4 Reasons to Start a Second Blog
Time for another fabulous guest blogger. I’ve known Eve of Beautiful Spit Up for a while now and just adore her combo of marketing smarts and wittiness. She recently started a second blog called Mama’s Hungry to write one of her passions, making healthy, naturally delicious food. If you’ve ever considered starting a second blog, this post will give you some food for thought!
First, I have to say thank you to Melissa for having me as a guest here for a second time. I’m always eager to share my knowledge with others who may find it useful. Thanks, Mel!
Most of us have a wide variety of interests that can range anywhere from fashion to crafting. Having interests and hobbies is awesome. It’s what makes us the fascinating people that we are, right? That being said, it is not always in our blog’s best interest to try to include everything we like into one blog.
Take me for example. My first blog, Beautiful Spit Up, is a mommy blog by niche. Its focus is around my family, mainly my 2-year-old son and the drama that ensues while raising a toddler. However, I really love to cook and bake. I’m also a lover of music, books, and technology. Does that mean I should write about all these things on Beautiful Spit Up?
Maybe. Maybe not.
In my case, it made more sense to start a second blog devoted to my passion of cooking and baking. I recently launched Mama’s Hungry, a blog centered around sharing recipes and healthy eating tips for families. I must admit that the decision did not come quickly for me. It’s something that I mulled over for months weeks.
There were many factors that I took into consideration before I started my second blog. Things like existing site traffic, niches, domains, SEO, web design, and social media marketing come to mind. Dang! It can get pretty scary when you try to think of it all at once. I don’t suggest you do that. Instead, I have a few reasons you might want to think about when you’re considering starting a second blog.
4 Reasons To Create a Second Blog
1.) Share a Hobby/Interest (While Keeping Existing Readers)
This is a big one to think about. Do you want to share one of your hobbies or interests without alienating existing readers? A second blog can help you do that. It can also help you nurture that hobby by connecting you with like-minded people. (Yay blogging!)
You know yourself and you know your readers. Take time to think about your hobby and how readers will react when you write about it. Will they like/relate to what they read? This was a big push for me to start Mama’s Hungry. Some of my subscribers cook and bake, but most of them don’t. Why run the risk of driving them away with posts to which they can’t relate? For me, the risk wasn’t worth it, which is why I started Mama’s Hungry.
2.) Promote Yourself/Make Money (While Keeping Existing Readers)
Do you want to promote your consulting services and/or make money from your blog via affiliate links or sponsored posts, but are afraid it’ll turn off your readers? If you rarely write sponsored posts or use affiliate links, it might be a turn off to some readers if suddenly every other post is paid or includes affiliate links. It may be worth the time and effort to start a second blog in order to keep that trust with your existing readers. As they say in public relations, it takes years to build a reputation, but only a minute to ruin it.
3.) To Streamline SEO and Social Media Accounts
Does your current blog have good SEO value? Do your social media accounts match your blog’s niche? If they already do, you may want to consider the following as reasons to start that second blog.
Search Engine Optimization
You already know how to improve SEO with anchor text, and how optimizing your photos can do the same. However, did you know that having too many “topics” or more than one blog niche may actually hurt your existing site’s SEO value?
Google periodically scans your site and determines what category in which to put it. If your site is about 10 very different topics, Google will rank you lower because you aren’t an “expert” on any of those things, you simply write about them on occasion. It would be your benefit to create a second blog and focus your SEO efforts on keywords that relate to the new blog’s niche.
Social Media Marketing
If your Twitter handle is something like @Photography-101-Blog, but you tweet about your son’s pottytraining tantrums, it may be difficult to grow your followers. Of course, you could easily create a second Twitter handle, but why put yourself through the hassle of managing two different accounts? Now, if you create a second blog about motherhood and change your Twitter name to your own name or something like @EverythingEvie instead of a blog name, you can tweet your heart out and not worry about losing followers. Just don’t forget to follow Melissa’s Twitter name change checklist when you do!
4.) Noticeable Trends in Traffic and/or Readership
If you’re anything like me, you take some time out of each week to review your Google Analytics. If you don’t currently run Google Analytics on your blog, go do it now. Seriously, it’s THAT important. Go now. I’ll wait.
Google Analytics is Your BFF
Now that you’re back, I can tell you how analytics can be your friend when it comes to knowing who’s reading your blog. Analytics can tell you exactly from where visitors to your blog were referred and what posts they spent the most time reading. Being armed with this information means that you can make changes to your blog accordingly. Awesome, right?
For example, I noticed that on Beautiful Spit Up many of my recipe posts were being viewed by new visitors, meaning people who had never been to my blog before. The posts weren’t getting a lot of attention by my regular readers. When I dug deeper into the data, I found that the top referral site for new visitors was Foodbuzz.com, a site I used to share my recipe posts and virtually meet other foodies. Interesting. Digging even deeper, I realized that these new visitors were ONLY interested in the foodie posts, not the posts about my son smearing poop on the hardwood floors. Double interesting. (the data, not the poop)
If existing readers didn’t read the recipes and new readers only read the recipes, it made sense to just separate the two. So you see, Google Analytics really opened my eyes to reader trends that allowed me to make the decision to start Mama’s Hungry. I highly recommend reviewing your analytics before starting a second blog, and periodically as well while we’re on the topic!
Although I’m sure there are dozens more reasons to start a second blog, these four are what helped me decide to create my food blog. If you’re on the fence about whether or not you should start a second blog, I hope this post helps you.
Eve Zafiropoulo (@EverythingEvie on Twitter) is a full-time marketing manager and has a B.S. in Public Relations and an M.S. in Advertising. She has a 2-year-old son and when she’s not busy blogging at Beautiful Spit Up or cooking something awesome on Mama’s Hungry, she can be found running around with her husband and son, drinking iced coffee or lurking on Facebook.
