Sometime last year I decided I wanted to separate my interests onto different blogs: one for sailing, one for gardening, one for favorite words, one for my career, and one for my reading project. I’m not sure why I did this. I think I wanted to be able to give them all different looks. I really loved the theme I chose for my sailing blog, for example. I think I also wanted to give followers a chance to follow a specific topic rather than my whole mess of flitting posts.
What ended up happening, though, was that I stopped writing. I felt segmented. I spread my (sparse) posts widely but rarely went deep. Each time I wrote something, I wondered which blog to put it on. When I switched jobs I had to remember all the places to update my bio. I had all these custom domains and subdomains to maintain and renew.
Having multiple blogs is overly complicated in an area of my life that I want to be complication-free. Blogging is my hobby, for pete’s sake. WordPress allows me to categorize for when I want to look at a stream of garden or sailing posts. There is no need for me to manage six different blogs.
So, as with many areas of my life, like switching to a tiny purse, I’m paring down. Decluttering. From now on, other than my Andrea Reads America project writeups, I’m moving all my writing back to Butterfly Mind.
I feel lighter having made this choice. It means I have a lot fewer decisions I have to make each time I sit down to write. Plus it gives me a winter project.
This January when I’m craving green leaves and bright flowers, I can turn my attention to cultivating my blog: to transplanting content, pruning categories, and maybe even changing the look of my site. Oh, and writing. I’m excited about my blog again for the first time in a quite a while.
Butterfly Mind 
I love it!
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It happens to me too even when I have just 2 blogs, one for my writing stuff and the other for the photos that I take. I wanted to merge both blogs but I didn’t know how to do it. If wordpress allows the bloggers to create and maintain multiple blogs under the single blog address, this would never happen to anyone and people may continue blogging their multiple interests. Isn’t it?
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That’s exactly what’s possible with categories on WordPress! 🙂
https://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates
These archives act as their own streams and show only the categorized posts.
If you have something else in mind, I would love to hear about it!
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I agree, it will be easier for you and for your readers !
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Thank you for this post. I am struggling with the same issue even though I only have two blogs. When I originally split them I told myself that it was better for my readers. I don’t know why I thought that as I have very few readers for either blog. Deep down it was because one blog was connected to my FB account which meant that all of my work colleagues would be able to read everything I wrote. I don’t write about them of course. I was worried about being vulnerable. My second blog is not connected to any social media accounts so I feel like I can say whatever I like.
Nevertheless, my two blogs have very connected themes (I’m really only interested in writing about a few things) so I could easily combine them if I knew how to do this without losing my precious followers.
If anyone has any advice on this, I’d be glad to hear it.
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Love it!
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So glad you posted this, Andrea. I was just thinking ‘you know, maybe I should split my blog like that Andrea Bagley does’ – I too have many interests and have been sticking to one subject, at the expense of writing, sometimes, and at the expense of expressing myself. My worry was that I’d end up stressed trying to blog enough in each space to keep them going. You’re absolutely right – one blog, many categories. Keep writing and keep the strength! Thanks for your sage words x
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Until a few months ago I had two photography blogs, one for posting what I thought people wanted to see and one for posting what I personally liked. *eyeroll* I decided to create a completely new photo blog, taking over some of my images that I personally liked best, and now I post what I feel passionate about. Feels so much better.
I think you’ll enjoy your January activities and the result!
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