Search and Social Results

Recently, I’ve been guest blogging on a couple of friends’ websites, neglecting to add timely original content to my own. This is not necessarily bad in the long run and I’ll tell you why in a moment. In an effort to practice what I preach and carve out a truly successful news and information site, I took some time to reflect, study success, and take a big bite of reality.

Personal Branding Verses Niche News & Info
For awhile now I’ve been torn between growing this blog as a travel journal about adventures and traveling in Texas, or using it for its original purpose, personal branding and displaying my expertise. I just couldn’t seem to bring it in perfect balance like Couch Surfing Ori. Recently, I changed the title back to industry-oriented phrasing from Texas Travel Journal to The Inbound [Marketing ] Blog. One reason, two success stories of citizen journalists I know were based on the premise of hyper local information relevant to people in a particular city (in this case Dallas). I thought I would focus mine on Texas travel. Then I realized two things:

1) I don’t travel that much.
2) With online niches, it’s better to be deep than wide.

I wanted this site to be bigger than life, but I was riding the fence too long. I did not want to wait until the domain TexasTravelJournal.com was allowed out of the sandbox, so I promoted it, but redirected the site to my vanity URL which had already been established. I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I just need to separate the two and work on them separately. For now I will cover more topics affecting bloggers, online marketers, and business owners.