Month: May 2010

I have a question for those of you who maintain more than one blog, as I do.

As many of you know:

• I write regularly for Inc.com on the Start-Up Toolkit blog.
• I have with the Harbrooke Group blog for my business.
• This blog is for personal observations, and more for friends, though it is open to all.

I was recently talking with a client who also blogs for a major magazine as well as having a blog for her business, and we were exploring the ins and outs of when to link to which blog. We were discussing this issue, and I suggested we put our collective questions out to my audience.

Here are our questions:

1. If we’re writing about a topic we’ve covered on both our own personal blog and the magazine’s blog, when is it okay to reference one of our personal blogs on our magazine blog? Is that too self-promotional?
2. If we’re able to cross post items to both our own blog and the magazine at the same time (I’m not – I have to wait, per my contract), do we promote the magazine version or our site’s version on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.? What’s the difference, if you’ve got the exact same content?

The core issue here: as the web changes, do we still need to promote our  ‘home base’  even though people can find us from anywhere (our blog, magazine, Facebook, Linkedin, or wherever)?

Another caveat is that when we interview someone for our magazine blogs, they’re more interested in a link to the magazine’s site because of the visibility. However, the advantages of our own sites are that we can provide more material and different angles than we can fit on our magazine blogs.

There’s the idea of a “platform” here – a place to gather an audience outside of the magazine site – potentially for advertising, potentially for showing an audience to a publisher. (I may yet write a book one day.) Are we losing those opportunities if we point all the traffic to the magazine blog?

I tell my clients – “put stuff out there to be shared – as long as people know it came from you, who cares where they find it?” This is usually in the context of things like YouTube videos or other digital assets. Does the same hold for blogging?  Can we just put our stuff out there knowing people will know who we are in 2010?