Is it possible to be exhausted yet refreshed? That’s how I feel about our recent trip to Colima, where we spent the Christmas holidays on the beach. The break from routine was refreshing, and I’m all psyched to get going on new projects for 2008. At the same time, travel is always tiring, so I need to catch up on a couple days sleep. Not to be however, since New Years celebrations have begun already.

So this post will be brief, as I talk a bit about blogging. I have already stated that blogs should be an important part of your Web Empire — there are many advantages to this format. I also suggested that you need to post frequently during the early stages of creating your blog — then immediately broke that ‘rule’ myself, by skipping a whole week on this blog when there are only twenty-some posts. Some ‘rules’ are very important, while others can be safely bent to suit your situation.

In this case, I am working on a long-term project here, this is not one of those blogs that will have lots of posts at first, then taper off. That is for search-engine fodder blogs that exist to feed traffic and links to your money sites, and/or for advertising income. This blog is a ‘personal branding’ blog, so it exists more for you — the reader — than for the search engines. For real readers, consistency is important. I can tell real readers I will not be posting for a few days, and they understand, so by setting a precedent early on it tempers readers expectations. You now know I will warn you if I will not be posting for a while, and that is to be expected occasionally. Search engines use algorithms to track frequency of updates, they only understand the numbers.

You should include one ‘personal branding’ blog in your Web Empire if you sell products you produce yourself, but never more than one such blog. It is too much work, for one thing. You can take an occasional break, but long periods without posts are interpreted as an ‘Out of Business’ sign. Content blogs, on the other hand, can provide useful information on a topic without needing frequent updating. If you produce a few hundred posts on gardening, for example, that information will continue to be of value when you stop posting. You should constantly be creating new blogs on topics related to your main subject — as fast as earlier blogs ‘fill up’ to a convenient size (typically 100 to 500 posts) they can be left without updates, and a new blog started instead.