When I started writing blog posts about blogging advice, I didn’t necessarily anticipate it getting interrupted on multiple occasions due to choosing to write more about how I am faring and how my part of the world is faring with a global pandemic. But alas, it happened.
And the fact that things have happened in the way they have over the past couple of years (as well as the fact that this blog wasn’t designed originally with the intention of writing any sort of blog advice) made me think of how many bloggers often end up blogging on topics different from their blog’s original focus.
Let me start by saying that if you have a personal blog as opposed to a business blog, you theoretically can blog on just about any topic you want to. I can theoretically blog about gardening[1] and a blogger who has a blog focused on gardening can theoretically write a post about basketball.
However, some of us, myself included, have blogs that were at least originally designed with a particular focus in mind. Therefore, for people like me, there is a valid question that comes to mind: If our blog was designed to focus on a particular topic, should we even allow ourselves to blog on topics different from the original focus?
If you’re looking for a definitive answer from me, you won’t get one in this post. Instead, what you’ll get is a few questions to keep in mind before deciding:
- Are you passionate about the topic you want to blog on? If the answer is yes, even if the topic is on something different from your blog’s focus, then you are off to a good start.
- What is the purpose of writing on the topic you plan to discuss in the blog post? Note here that the purpose can be to help others or yourself in some way. However, if you have no purpose for writing a blog post that veers from the main focus of the blog, then you should ask yourself why you’re even going off-topic from your typical focus.
- Are you worried about whether your readers will be interested in what you have to write about? If your blog has/had a particular focus, some of the readers subscribed to your blog likely subscribed because they were interested in the topics you blog about. If you start blogging about topics different from what readers came to your blog for, there is a chance you might lose subscribers. If you are not at peace with that possibility, then you should think long and hard about whether you want to blog on a topic different from the blog’s original focus.
- If you happen to have any sponsors for your blog, do those sponsors want you to blog a certain amount on certain topics? This is not something that I, or most other bloggers, have to worry about because most of us don’t have sponsors. But if you have a sponsor, you will want to really make sure that you don’t have a sponsor that requires you to blog a certain amount on the blog’s focus (and if you do, then make sure that you fulfill your sponsor obligations if you don’t want to lose your sponsorship).
Ultimately, all the questions I raise here come back to one fundamental question: If you blog on a topic from your blog’s main focus, will you be a happy blogger? If so, you can be a social justice blogger who talks about gardening, a gardening blogger who talks about basketball, or a basketball blogger who talks about history—letting your imagination run wild, in the best of ways, in the process.
[1] I actually know very little about gardening, so the chances of this happening are unlikely, at least at the moment.
Blind Injustice 
I’m passionate about trans rights, but I also get mentally tired, because a lot of the “problems” of transphobic people aren’t actual problems. Like in Utah, they were trying to ban trans kid from playing sports. There’s only 4 trans kids in the whole of Utah, and only one of them plays sports. So effectively a ban on ONE person. What I’m trying to say is, I try to get out of my mental tiredness, and try to write other more positive fun/silly things, because I need that too.
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That’s fair. Sometimes when you write about topics that are just mentally exhausting (even if they are important, like what is the case with trans rights), it is really important to make sure that you give yourself breaks in order to take care of yourself, whatever those breaks look like.
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