Duncan Riley has been making a whole bunch of predictions for 2009 over on the Inquisitr blog, many of them seem quite likely, a few seem fanciful, and a couple are a bit ‘yeh sure Duncan’. One of the predictions which really got me thinking was ‘2009 Will Be The Year of the Uber Blog‘.
The reason this article / prediction got me thinking is that I have a number of blogs that I work on, and often the lines blur as to where some things should be published, and often there are news / press release items sent to us that we don’t really fit any of our current publications but we still want to publish them
Also, with I’m With The Band we have recently arrived at a tipping point where we’ve kind of out grown the mainly Newcastle based focus that we’ve been publishing for the last couple of years. Frankly there’s just not enough music news in Newcastle to sustain the site.
So what do we do?
At this point in time I’m thinking I might start merging the sites into one large blog, but that leaves me with a tough decision, who loses their domain, identity, brand….or alternatively do I set up a new domain name and push the visitors from all of the other sites across to the new domain name?
Based on daily traffic numbers, subscribers, and page rank, I’m With The Band would be the site that stays put, with Cool & Stuff and the other sites directing their traffic over to I’m With The Band. This would be the simplest route to take as all I would need to do is set up the new categories on I’m With The Band and then do an announcement and re-direct.
The only thing that might stop it from working properly is that I don’t think the design and home page of I’m With The Band can take any more categories without a solid re-design.
To set up a new domain name is reasonably easy, come up with a cool name (hope it’s actually available) and then set up the actual website / cms, point the other existing domains (IWTB, C&S, etc.) at the new domain, and hopefully all the traffic follows the re-direction…
Sounds easy hey?
In reality I’d be starting a website from scratch, ie. no traffic, no search terms, no page rank, nothing at all. If all went well it would inherit the traffic from I’m With The Band, and Cool & Stuff, if it didn’t go well and you alienated all the readers and subscribers, well you’re totally shafted.
Quite the conundrum indeed.
What do you think I should do?