In the last month I’ve fired a client, turned down several projects, dropped three of my blogs and brought in writers for another one.
The upside? I now have more time to concentrate on my main project, more time to blog here at Performancing and most importantly, zero stress about work not getting done.
The downside – none, actually. I’m making the same amount of money as before (a bit more actually), am stress-free and have been able to put more time into the projects I really care about, allowing me to move them along at 3 times the speed than I would have otherwise.
In short, doing less work will actually make me more money this year.
But it’s not all about the money – even though many of us slave day and night for it (or used to) and worry about it all the time.
By consolidating and concentrating your efforts on fewer, more important things you’ll be able to growmore fun while doing it.
However, before you jump to the comments to argue or (worse) go delete all your blogs, I should point out that there is clear-cut right or wrong between having 20 blogs or 2 blogs.
The key to all of it is you, and how you manage your blogging.
I wrote about this dilemma in more detail last year, but in a nutshell:
- Don’t launch more than 1 blog per month if you are the main blogger for that site.
- Don’t be involved full-time in more than two blogs at a time – this involves blogging, marketing, participating in comments, strategizing for future growth, etc.
- In the beginning, your blogs won’t be earning you enough to live on. Instead of starting new blogs:
- Find a system that works and helps you make money online (such as PLRPro – (disclosure – I’m a member)).
- Hold on to (or get) a real job.
- Get hold of freelance projects (what I did).
What type of projects? Writing, programming, consulting, designing, whatever suits your skillset – and if know nothing, you can still probably write – otherwise you wouldn’t be blogging, right?
- Blogging isn’t just about posting articles on your blog, it’s about finding out what people want to read about and then writing about that. It’s about networking with fellow bloggers and leveraging those relationships to help promote your blog. It’s about marketing your blog, because let’s face it, you’ll need to get links to your blog one way or another.
It’s also about planning ahead, so that you know when to take your site in a particular direction, when to grow it and when to split off a section into a new site.
If you do all of the above, two things will happen – one, you’ll have time only for a couple of blogs and two, your blogs will grow much faster.
If you are spread out too thin, you’ll lose money and traffic and stress yourself out.
If you are too focused, you’ll lose money and traffic and (almost) never make it big.
To find a balance, you need to maintain enough focus while constantly working on growing your sites.
Part of that means hiring designers, programmers and writers to work for you.
Part of that also means that you should know when you’re just churning out articles and not putting enough effort into growing your site – usually that point comes when you’ve been blogging for a while and your site’s traffic numbers have been stagnant over 2-3 months (once again, this applies more to new / young blogs).
So where do you stand? Are you spread out too thin? And are you stressed about your blogs?
This article was originally written on 21 Jun 2007 for Performancing.com.
