If you’ve been following my “Blogging in Seasons” concept, you may remember I gave you a tip for using seasons to help you manage multiple blogs.
Today, I’d like to turn that idea on its head, and explain how you can use blogging in seasons to make one blog conquer several different topics – but without running a “do everything” blog.
Do You Have Several Interests?
I’m not much of an outdoors-y type – so I’d feel a bit silly saying “I have a wide variety of interests”. Most of them are something to do with technology or the Internet. 
However, I do have an interest in the following things:
- blogging
- social media
- web development
- testing
- usability
- movies
- writing music
- apps and casual gaming
I particularly enjoy it when two interests or more interests overlap. In practice, this usually means blogging about one of my other interests. Writing an app review, updating my music site, suggesting apps for bloggers to use, that kind of thing.
When Two Interests Collide
Sometimes I think up a way for two interests to collide. My latest idea is to start a blog focusing on usability for bloggers.
But while it might make an excellent blog, it’s an idea that would mostly overlap with other “blogs about blogging”, or indeed, general usability blogs.
It was then that I realised I could do a better job of that idea on an existing blog – namely, Quick Blog Tips.
This is where seasons come into play.
Why Write a Season Instead of Launching a New Blog?
My plan is to write a season with a limited number of posts, instead of starting a new blog with a potentially limitless number of posts.
This means I force myself to only write the absolute best content in this niche, and not squeeze out every last drop of a topic that ultimately has a limited lifespan.
Perhaps you can think of many more posts than I could for this niche. I couldn’t think of a lot. When I started listing out potential topics, I came up with seven. I might think of more, but I doubt I’ll have 30 or 40 great topic ideas.
It therefore makes more sense to work on this as a series of posts, which will form a new season of Quick Blog Tips – and will also become an eBook.
Continuing to build an existing blog, instead of starting a totally new one, means you can focus your promotional efforts on your main blog. There’s definitely a time and a place for multiple blogs, but running two blogs is a huge undertaking – particularly if you try to do everything yourself. Even more so if this isn’t what you do for a living. In other words – think carefully before starting too many blogs.
Why a Broad Niche Works
Having a blog about blogging might not be the most original topic. But there’s a benefit of choosing a broad niche such as blogging – it means you can choose sub-topics and spend several posts focusing on those sub-topics.
This isn’t so much a case of writing an endless stream of one-off tips and tricks, because your niche is so broad. It’s more to do with the fact that you can sub-divide your niche into smaller areas, and blow those up into a powerful series of posts – a season.
I think that if you run seasons on a broadly focused blog, you could trump a blog that’s in a much more narrow niche and only publishes posts on that one topic.
Discussion
Could you broaden your blog’s focus and avoid starting a totally new blog?
Hi Ben, I could have started 3 for Inspire but incorporated all 3 blogging, SEO and social media into one, thank goodness, I could not handle anymore than the others I do besides this one. I think it helps to have it a little more broad – gives you more readers and more interest than if you focused only on a very narrow niche. So it helps in more ways than one. Seasons is a wonderful way to do it too.
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Hi Lisa
It sounds like you made the right choice – running 3 blogs would be a lot more work. Multiple blogs works fine if you can separate the topics logically, but when they are quite closely related, I think we’ll have more success with one blog. Hope you’re having a good week. 
I have been thinking about the same things Ben. I started just one blog, it’s about marketing, but it’s also a personal blog, where I explain close to everything that’s going through my mind, as long as it’s a bit relevant to my readers. But, where I had a real issue, is when I was going to launch my business in Norway. I needed a website in Norwegian, because all my customers are located in Norway, and they speak Norwegian. On the other hand, they understand English, but they’re more comfortable reading and writing Norwegian. So, I thought about launching a new blog entirely in Norwegian, or if I should just launch a new page / version of slymarketing in Norwegian. This way they could just click on a Norwegian flag (or a tab) for the Norwegian version of the blog and the English flag for the English version of the blog. I am still not sure if I did the right thing when I launched the business blog, but it was a hard decision to make.
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Hi Jens
That’s quite a tricky decision. I think if you’re able to support multiple languages, and doing so will benefit your customers, then it’s a nice thing to be able to do. As long as the navigation is clear and you can handle the extra work, it could work just fine. What option did you end up going with?
I have currently set up two blogs, one is slymarketing, and that’s my English blog. The other one has the same name as my business, berget marketing, and it’s my Norwegian blog. I thought about using slymarketing for both, but I don’t think that’s going to work
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Hi Ben
I found your blog through Lisa’s post “13 Up and Coming New Blogs” sorry it has taken me a while to visit you!
I have one blog and that is focused on List Building but have now added Affiliate Marketing into it also rather than start a separate blog so I will see how it works. I am thinking about another blog for this year in the health niche, I will see if I think I can fit both in as I do not want to neglect my main blog.
Thanks for sharing, hope you have a great weekend
Pauline
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Hi Pauline
Welcome to QBT, and thanks for stopping by. My advice is to make sure you’re ready if you want to start another blog. It’s a lot of work, but if it is for something that couldn’t fit into your existing blog, it’d be worse to force it into the one blog. In your case it sounds like starting a second blog would be the right thing to do, if you can find the time 
You must have been thinking about me when you wrote this post. I did 3 in the beginning and I was overwhelmed and clueless. There was no passion and it was all work. I can’t say I enjoyed much of any of it and quickly let them go when I ran out of things to say. Now, I started a new business and the posts I write for it is fun, I know allot about it and I thoroughly enjoy doing it. Good advice Ben!
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Hi Sonia
I can’t imagine starting out with 3 blogs. There’s a definite time issue if you try running multiple blogs, but when you’re just starting out it’s a lot more difficult as you also don’t really know what to do. The difficulty I have is that I have a few ideas that I don’t want to merge into one “super blog” and that might work really well as their own blog, but it’s not easy to keep multiple blogs running! Despite knowing this, it doesn’t stop me from trying 
This is an interesting and original solution to a problem a lot of bloggers have.
I have a wide range of interests and because I know that more niche-specific blogs do better in the search engines, I have tended to start new ones. Then I have felt guilty when I haven’t updated them.
I wish I’d used this approach earlier. Could have saved myself some angst. Although I can still use it now to stop me from starting still more blogs!
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Hi Matt
Welcome to QBT! If you’re interested in learning more, I’d highly recommend you check out the Blogging in Seasons portal here at QBT. It contains links to the original eight posts I published on this topic, along with a free eBook that adds four new articles and also revises some of the content from the original posts. I’m already partway into season 2 and it’s totally transformed my blogging experience. I’d love to hear how you get on with this idea if you give it a try. Thanks for your comment 