Does Your Hobby Blog Eclipse Your Pro Blog?

dangers of assuming on freelance jobsby Joe Wallace

If your hobby blog is overtaking your professional blog, getting more hits and more attention, ask yourself a couple of important questions. After all, we all want our pro blogs to do well and make money–but some people find their pro blogs lagging behind the ones they do for fun.

And there lies the answer, I suspect.

Hobby blogs are often more informal, more fun to read, and definitely more fun to write than pro blogs. I think pro blogs could take a lesson here–at least the ones that don’t seem to be able to compete. I run Turntabling.net, which is a lot more snarky, informal and goofy than Freelance-Zone.com. While Turntabling isn’t a hobby blog per se–I do try to earn some coin on it–I don’t worry nearly as much about content there because it’s far more opinionated and as such is easier to write. While there are opinions here, I find striking a balance between information and opinion more crucial to the success of FZ in general.

If your hobby blog is outpacing your pro blog, ask a few questions of your work:

  • What makes the hobby blog fun to read? What is it you do there that you DON’T do on the pro blog?
  • Is your pro blogging work too long? Too densely packed with information? Or is it “skimmable”?
  • What is the central idea of your pro blog? Can you sum it up in two sentences or less?
  • Look at the visual presentation of your pro blog. Is it easy on the eyes? Or is it a cluttery mess?
  • Give your blog the Who Cares? test for all your most recent posts. The So What? test is also a good one.

These are only a few of the things you can try, I’ll cover some additional ways to give your pro blog a good, hard look in another post.