Blogging Lifestyle: How Many Blogs Can You Maintain?

Indeed, how many blogs can you realistically maintain?

This was one of the questions that came up in that nice little workshop of ours with Abe Olandres last 24 November 2007.

I got into blogging in March 2007. I knew nothing about how to start a blog, or what it was for, or what good it was to your everyday life.

Shortly after starting out with my first blog, I suddenly realized that I wanted to have a blog for each of my various interests. Soon enough I had one for music, another for TV and movie reviews, and then another on PC gaming, then one came up on business and marketing, followed by one on cats, another on writing, and it just went on and on.

Which was cool, in a way, since it let me toy around with different kinds of layouts and plug all sorts of widgets, and try out different blog services.

But I soon found out that, at the rate I was blogging- which at the time was only once or twice a
week- there was absolutely no way I could put any decent amount of content into any of them.

Which was why I have just recently made an effort to scrap some blogs, or merge others into larger ones in favor of a more streamlined blogging operation on my part.

The question really, is not "How Many Blogs Can You Maintain?" but rather "How Much Time Can You Put In Maintaining Your Blogs?"

Assuming you have a regular eight-hour job, plus a regular enough life (where you have to have meals, take a shower, do some other day-to-day homestuff, have a social life AND sleep for six hours), you realistically only have time to churn out one, maybe two decent entries a day. And that includes a little bit of adding links, putting in some images, tweaking the layout a little and even reviewing it some.

One or two articles a day, if you have a regular enough life. And that's probably a good day.

So given a regular enough life, you might be able to maintain- comfortably enough- anywhere from maybe two to three blogs. Five is pushing the limits of your human ability and sanity.

If you want to maintain more the aforementioned suggested human limit, well, you can always consider going professional blogging- which might possibly mean forgoing all forms of regular employment in favor of a life dedicated to blogs and blogging.

And while there are many successful professional bloggers- or pro-bloggers- out there, there is (more realistically) a far larger number of aspiring pro-bloggers that have achieved varying degrees of blogging success: from "moderately successful" to "absolute failure".

We go back to our question: "How Many Blogs Can You Maintain?"

The answer: As many as you want to, as long as you make time for it.

Make time for it, man. Starting a blog is easy. But making time for it? It's what separates the serious bloggers from most of everybody else.

Whether you blog weekly, monthly, or daily, remember that blogging does take a certain amount of commitment on your part. The more time and effort you put into it, the more you can reap from it later on.

Cheers, everyone!