This was one of those lessons I learned back when I was a freelance writer.

As a freelancer, the idea of putting all your eggs into one basket meant that you blindly relied on one or two clients/gigs to be the foundation for most of your income. When writing for clients the web, you are at the mercy of whomever is employing you for a job. When the job is done, it’s done. So, you want to branch out enough to have other opportunities to fall back on just in case something doesn’t work out.

As a blogger, this is less about making money and more about building an audience and essentially a successful blog. Having focus is good, but when you limit yourself so much that you don’t have room to pivot should you need to, that will only hurt you in the end.

Too Much Focus on One Topic

Take, for example, focusing too much on just one topic. In my case, putting all my eggs in the basket of one video game.

I don’t want to get too much into the politics of the whole current Blizzard/WoW fiasco, but for content creators who were so focused on WoW, and WoW only, this has been a tough time. Not just for the individuals who make their livelihood off of their content – be it written or video – but also the small content creators that began building a focused platform around WoW or Blizzard games.

Those who allowed themselves some wiggle room had the freedom to make other choices and transition into new kinds of content if they felt that was the right thing to do. But those who have placed all their eggs in the WoW basket now have a harder choice to make.

This blog covers a lot more than just FFXIV, for example, and sometimes even strays from just talking about games. I know that even if I chose to put FFXIV away someday (hopefully not anytime soon), my main blog would continue on because I’ve established a wide base of topics there.

Locked into One Platform

For me, the lesson came in the form of closing myself off on to only one platform – namely, Tumblr. In my defense, when I first launched this blog on Tumblr, I had no idea that it would become such an important project to me. It was an experiment in character, story, blogging and social media… and somehow it worked.

For a while.

Due to experiences I’ve had, and due to the Tumblr environment, I began to realize that I needed to branch out if I wanted to keep this project from suffocating due to being locked down too much to one platform. That’s when I made the transfer of the bulk of my content to WordPress and decided to make my Tumblr more of a mirror site. I also began to build up connections on other social media accounts, such as Twitter and Instagram.

It’s taken time for me to earn the same amount of interaction that I used to have on Tumblr in other places. But finally, after months of working at it, I feel like I’m starting to make ground on Twitter. I’ve been much happier for it, too.

Taking part in Blaugust was another step to widen the audience and awareness of this blog, opening it to people in other blogging circles. I have yet to gauge how well this will stick, but it couldn’t have been a bad thing to try, right?

I’m not fully sure where I’m going to take Spot of Mummery in the future – I’ve always just sorta winged it when it came to this project. But I feel like I’ve made some steps in branching out, making new connections and trying new things when it comes to both my blog and the social media accounts connected to it.

Perhaps once Blaugust is over with, I will sit down and figure out some kind of content plan.

But more likely, I won’t. 🙂