Weekend Coffee Share: In Which I Finally have a Good Week

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I’m feeling more myself this weekend than I have in a couple of months. Things have mostly settled down in the family sphere, even though we STILL haven’t got all the boxes unpacked. I’ve almost got a huge work project off my plate. Fall is coming, but it isn’t here yet and I have a week or two before I really have to start gearing up. Life is good.

And I’d tell you I am pondering where to go with my blogging from here. A certain amount of my blogwriting has to be pop-culture related because my blog Sourcerer is all pop culture, all the time. But I have other interests, and things I’d like to write about that don’t fit there.  And some those other interests are political.

I could publish political things here, but I’m not sure it really fits here, either. Not sure how well it would be received, and really, this blog has been so all over the map over the last couple of years, I’m not sure about shifting the focus *yet* again.

I’m also questioning the wisdom of having two blogs on WordPress.com. WordPress is working well for Sourcerer, but here’s the thing. Because I built a blog specifically for contributors and separated the personal one, I have limits to work within here.

I’m not able to generate slow and steady audience growth by posting frequently here. Once a week, and the occasional piece that I either hammer out quickly or take a couple of weeks to finish, is about all I can manage.

I’ve got no search traffic, because I’ve never been good at writing for searches, and this blog in particular, up to this point, hasn’t let itself very well to content that people are actually using Google to find.

Getty stock image.

What this means, in practical terms, is that I get readers from two places: From the #WeekendCoffeeShare linkup, and from sharing things I post here with friends. The potential audience for any given post here is only 25-50. I’ve had much better days than that, but never consistently, and not since I cut back to once-a-week posting.

This blog is hampered by the fact that every like I give and every comment I leave leads people to Sourcerer. That’s by design, because growing that blog is my top priority. But the ability to leave easy links when you interact on other blogs is one of the biggest benefits of blogging on WordPress. And using two separate accounts doesn’t work for me, because then I have to constantly be checking both accounts for notifications.

So, in short, I’m questioning the wisdom of having two blogs on WordPress, and I’m thinking about opportunity cost. I can generate 25 to 50 page views every Saturday no matter where I do the posting I’m doing on Just Gene’O, and a blog on another network, or just on the Internet as a whole, might mean the potential to find readers who would never otherwise find us here.

I’m thinking about standing up either a self-hosted site or a blogger blog in the late fall when the back-to-school madness settles down. Not bringing the complete archives with me. Just the stuff I need to keep my projects going.

But I’m only thinking about it at this point, and in the meantime, I’m wanting, very badly, to write about the problems of the U.S. penal system, various forms of privilege, and some other social/activist issues. So you may see an uptick in politically-oriented posts from me here.

Happy weekend! Don’t forget to add your coffee post to the linkup at Part Time Monster and share it with #WeekendCoffeeShare on Twitter.