Monday, July 24, 2006

Re-Knitting My Podcast and Blogs

Darren over at ProBlogger.com has started a writing project, “what I’d do differently if I had to start my blog again?”. This post is my response to that question.

Since one of my goals of starting my knitting podcast, Knitting News Cast, was to give me one of several revenue streams in order to be self-employed while enjoying my hobby of knitting, I've recently been thinking about how I could do this. I really have enjoyed doing the podcast and finding the knitting news content for my website and podcast, but it takes up a lot of time. I spend an hour or so a day reading blogs and doing other research for the show. Then every other weekend I spend all day Sunday doing the podcast. I'm usually happy with the final result. I feel like each podcast gets better then the last one and I feel more and more comfortable doing them.

The first thing I'd do differently is I would have created my blogs on WordPad hosted on my own domain rather then use Blogger. With Blogger, I can't label my posts with different categories like knitting, crochet, yarn, podcast, news, knitting book reviews, free knitting patterns, etc. Also, since the blogs reside on Blogger, I don't get the benefit of all my visitors and pages views being reflected together. So there isn't a complete total picture of how I'm doing.

The second thing I'd do differently is I would have combined all my different blogs together. I have Rhonda's Knitting which is a personal knitting blog, Knitting News Cast, which is my podcast blog, KNC News, which is my knitting news feed, and my Knitting News Cast website. If I had combined all of these different blogs I'd have had a much richer base of content that would have satisfied many more types of knitters. I'd at least would have each on my website. Maybe I'd keep the personal blog separate and combine the podcast and news feed on the website.

Finally, the last thing I'd do differently, is I'd have a game plan on how to best use these blogs and my podcast to inform and entertain knitters, while being able to earn enough money to at least cover my costs (domain name, hosting, knitting magazines, knitting books, yarn, etc.) and at best make a decent living so I could quit my day job and get other opportunities like writing knitting books and patterns. And, of course, I’d get more knitting time!

Now back to our regularly schedule knitting adventures!

5 comments:

Mama Duck said...

You can still combine them on your own domain, you know ;). I do like having my own site, without the constraints of blogger or anything else like that. I also participated in this project - if you want to peek - http://lilduckduck.com/archive/187

Unknown said...

Most people upon hindsight want hosted domains instead of Blogger. The making money part of the game plan will be tough.

Flipping Heck said...

You could get a domain name, install wordpress and then migrate your entire Blogger blog to it, there's an excellent tutorial at http://catsutorials.catsudon.org/?p=15.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like you have a passion! That's fabulous that you are blogging and podcasting. I wish you well as you figure out how you are going to streamline over time!

Peter @ Enviroman said...

"With Blogger, I can't label my posts with different categories like knitting, crochet, yarn, podcast, news, knitting book reviews, free knitting patterns, etc."

You can use workarounds. See Creating categories step-by-step
Categories - Simple Method
Categories - Easy Method