What to do with a spare blog?

July 13, 2009 4:15 AM

I've got a spare blogger blog ('domainname'.blogspot.com) with the same name as a wordpress blog('samedomainname'.com).... what could i do with it? bonus points for income generation.

I bought a domain and slapped wordpress onto it where I shall be posting an inspirational image of a document (say... a book cover) per day.
i got a gmail account to work as a spam filter for the domain email and, obviously, i get a free blogger account to go with it.

what can i do with this blogger account that could be linked / unlinked with this main blog? devblog? best of blog? something else? could I make money from this second blog? should i just not use it?

posted by gonzo_ID to computers & internet (4 comments total)

The only reason to use domainname.blogspot.com would be because blogspot provides some bonus features not available on your stand-alone domain. I doubt that domain.blogspot.com would get any better "google juice" than domain.com, by simple fact it's hosted on blogspot, but I don't know. Blogspot supports google's adsense, but I assume you can weave that into your stand-alone site as well.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:16 AM on July 13

Er, another reason to use domain.blogspot.com would be to have some spin-off, like you mentioned (devblog, best of blog). Not knowing anything about your main project beyond what you've stated, it sounds like the main project is simple and straight-forward enough that a "best of" would be odd (unless you start getting a decent readership/bunch of commenters, and then pick their apparent favorite of the week), and I don't know what sort of development would go on for the main blog that would make a devblog that important/ interesting/ money generating.

FYI: I'm writing most of this from the view of a potential reader and webdev hobbiest (at best), not an active developer.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:25 AM on July 13

You put a single post there that says "This blog about [whatever] now lives at [link.com]." and maybe a representative image, and then forget about it.

If you're trying to make a successful or popular blog you do not want to fragment your viewers, you want to send them to one place. It'll be less hassle for you to manage (very important if you're doing a daily blog). It will be less confusing to your visitors. And it will promote discussion and comments since people will be virtually gathered in one place.

If you want to start another blog on a different subject then create a new blogspot blog. Don't reuse the same name since people searching for [blogname] will be looking for the one about books, not the one about monkeys. (or whatever)
posted by Ookseer at 11:11 AM on July 13

Blogger can use your domain name, so you can use all the blogger features while the blog lives on samedommain.com... unless you have some layout chops it will still look like a blogger blog, but a lot of people seem to prefer this for blogger/wordpress hosted services.
posted by shownomercy at 1:04 PM on July 13