Continuing on from Part 1 and Part 2, let’s talk about another mistake people make trying to be big. First, a real world example.

You want a loving relationship, it’s a serious goal in your life and lucky you…there is a girl/guy you like and you “think” this person returns the feelings! This isn’t a passing fancy – this person has gotten under your skin and seems like a keeper but there is just one small problem. You’re shy, insecure, etc. and you can’t tell this person who means the world to you how much they mean to you. Perhaps you are afraid of losing them completely – what if you are wrong and they don’t return the feelings? Being human you desire companionship, feeling needed, wanted, etc. so you date other people. Since you are dating other people, the person you really are interested in thinks you aren’t interested in them, so they start dating other people. The entire thing is thrown off track. What’s the way to fix this mess and get the person you really want? Well, there is only one way a relationship gets off the ground – focusing on each other. The dates would have to stop, instead of turning to other people turning to each other and solving things together would be the key and of course that good ole ability to communicate is a fundamental necessity for any type of relationship. If you’re allowing other people to think you have an interest in them (when your true interest is elsewhere) and allowing them to build feelings for you, guess what? You aren’t 100% vested in the one you really want and it will fail.

Let’s apply this to blogging. You want to be “big” in the blogging world and you have a topic you thoroughly enjoy talking about – technology. You love all types of technology and you try your best to cover it all. You also love playing games and although games are a type of technology they would probably be better separate so you start a gaming blog. You are very passionate about what’s going on with politics due to the upcoming election and you want to start discussions about important issues so you also have a political blog. None of these blogs have very much traffic and although passionate about these topics it is a challenge to properly update all the blogs so they are competitive with existing blogs in their niche.

Let’s compare the two situations: if you like a guy/girl but are dating other people you aren’t pulling the person you really want closer to you (and building the relationship to a “bigger” status) you are pushing the person away. If you have a blog you are passionate about that happens to cover a large span of areas (technology) it’s hard to maintain that one blog…adding others will push you further away from your desire to be “big” because of the challenge in solely authoring, updating and maintaining the quality all the blogs would need to scale to be “big”. The technology blog has a lesser chance of being big because you aren’t 100% vested in it…just like you weren’t 100% vested in the person you really wanted to be with.

I see this all the time – people will want to be “big” with their blogs but they aren’t 100% vested in it. Put your energies in one blog, make it successful then you’ll have more opportunities to achieve your other goals. For example, once your first blog has made it “big” (you have the traffic and income you want) you can hire quality authors and then focus on the next one….and guess what? Since you have an audience already you can use your first blog to give exposure to the second one. If you want to be “big” having three average blogs won’t cut it.

There are a couple of other underlying issues in the scenarios I chose…we’ll cover them all one by one.