Hard choices

If you’re like me and have been running several blogs for a while you find that eventually there comes a time when you have to look at everything that you’ve been working on and decide if all the effort is still worth it.  Are these blogs still satisfying to you and your readers?  If they were monetized, are they making you any money and most importantly, do you still have the passion on the topic that you had when you started?

If the answer to the first two questions is no, then you have to ask yourself what you need to do to change the way things are working.  Do you need to put more time and effort into posts, or is it that you just need to go find yourself a few new affiliate partners?  If your page rank is dropping, do you just need to generate more inbound links, or have you managed to get in with what Google considers to be the “wrong crowd?”  Define the issues and then tackle the problems.

If the answer to the third question is either “no” or “I’m not sure” then it’s probably time to move on to other things.  if the blog in question can handle a different type of content, just start writing what inspires you.  You may lose a reader or two, but in the end you will gain more than you lost.  If the blog is completely niche and you find that you can’t easily move on to other things, then it’s most likely time to put up an “out of business” sign, and maybe load it down with advertising until the domain expires.

This is the unfortunate position I find myself in at the moment.  I’ve got a trio of blogs, one of which I’ve been maintaining for years.  Each just dropped to a PR2 or below and none of them holds my interest any longer.  One can be incorporated into this blog without much of a hitch, one already has been, but the last…  Well…  It’s just gonna have to go.

There’s no way I can re purpose it or move on to something else with it.  it doesn’t get enough traffic to warrant leaving it dormant until it expires, because it won’t make me a penny.  I can’t think of anything better to do with it than to milk the last few posts I can out of it, then let it die gracefully, because in the end, it’s already terminal.  i have no passion for the subject any longer.

That of course brings us to this particular corner of the web.  This blog is taking on aspects of the other two that I’m incorporating here.  I think that in the end this will be a benefit to everyone, because I’ll have more content to post, more variety of topics and a lot more relevant information (along with a  few asides.)  I see a benefit, and its got me excited.  That means I’ll write more, and that’s a good thing!

Do take some time and analyze your current blogs every now and again.  Beating a dead horse only prolongs the inevitable, and while you’re busy beating it, others may be falling by the wayside as well.

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