Your own blog(s)

Wordpress, Blogger, (both?)

[Hubie]

I have a wordpress blog, does it make sense for me to also have a Blogger account and post entries there? StumbleUpon? Typepad? I would be doing this solely to get any traffic that my word press blog which I host may have missed. Does anyone do this? Is this a stupid idea?

[nicolebeckett]

If I were you, I'd stick to 1 blog. That way, you don't have to worry about maintaining/promoting 2 blogs. Make sure your Wordpress blog is perfect - on-site SEO, layout, the works. Then, promote the heck out of it.

[dogweather]

Ditto. First, Google does not like duplicated content. They penalize sites for that. Secondly, Google is pretty clever and can detect "tricks" like you're talking about.

[sublime1]

Hubie -- I have multiple blogs and websites (in my personal life, 100s in my professional life), but each have a clearly defined subject, voice, purpose and type of content. When relevant, I occasionally link between them, but that's pretty rare.

The idea that you use different platforms for the same content doesn't make sense, as others have correctly said -- an analogy would be an author publishing the same book with different publishers.

A good way of thinking about this is that Google pretty much knows about all websites regardless of how hard you try to prevent it from doing wo -- it's effectively omniscient. You can help Google by telling it about your site (Google Webmaster Tools rock). People don't find things by seeking out Blogger sites or TypePad sites -- they go to Google (or StumbleUpon, or Del.icio.us, or ... well, mostly Google).

Please your readers by creating a great site. Let the world know -- Tweet about it, list it in all your profiles, put it on your facebook page, and listen to what people have to say.

Tom