When I made the commitment back in late 2015 to maintain this site’s blog on a regular, daily basis, I had the goal of using it as the hub for most everything I was writing. At least everything that wasn’t produced specifically for another site or outlet. The goal was to build up my own readership on my own site for the purpose of, if you’ll excuse my using this phrase, building up my own brand.

Over the last two years that’s meant this site has been home to my movie marketing recap columns, opinions on news in the content marketing industry, a bit of fiction and more.

Occasionally, including very recently, I wonder if that mix makes sense. I’ve already made the decision to shift most all my movie-related writing over to CinematicSlant. Here’s the rest of my thought process, transcribed almost directly from the internal dialogue I had with myself:

OK, CinematicSlant has movies. So what if I used LinkedIn for industry news only. Then I could write about music on Tumblr and put fiction on Wattpad. That would clean things up here quite nicely. But then what’s left here? Just the posts about looking for work, living the freelance life and so on. Is that enough? How would that impact my goal of building up my own profile? Is that enough to keep traffic from falling precipitously? How would I connect those profiles to a call-to-action to hire me?

Once I start slicing and dicing content, it has the potential to never stop. The next step after what’s above would be to say “Well my job search-related posts should go on Medium as a series” and soon I’m left with little to nothing that’s happening on-domain.

So what makes the most sense? We live in a distributed media world, so am I handicapping myself by adhering to a hub-and-spoke content strategy for myself? Or am I building up a strong, dependable presence that will serve me well in the long run because I committed to owning my stuff? Should I go back to writing quick, one-paragraph posts here when I don’t have a load of thoughts but want to share something?

This month marks two years since that recommitment to publish regularly on this site. So it’s as good a time as any to shake things up a bit and do some experimentation. If there are changes to be made, I’ll share what they are and the logic behind them here. At least most all platforms now allow for easy exporting of material, so if this goes wildly and completely wrong I can do some patchwork and fix things up.

Let’s see what happens…

1 Comment

  1. I often wonder the same thoughts about my blogs. I started off with spudart.org in 2001. At work we started to dip our toes more into digital publishing and ebooks, so I started my own blog about digital publishing. My third blog is a baseball blog. And then a 4th is for christian topics. Perhaps I should keep all these topics on one site, my original one on spudart.org.

    I do the same thing with my Twitter accounts, only worse. At one point I had about 12 active Twitter accounts (with dozens more that I rarely used).

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