Wendy’s growing her blog network

October 25, 2007 by mireya
Filed under: Notes 

You should definitely read eMoms at home founder, Wendy Piersall’s “What have I learned in 6 weeks of running a mini blog networkeMoms at Home” if you have ANY desires whatsoever of growing your blog into something larger than a singularly focused collection of posts.

Why do I recommend this to you? My friend and former business partner, Joseph Cizek and I had hoped when we launched this site at the beginning of 2007 to immediately be able to have our own mini blog network focusing on 8 areas we had decided were core, necessary “attributes” that would allow for one to get better at doing whatever they wanted to be doing online (or offline for that matter).

We spent a lot of time figuring out our game plan. We spent even more time figuring out how to highly modify our WordPress Themes in order to display our content in unique and interesting ways. We spent a lot of time discussing the focus of the 8 bgAttributes and what sort of content should be generated in each area. We spent a lot of time learning that we wanted to make a distinction between shorter posts, which we decided to call “Notes” and longer posts that would be known as “Articles”. We thought long and hard about how we would monetize the site, and eventually came up with the idea of our very own marketplace called Trader Jim’s.

In case you’re not catching the drift here, we spent a lot of time doing everything but what Wendy and countless others have done with their online endeavors: create content. There’s no way eMoms could even consider creating a mini network of blogs if they didn’t have the bloggers in place creating the content they have been doing for as long as they have been. That was our challenge.

And now the “magic is gone”, and Joseph and I have decided to go our separate ways on the blogging network stuff. We continue to develop on client projects together, as well as collaborating on some potential business ideas. But what we don’t have is a growing thriving blogging network.

And that’s okay. Not everyone can create and maintain such beasts. Wendy is right to be a bit outside of her comfort zone, but I say good for her. Go for the expansion of your sphere of influence, and grow your business, whatever it is. I look forward to her continued success and am very excited that she has problems like whether or not to take on a partner (with money, I imagine!), a loan or equity financing. If you are building a business, you want these sorts of “challenges”. Trust me on that one!

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Comments

  • Pumping out content on a daily basis is a lot of hard work.
    one good aspect of this, I am sure those technical skills you have picked up are useful.

    I will try to keep Google Chat up and running for a chat
  • Yeah, you know they are Mr. Beard. And that, I think brings up another interesting concept: finding what you should be doing online, how often you should post, whether or not making money doing it is a goal. On, and on, and on. For me, I believe that focusing more on the other entrepreneurial projects and simply contributing good writing (if it is) on a relatively regular basis is what's for me. Maybe with continued effort and energy I might have a nice following of like minded folks at some point. Till then, I do enjoy having the site up and running.
  • James, thanks so much for a great article and an interesting read! For all the things I have done with eMoms at Home, there are countless other ideas I have half-pursued over the years and that I let flounder.
    I think when the time is right, you just know to M.O.V.E.

    Also, you will very likely need all that research at some point down the road - I'm a firm believer that nothing happens accidentally! ;)
  • Your post is great for anyone creating a blog network, or blog niche network like myself. I like the fact you stress that you spent most of your time thinking of new ways to improve the blogging experience while it was key to have others fill out the content. With both those things going for you that creates one powerful blog network. Wish you more success, Matt
  • You've hit it right on the head there Matthew: "With both those things going..." And in our particular case (probably a lot of others as well?) it has to be both sides of this particular fence. We wanted to have something that was a bit different than all the other off the shelf stuff, plus we are tinkerers and as such, we have to get into the guts of things, figure them out and make them work for our "vision".

    All of which is great, but like you said you need others to fill out the content (or somehow find the way to do both, which can be hard if you have other commitments to things like working at a job to pay the bills!)

    Checked out your site, pretty wild! I like that you've got a clear focus there. Keep up the great work, and thanks for your comments here!
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