Darren at Problogger posted a blog case study on the Kiddley blogs, and something he worte in his post caught my eye:

I love the way that Claire and Phil are expanding their blogging by picking related topics and are leveraging previous success to drive traffic to their new blogs. I wish that I’d done this in my early days of commercial blogging instead of picking a wide array of topics.

I’m working on three blogs right now, all of which work off of the same core concept. And I’ve actually been a bit worried about this.

In the past, I’ve always picked a blog’s topic based more on the money-making potential of the niche. So needless to say, most of my blogs are not related. Like Darren, I have a wide array of topics. And (sadly), I could take or leave most of them (well, except for the fact that they do make me money).

So this time around, I’m doing something different. These three blogs all tackle a different aspect of the same area of interest. They are all on related topics.

Unfortunately, it’s not like I’m starting smart with them - I’m not “leveraging prevous success to drive traffic”, since I don’t have any existing blogs in this topic area.

Anyway, here’s my worry. Am I splitting things up too finely?

Each blog has a different “angle”. Every day, I get clearer on how I envision these blogs, their ultimate purpose, so to speak.

But still, they are blogs that all fall within one broader topic.

And I’ve been asking myself, should I just put all of this together in one blog?

Does it make sense to have three separate blogs?

But I can definitely see the advantages of having blogs about related topics:

1. They can drive traffic to each other.

2. I can definitely promote all of them at the same time.

3. Writing content for one blog will definitely help trigger ideas for content for the others.

And in this case, each one has a different angle. They’ll attract different core groups of visitors, although I expect there might be some overlap.

I really want to go ahead with these blogs. I’ve bought their domain names, and have been working on the content for the first one.

So I’m going to stand firm. I’ve decided. Yes, it is a good thing to have blogs on related topics and no, it doesn’t make sense to jam all of it into one blog.

There. I feel much better now.

(Of course, this doesn’t even address the BIG question that sometimes has me quaking in my boots. And that is, What on earth am I even thinking, trying to do something like this??? But that, well, that is for another post, another time.)