Yesterday I decided to combine some of my blogs and do away with an excessive number of domain names.
My motivation is to make my life easier by having fewer blogs to keep updated. I’m keeping only the blogs that are most valuable, that have a history of producing income… and these blogs are often the oldest.
This blog is a keeper.
My other business blog was not, so I added all the postings from that blog to this one today.
It was easy to do, as they are both WordPress blogs.
From the dashboard I chose “Export” in the Tools directory… and saved all the content from the LJ Martin Web site onto my hard drive.
Next I came to Klamath Design, this blog, and chose “Import” from the Tools directory. It guided me to install the Word Press Importer plugin, then I picked up the file from my hard drive and imported it here.
So easy!
Now, for you who are getting emails when I update this blog, you may get a notification from Feedburner that there are a lot of new articles at this blog today! Actually, those are all the articles that were formerly on my business site. I closed that business when I left Siskiyou County in California last summer… but the articles are still worth having here.
My goal is to get rid of 2/3 of my domain names. With some of them, it is like pulling teeth, because I love the domain names – that’s why I bought them! But if they’re not producing money, they’re only consuming money, and I can’t see any reason to keep them. I don’t like investments that aren’t income producing. I’m going to try to sell them on Flippa, but if they don’t sell, that’s it. I won’t renew them again.
This is one of those very difficult business decisions. We’ve all had to make them. Decisions that distress the soul. But I know that tending five to six sites daily, seven days a week, is detracting from my ability to caretake any of them properly.
I’ve never been good at creating spammy sites that are there only to pretend to offer helpful information on niche needs people may have. I know that business model, and it isn’t my thing. I’m primarily a writer, but not the type of writer that will produce carefully keyworded articles that I have no real knowledge about. And few of my sites, which I intend to delete, have any resemblance to that business model.
My sites are all on my personal interests, and I thought I could develop them into useful sites, but guess what. I can’t — there are just too many of them. And the last seven years have been hell on earth for me, because the man who I thought was going to be the love of my life turned out to be my worst nightmare – a strange combination of mutual attraction and attacks on my peace of mind and emotions. From all this I learned the word “narcissist” and now have something to write a gripping memoir about. Oh, that ended last June 29, by the way, and I moved from California to Idaho the following day, and haven’t seen him since.
Anyhow, blog combining was a great success here at Klamath Design. My next job here will be to strip the blog of all advertisements and featured images. This is preparation for a change of theme. With the new theme I’ll add new advertisements, but they’ll be in the theme itself and not in the blog postings.
Remember, web workers, don’t do as I have done. I hold myself out as an object lesson – of an over-extended person who tried hard to do more and in the end found that my energies were depleted and my abilities were frozen. It is better to have a handful of well curated blogs than a long list of blogs that rarely get the attention they deserve.
I made exactly this same decision over this last weekend. I originally wrote one blog and it was quite successful in terms of readers. But as I started to widen the things (my interests) which I blogged about, I found that I started several more blogs over a two year period. Keeping up with supplying all these with unique and original posts became more taxing and posts became predictable. I have decided to limit myself to two blogs (plus other on-line sites) and let my readers decide if they want to read a particular post or not. I am at the moment trying to decide what these two blogs will look like and what to include or simply let go.
I wonder if blogging is on the way out. Definitely, I got in too deep, and so cutting back is the reasonable thing do.