: “If your feet aren’t in the mud of a place, you’d better watch where your mouth is.” That’s the impetus behind my Martha’s Vineyard blog too. Most writing about the Vineyard is by journalists and occasional visitors. They miss a lot.

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      1. THE MUD OF THE PLACE sounds so grounded and rather entrenched. I love it! I’m actually more “of the earth” than “of the water” as SWIMMING IN THE MUD suggests (though my zodiac sign is cancer crab!). I see the value of being fully in the place rather than floating through.

        Good luck with promotion of your novel and with all future endeavors. Your blog writing is lovely.

        Peace,
        Sue J

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      1. Thanks! I’m letting it all happen organically. If something needs to change, I’ll change it. WordPress makes that process pretty easy (for which I am EXTREMELY grateful.) đŸ™‚

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