Why We Decided To Split Our Blog In Two

As readers of our blog have likely noticed, we have greatly increased our blog posting frequency over the past couple months.  We hoped that this renewed dedication to blogging would help our inbound marketing efforts with better organic search rankings, increased inbound links from other blogs, more exposure across social networks, greater mind share, and a larger number of subscribers.

Thus far, our efforts have been extremely successful in almost all of those facets.  We've seen our organic search traffic more than triple, reached tens of thousands of new people, had our posts linked to from dozens of other poplar blogs and publications, experienced an increase in traffic from Twitter and other social networks, achieved some recognition as a leader in jQuery techniques, and more.  However, our subscriber count has stayed rather stagnant, with only a slight increase of about 15%.

At first, we wondered if perhaps our increased frequency was causing people to unsubscribe?  Quickly, we recognized that many of our favorite blogs also post daily, so we doubted that frequency was a deterrent.  Also, upon looking at the Feedburner statistics, we saw that the main issue was a lack of new subscribers rather than an increase in unsubscribers (at least that meant our current subscribers were enjoying what we write!).

We then took a look at our actual blog content to see if we could gleam any insights from our actual writing.  It quickly became apparent that our posts varied, almost exactly 50/50, between Internet marketing topics and in depth web development techniques. 

As a non-developer, I can attest to the fact that no matter how interesting I found a marketing post, if it was sandwiched between posts about smarty image resizing and jQuery calendars, that I likely would not subscribe to that overall blog and would rather just hope to stumble upon it again sometime in the future.

By not focusing our blog on a specific niche, we were losing out on building our subscriber count for people interested in only that specific topic.  However, while we certainly wanted to increase that subscriber number, we couldn't sacrifice one of our niches, as both are important to our company and its continued growth. 

Half of our business is with folks who look to us for programming expertise and use our CMS for designers and ad agencies.  While the other half is with end-clients who come to us for our Internet Marketing and web design knowledge to build and leverage their own web presences.

That is when we came up with the solution to divide our blog into two separate blogs: an Internet Marketing Blog and a Web Development Blog.  That way, all of our new organic and inbound traffic would land on the blog that most interests them, be able to browse that niche's content, and have the ability to subscribe to just that blog.  Also, understanding that there are some renaissance men out there, like Joel, who are equally interested in development and marketing, we'll allow people to continue to be able to read and subscribe to the "Full Blog."

We're interested to see how this experiment evolves and it if it affects our subscriber count and perhaps even our inbound links, as people read more links when presented with a full blog of related content to digest.

Now, what you've all been waiting for: if you want to specialize your feed from us, feel free to choose from below.  Thanks for your continued support!  Let us know your thoughts on this strategy in the comments and if this change is likely to affect whether or not you subscribe.

Internet Marketing Blog Subscription

Web Development Blog Subscription 

For more information on business blogging, check out our series on blogging for business.