One of the biggest problems I'm finding is that, as a single-person blog "networker", it's impossible to do everything that needs to be done on a regular, daily basis. If you want to run custom templates and add non-blog web pages, guides, etc., it's nearly impossible to run it all by yourself. And that's just for a single, full-fledged hybrid blog-website. So what if you want to publish several blogs? Hoo boy. Fuggedabout it? (Sorry, watching too much TV.)

So while I'm trying to do all the infrastructure work of setting up a new blogsite, I'm neglecting writing for other blogs. Some of my blogs haven't seen a post in over a month, and it gets kind of frustrating. So what can you do to manage multiple blogs? Here are a few tips, some of which I've already implemented and others which I am in the process of doing.

1. Use a blog platform that supports categories and combine related blogs together. I used WordPress to combine my 4 old cooking blogs that were on the Blogger.com platform into a single blogsite (which I've neglected for the past week because I spent so much time setting up this new BlogSpinner site). The main reason this saves you time is purely psychological. If you have a blog with categories, it's probably easier to come up with 2-3 posts a day and feel as if you accomplished something significant. On the other hand, if you are running one blog per topic, then it's much harder to come up with 2 posts per day because obviously that's a lot more daily writing. What's more, combining your related blogs together, if appropriate, will likely result in higher single-blog traffic, which may increase your Google AdSense earnings per click (based on "smart pricing" rules). In other words, it's better to have a single blog with categorized posts that gets, say, 500 pageviews per day than 5 related but separate blogs that each get 100 pageviews per day.
2. Use a single blogging client to write and post all your entries with ease. I've tried Blogger.com's plugin for Microsoft Word. It's easy to install and use, but it didn't jibe with the way I write my blogs. What's more, I really love Zoundry's BlogWriter, which is perfect for my multi-blog, multi-platform blogging style. BlogWriter makes it easy to add Technorati-style tags to categorize your posts for a number of blog directories. I've also got BlogWriter set up to manage about 6 different blog accounts on three different platforms (Blogger.com, WordPress, MovableType). In fact, I had plans to add platforms like TextPattern as well, but that support is still in the beta stage. (Lawrence, if you're reading this, sorry. I'll contact you guys shortly to help beta-test.)
3. Hook up with some other bloggers you admire and create your own blog network. Seriously. This seems to have worked for a number of high-profile bloggers out there. While a blog network usually still uses multiple domain names, the synergy of a network probably means higher traffic for each blog than if each blog were an entity unto itself. This may reduce the massive effort required to boost your blog traffic. (But it still takes time.)
4. Hire some college students as apprentice writers. This means you can free up some time for webmastering tasks. You may be able to work out a deal with a college English, History, or Marketing department to give an apprentice (i.e., unpaid) writer a course credit to blog for you for a semester. Make sure you plan out what topics you want covered, and what kind of writing style, and present that to the department head. If you're lucky, you may find a writer like my brother, who is able, at the drop of a hat, to write pretty much any passage in the style of Papa Hemingway or some other classic writers. Better yet, find one that writes like you do.
5. Write a custom PHP+mySQL-driven application that uses AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) and lets you manage all of your blogs. Or hire a college computer science student to tweak the open source code of WordPress for you. This frees you up to focus on the writing aspect of blogmastering (once the application is ready).
6. BONUS TIP: Hook up special electrodes to your brain. Plug the other end of the electrodes into a special USB connector that in turn plugs in to your custom AJAX application (tip 5) and automatically downloads all of your thoughts, formats them into blog entries, and posts them on a custom schedule that you can simply think of and which will be automatically implemented. In fact, I'm working on this wondrous application right now. Except that it's all in my head :D

Note: This post is a continuation of a series on BlogSpinner V1.0 blog. Here is MultiBlogging Techniques Review Part III.

(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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