Full Disclosure: This post is one of those “do as I say, not as I do” type deals. 🙂
Have you ever wondered what the best way to organize your blog and all the things that go with it (sometimes referred to as “digital property” or “digital real estate”?
If you look at this blog, you might think that I haven’t the foggiest how to organize a blog, but there’s an explanation for why this blog looks like a haphazard mess, but I’ll get to that later.
Best Practices for Organization
Ideally, the best thing to do is to have every blog and its related components (thus creating your so called “digital property”) separate and encapsulated by niche or type.
When I started out, oh so many years ago, I had several blogs, associated emails, social media accounts, etc. and they were all separate and that really is the best way to do it.
An example
For example, several years ago, I had an internet marketing blog (this one), a personal blog, a professional blog, a couple specialty niche blogs, and a hobby blog (saltwaterfishkeeping.com) that was also the blog example I created whilst teaching others how to create a WordPress blog from scratch.
For each blog, I had at least one domain level email (for example, email_address@sweatyshop.com), and a Twitter account, a Facebook page, affiliate programs (where applicable), etc.
So, each blog with all its trimmings, or digital property if you wish, was an entirely separate organism from the other one.
Two reasons to do so
One of the main reasons behind that is so that if you ever want to sell your blog, you can sell it, and everything tied to it, without affecting anything else. You don’t have to worry about the fact that you have three blogs sharing one master email account, or one Twitter account that covers three different niches.
Which is fantastic.
It’s also a lot of work.
Think about it for a minute. For each blog I had to write a blog post, a tweet, a Facebook post, and whatever else. Even with automation software sending each blog post to the various social media accounts for me, I still had to write (and edit) the blog posts plus the extra tweeting/retweeting and other social media posting and responding to keep up engagement which is a large part of doing social media properly in the first place.
Another reason is for the search engines.
If a search engine sees a blog about home gardening, it will rank higher than a blog that talks about home gardening, car restoration, and fishing.
So having your stuff separated gives your site more authority and credibility than if you have a blended cocktail of various things.
Anyway, that’s how you properly organize your online presence.
As for what happened to this blog…
Now as for how this blog came to be such a wild conglomeration….
A few years ago, I shut down everything except the fish keeping blog. I didn’t lose the posts or pages or other content (mostly) but I took everything offline.
When I decided to start up again, I thought about how much work having all those things were, and I didn’t want it.
So I simply recreated this blog by importing the original articles.
No big deal, right?
But remember, I also had saved all the pages and posts for a personal blog, a professional blog, a couple specialty niche blogs, and the hobby blog which is still up at the time of this writing.
And I thought a lot about what I wanted to do. What I absolutely knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what I didn’t want to do was to maintain a bunch of blogs.
I don’t enjoy writing that much.
But with having a blog going (the hobby blog doesn’t count), I couldn’t bring myself to ignore or delete all that other stuff that I had created.
So what’s a guy to do?
I imported all that stuff into this blog, that’s what I did, which is why it’s such a big unorganized mess right now.
In addition, that little stunt gave me almost 400 broken links that I’ve had to do something with, and I have, mostly. I have a handful or two left to fix.
Grouping and categorizing the posts is kind of low on my priority list.
“But wait,” you might be thinking, “if this blog is about internet marketing then won’t having all that other stuff sink your site in the search engine rankings?”
That’s an excellent point and yes, yes it will.
But I don’t care. I’m not attempting to rank highly with SEO and I don’t really care which page on a search I am on.
Oh I know how to do it, I just don’t care.
So if you don’t want to read about some aspect of internet marketing one week and what I did over my weekend the next week, that’s fine. Skip those posts.
I am, like most people, a complex being. I have many interests (but few hobbies) and I want to write about them in one place, not all over the place trying to keep everything separate (the fish keeping blog is the exception).
In conclusion
Anyway, what it boils down to is that it’s my blog and that’s what I want to do so that’s what I’m going to do.
No, it doesn’t help me with my online business, but that’s okay. It’s hard to say how much (if at all) it hurts my online business either.
And maybe, just maybe, my personal life will relate with some of you in such a way that you will keep coming back anyway, in spite of how I have my blog organized and lumped together.
And you can do whatever you want to with your digital property, whether it helps your blog and/or business, hurts it, or doesn’t make a difference.
Either way,
Have a great day.