This is an ongoing series of posts about making blogs better. I’ll take a look at what “experts” say we bloggers should be doing to attract more readers and make our blogs more user-friendly, and then I’ll throw in my take. Your input is always welcome, because I’d love to know what you think, especially if you’ve had any successes or failures with a specific topic.

I recently read an article that suggested the key to building a big audience is focusing on a single topic.

I missed that memo when I started this blog, so I ended up going a different route.  For a couple of years now, the subtitle to my blog was, “Fighting Double Standards and Poor Grammar Since 2004.”

I do a good bit of posts on politics, which often involves double standards of one kind or another, and poor grammar is one of my biggest pet peeves. So I thought that would be a funny way to set the blog apart right from the start.

Then, tags came along. I went into my posts and found all of them that were categorized with “double standards” and “grammar” and tagged them that way as well.

But as I added tags to other posts — they’re not all tagged by a long shot, but I’m slowly making progress — something became crystal clear in a hurry: double standards and grammar make up a very small amount of the subject matter.

The Saturday Six and Sunday Seven generate a good deal of traffic, even if they don’t generate as many comments each week as they used to. But I was afraid that focusing on those might make people think that’s all I post.

While the Saturday Six claims many, many more posts than double standards and grammar combined, I want people to drop by all week, not just on weekends, and I want them to read the variety of topics I talk about, not just those little memes.

The next thing I realized was that TV was a major subject. That makes sense, though I didn’t really realize it at the time. I write a lot about TV, since that’s the industry in which I work. So that seemed to be a good subject that could get a little more focus.

My tagline then became:

Thoughts on TV, Double Standards and Poor Grammar

So for those of you who noticed, that’s why that minor change happened.

But if I were to look back over how this blog has gone for its nearly six years, this “expert” would have had me focus on TV and little else. Maybe I could have gotten away with doing the weekend memes if they always focused on television or media as well, but then I don’t think I could have done nearly as many of them as I‘ve managed to generate if I was restricted to such a narrow focus.

If you’re into cooking and you want to start a blog all about cooking, that’s a great idea, and there are plenty of people out there with varying levels of culinary ability who might give you a try.

If I’m not particularly interested in cooking, I probably won’t read very much of what you have to say. If I’m searching for a particular recipe, and you feature that one, I might end up at your blog to use it. And if the recipe turns out as good as you say it will, I might come back to see if there are any other recipes I think I won’t butcher.

But even so, you won’t be a regular read of mine, because overall, I’m not all that interested in cooking.

It would be next to impossible for me to write about one single topic all the time and still keep this blog interesting. Despite all of the blogs I’ve done on politics, I’m not really that interested in politics. What interests me is the double standards and bad logic that make up so many of the political debates. I could have written about that and nothing else, but I don’t think the blog would have lasted five years that way.

I could have focused solely on TV, but then since I work in it, I come home from a bad day at the office and the last thing I want to even think about is TV. That would have been a good reason why my own blog would have been, on those days, a total turnoff. That doesn’t seem to be a good way to guarantee success from the blogger’s point of view.

One of the things I like about the new design of this blog is the category bar near the top of every page. Though I have many more than five categories, I am able to highlight five that I think I write best about: politics, double standards, religion, television and grammar. No, it’s not one single topic, but these are the ones where I think I’ve written some good pieces.

The folks who come for the weekend memes can always find those quickly enough in the “featured” section right on the front page. But I intentionally put other stories there, too, because I want first-time visitors to know there’s a lot more here than just one single topic.

Now it’s your turn: Did you set out to make your blog focus on one single topic? If so, have you been absolutely faithful to that one single topic, or do you at least occasionally stray to different topics? If you do focus on one general theme, how in the world do you pull it off? I’d really love to know your secret!

As a reader, do you prefer blogs where you get one single topic or theme, or do you like variety?