The drawbacks of a multi-blog empire

Early Friday morning, I was musing:

considering pros and cons of streaming empoprises blogs to facebook, linkedin, plaxo.

For those who aren't familiar with the Empoprises blogs, this is actually a series of four blogs that I publish. Unlike my personal blog, which is specifically advertised as "all-encompassing," each of the Empoprises blogs is devoted to a specific topic.

• Empoprise-BI (this blog) is devoted to business.


• Empoprise-MU is devoted to music.


• Empoprise-NTN is devoted to trivia games from NTN Buzztime. (Therefore, if I run across a business story about NTN Buzztime, it will go in Empoprise-NTN, not Empoprise-BI.)


• Empoprise-IE is devoted to the Inland Empire of California. (Therefore, if I run across a business or music story about the Inland Empire, it will go in Empoprise-IE.)

I've gone back and forth on this over the years, but have decided that these separate blogs offer a more focused reading experience for my potential readers. I also figure that the more focused content will benefit me in other ways (searches, etc.).

I know that some people only write about tech, or only about business, or whatever, but I've decided that it's more fun for me to pursue my separate interests in these four areas. And for other areas, there's always my personal blog.

So anyways, I eventually started to act on my musings. First, I went ahead and added streams from all four blogs to my Plaxo account on Friday.

I began looking at adding these to my Facebook account, but I am extremely new to Facebook (I just joined on Thursday) and am still trying to figure out the optimal way to do this. (I don't know that I want to dump everything from all the blogs into the Notes application.)

That left LinkedIn, which I visited on Saturday morning to figure out what to do. I had already installed the Blog Link application.

Blog Link is a free, easy-to-use application that allows you to connect your blog to your LinkedIn profile. Blog Link is powered by TypePad, and enables bloggers on all platforms to leverage original blog content on LinkedIn.

And there are clear benefits to promoting your original blog content.

Now you can extend your personal brand even further by sharing the thoughts and insights on your blog with your professional network on LinkedIn....

Blog Link enhances your LinkedIn profile with the latest news from your blogand informs your connections whenever you publish a new post.

But there are two-way benefits also, because I can also view when my LinkedIn connections publish something.

Blog Link automatically pulls in the latest blog posts from around your network so that you can stay up to date on the issues that matter to you from the sources you trust.

Actually, I'm already subscribing to many of these blogs via Google Reader, but if one of my other contacts starts blogging, this way I'll know about it.

But how does Blog Link work?

How it works:
Blog Link Powered by TypePad is simple. Here’s how to get started:

1. Make sure your blog is listed on your “Websites” on your Profile.


2. Add the Blog Link application to your LinkedIn Profile.


3. That’s it - Blog Link will now add your sites to your profile.


4. To find news and ideas from trusted people in your network, go to the “Your
   Network” tab. Blog Link will automatically find all of the blogs in your network and update them in the “Your Network” tab. If you do not see the blog of one of your connections, just ask them to add it to their “Websites” list on their LinkedIn profile and Blog Link will find it for you.

So, I proceeded to my LinkedIn profile and found the space to list up to three blogs, and prepared to enter my four blogs into that space.

If you've completed first grade math, you can see the problem here.

Perhaps LinkedIn has specific reasons for limiting a user to three links, but to me it seems kind of odd, given that some of us literally have dozens of profiles. Take your average Oracle person, for example - he or she may have a personal profile, a profile on the Oracle Wiki, a profile on Oracle Mix, perhaps some other Oracle profiles, a profile on Eddie Awad's oraclecommunity.net, plus your usual smattering of profiles on other services.

So I ended up only adding one blog to my LinkedIn profile - this one (Empoprise-BI).

But the ironic part of this decision is that I ended up leaving out a lot of business content from my other blogs. Specifically, I had just started a series on LinkedIn member businesses in the Inland Empire and, according to my rules, I am putting these posts in my Empoprise-IE Inland Empire blog. And therefore they're not showing up in the Blog Link application (unless you happen to click on this post in Empoprise-BI and click through to the series).

Well, perhaps it's better this way. I don't know if my LinkedIn readers necessarily want to know my views on Madonna's music. I'm a little more pop-py than some of my LinkedIn contacts. (For example, see Louis Gray's post Life Is Better With a Techno Soundtrack.)

But now my Plaxo and LinkedIn contacts, and possibly my Facebook contacts, will have more visibility of my business blog. We'll see what happens.