Managing staff and launching new blogs

April 16, 2007 | Posted by Sapphire

Part of the reason I started trying to earn a living online was that I don’t like telling people what to do, and that’s where my career path was headed: management. Ironically, the blog I started just for kicks – Project B-2 Bomber – has led me in exactly that direction. It’s a site about an issue, and that issue has brought a number of contributing authors to work on the site.

Last week, I spent a couple of hours altogether talking to someone who was upset by some of the comments left on one of her posts. In the end, we worked it out and I think she ended up feeling okay about it. And then she told me I’d make a good boss. Me?

I’m getting more comfortable reading personalities and figuring out what’s between the lines of what they’re telling me, since they don’t always approach me with the “real” problem. I’m learning more and more techniques for keeping my fellow authors comfortable, for fending off trolls, for offering criticism that’s appreciated instead of resented. But I’ll say this: there is no shortcut to learning how to do this. You just have to jump in, fall flat on your face a few times, and learn lessons from your mistakes.

Another interesting happenin’ over at B-2: we’ve just launched a couple of sister blogs on subdomains. The only promotion they’ve had is on B-2. So we’ll see how strong B-2’s powers of site launching are. B-2 itself has picked up a few Bloglines subscribers, and jumped from 13 to 22 Google Reader subscribers. One of the new blogs is definitely outpacing the other, with a handful of Bloglines and Reader subscribers and almost double the daily visitors of the other. But they’re both doing pretty well, getting some comments. All I did was write a post announcing them, write another post elsewhere announcing them, and build their links into the overall site menu.

I’m kind of thinking about promoting the better-faring new one on its own, though. I think it’s a tight niche (not as tight as the original site, though), so it might be able to attract a whole new audience to the whole domain.

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Category Categories: Blogging | Tag Tags: Project B-2 Bomber | No Comments »