In order to have a successful blog, it's important for your blog to have focus. You can't blog effectively on several unrelated topics in the same blog and expect to have many readers. It's unlikely that many potential readers will share your mix of passions -- a blog must focus on only one topic for maximum success.
Let me give you an example. I have a friend Jacque who is a born-again Christian and a passionate gambler. He lives for Jesus and he loves to gamble. He certainly doesn't have any problems with either. He can carry on a discussion without mentioning Jesus in every other sentence. He also doesn't have any problems with gambling. He is not out of control; he's just really into sports and likes to bet on sports. He spends far less than many other people do on their hobbies.
If he were to blog on religion and gambling, it probably wouldn't work very well. He couldn't build a really large readership. There are not a lot of people that are into both and also people involved in one may tend to not like the other. A similar issue is when someone blogs on their business, whatever it is they do that they are hopefully passionate about, and they blog on too many miscellaneous topics or perhaps too many personal details.
Now you certainly can go off topic sometimes.
Recently I adopted a little girl from Russia and you can bet I posted a picture on all my blogs and said, "Hey, I just adopted this wonderful little girl from Russia." However you are not going to read about my personal life every week. If I suddenly have a cold or a sinus infection, I am not going to blog about it, not in a business blog
If you already have a large following, you may be able to go off topic more often if you are still providing lots of content in your core focus.
For example, Bruce Schneier is a very popular blogger on security. He decided that every Friday he would blog about squid. Squid doesn't stand for anything technical in this case: just squid the animal, the creature swimming in the ocean. He didn't cut down on his normal posting. He still posted as much information on his normal topic, security, but he thought it was kind of interesting to blog on something entirely unrelated. He just posted something about squid every Friday. It didn't affect his popularity although there was a lot of talk and comments about it, but it didn't cut down on his readership.
Now Bruce may be a slightly special case, because he is such a popular blogger, but pretty much the same rules would apply regardless. He kept blogging just as much on his main topic as always and just inserted something kind of fun every Friday. It seems to workout fairly well for him.
In general you should stick to your topic. If you want to blog on all kinds of miscellaneous things, you can always start a personal blog in addition to your business blog.
And for over 100 more tips on successful blogging, I invite you to grab your free copy of my ebook Secrets of Successful Blogging at http://www.secretsofsuccessfulblogging.com By Ted Demopoulos, author of "Blogging for Business" and "What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting" |
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