Reframe and crosslink: the basic principle
The basic principle is this:

This is an extension of the write once use many principle - it makes it easier to create meaningful links that add value.

There are two ways that people will find your blog: through a referral (via a search engine or a social networking friend) or through discovery. By crosslinking between your blogs, you are increasing the prospect of people going from one blog to another (and I know that this sounds like a no-brainer - stay with me). When they find a new blog they may subscribe.

Reframing is about taking an idea and looking at it anew while maintaining a semantic link - in blogging terms, there should be at least one point that clearly joins the two posts. Here’s an example: all bloggers run blogs. If they are interested in promoting their blog, they will often seek the advice of metabloggers (that is, people who blog about blogging). It is not hard to reframe a discussion on the art of bioblogging/mommyblogging/business blogging/you name it in a way that justifies a link to a metablog. Similarly, in metablogging, it is not hard to talk about specific examples of what works and what doesn’t from any other blog - so long as the link adds value to the story.

Crosslinking is simply using links to tie the two (or more) posts together. More about that below.

Reframing 101
So how do you reframe? Basically, by looking at one thing in context of another.

In the real world, everything has multiple facets. For example - I am male, Australian, a consultant, over 40, relatively affluent, live in the ACT, drive a car, enjoy good wine, enjoy good food, and practice information architecture. I can relate to any one of these facets of my personality - and while in sum they define me, I will probably read a blog post that relates to any one of them. As I will read a blog post about a good restaurant in the ACT (covering two of my facets), so will many other people, who may or may not be male, consultants, over 40, or practice information architecture. These same people may also be interested (as would I) of reading about a unique dining experience anywhere in the world, or of some other event/location/news around the ACT. Thus the intersection of these two facets serves a wider audience than just the ACT or just dining - it is possible to reframe along these lines and offer additional posts as “other people who have read these also enjoyed…” options a la Amazon.

Crosslinking: the art of the weave
Crosslinking is a science as laid out above: find two things that relate in at least one way and segue neatly between them.

Crosslinking is also an art: the art of seemless crosslinking is this - it is better to weave links into posts, as opposed to writing posts around links. You can tell examples of the latter - the writing just doesn’t flow, it jumps around enough that you notice the discontinuity - in other words, writing posts around links leaves the reader feeling jarred and a bit bruised.

On the other hand, a post that weaves meaningful crosslinks into the main flow of the writing should not jar. Imagine reading the same post without the links - does it still make sense? If not, it is a collection of words wrapped around links, rather than an artful piece of writing.

Dont “stretch the weave”
In Polyblogging: Link Self Love (Don’t be embarrassed, everybody does it!) I talked about not “stretching the weave”. If the art of seemless crosslinking is about weaving links into posts (as opposed to writing posts around links), stretching the weave is when you’ve gone too far - that is, when the segue is not neat enough to be seamless.

A successful segue is hard to spot: two seemingly unrelated topics are joined neatly without the audience noticing - if you notice it, it isn’t successful.

Don’t be embarrassed, everybody does it. Despite what your mother told you, it will not make you blind

What do I mean by sharing the link love with yourself?
While some may feel that the analogy is apt, it isn’t really about comparisons between blogging and masturbation.

Basically, it is all in the crosslinking. While there will be a separate post in this series on how to reframe and crosslink, this post is on why you might bother pursuing this sometimes maligned and misunderstood activity - deliberately linking to your own posts wherever the link adds real value across multiple blogs.

It isn’t hard once you have a few posts on a few different blogs - for example in Polyblogging: Basic principles I linked to eight different posts across five different sites without “stretching the weave” too far (and I’ll explain this analogy in a later post in this series).

Why does it matter in blogging?
I wrote the following on faceted marketing through multiple blogs - talking about how multiple blogs can help one another grow:

Here’s a simple example: imagine that you are selling used books on eBay. You could draw purchasers in by the following:

• the eBay listing itself,
• your eBay store,
• customer new listing email newsletter,
• a book review website with an online store,
• genre-specific forums,
• author websites and fan sites, and
• for non-fiction: topic specific sites (gardening sites for gardening books, motor vehicle sites for car books, and so on).

Any of these have the capacity to increase sales.

In blogging, you can increase your ’sales’ (that is, the number of readers/amount of ad revenue/telling people about your stated cause) by increasing your exposure. Blogging on a variety of related topics within the bounds of your niche on a single blog helps that exposure a lot - and effective linking between posts helps readers to decide if they will subscribe to your blog’s feed by keeping them reading (if this is what they want to do). This is the cure for “social networking bounce syndrome”, where a Dugg or Stumbled post may bring thousands of readers who stay for 20 seconds then move on, never to read your blog again.

How does polyblogging make it easier to share links with yourself?
Multiple blogs present far more opportunities to share links than a single one.

• For a start, they are genuine inbound links - important in maintaining and increasing index service rankings (like Google PageRank and Technorati Authority).
• Secondly, you can dramatically increase the value of inbound links within the whole “self blog network” by linking between them - increasing one means that the link is worth more to another.

It makes sense if you are blogging on a variety of niche-bound topics to expand your reach (while staying within your niche) by crosslinking to other blogs that you own. If someone likes your writing style they will possibly like what you have to say within a variety of niches.
Can I just play with myself?
No. A word of caution here - being greedy with your link love is not sustainable for a couple of reasons:

• You can manually maintain crosslinks between a dozen of your own blogs by working hard at it - but you need tens of thousands of inbound links to make your blog the best it can be. In other words, if you want to be at the top of your niche, you need more than the self-provided links.
• Sharing the link love is good community spirit building stuff - not only will it benefit the people that you share with, it will benefit you as well. A little goodwill goes a long way. Enlightened self interest is a powerful force for good.

Is crosslinking enough?
No - it helps people find your blogs. It doesn’t help you much at all if they don’t like your content enough to keep reading.

• write once use many,
• reframe and crosslink,
• be your own blog network, and
• turn every good idea into a series.

I’ll cover each of these below.

Write once use many
One of the principles of Permaculture is that no thing should be used for only one purpose. In The Permaculture Approach to Information, I wrote:

Imagine a fence dividing your chook (chicken) pen from your orchard in a suburban back yard. You grow beans and other edible creepers along the fence. The creepers get a little overgrown so that the chooks can use them for shelter. You eat the chooks and the eggs they produce. You eat the beans. You use the manure they produce in the compost that feeds the next generation of beans. The chooks go into different yards that contain the vegetable beds lying fallow for next year. You supply the chook-feeding and -watering labor. Everything feeds everything else. Everything contributes, and everything benefits. It is one big holistic system, and fractally expands in scope to include every energy transaction on the whole planet.

So what have chooks got to do with blogging? Nothing - but that they are a good metaphor for a post that feeds off your energy (to produce) and contributes to your blog. What I’m suggesting here is that no post should contribute to just itself - it should contribute to the blogosphere in general (by sharing the link love) and to your own blog network. Additionally, you should probably aim to add value to your niche.

Reframe and Crosslink
This is an extension of the write once use many principle - it makes it easier to create meaningful links that add value.

There are two ways that people will find your blog: through a referral (via a search engine or a social networking friend) or through discovery. By crosslinking between your blogs, you are increasing the prospect of people going from one blog to another (and I know that this sounds like a no-brainer - stay with me). When they find a new blog they may subscribe.
Reframing is about taking an idea and looking at it anew while maintaining a semantic link - in blogging terms, there should be at least one point that clearly joins the two posts. Here’s an example: all bloggers run blogs. If they are interested in promoting their blog, they will often seek the advice of metabloggers (that is, people who blog about blogging). It is not hard to reframe a discussion on the art of bioblogging/mommyblogging/business blogging/you name it in a way that justifies a link to a metablog. Similarly, in metablogging, it is not hard to talk about specific examples of what works and what doesn’t from any other blog - so long as the link adds value to the story.

And what defines value? Here is my definition/law of link acceptability:

Any link is acceptable to the reader provided it is relevant in context and adds clear value.

And I went on to write:

OK, so I didn’t invent this - other folks have been saying similar things for years about web links in general - but the title sounds cool

“Relevant in context” means that it makes sense - the linked material is directly related to the whole post in general, and the particular point suggested by the linked text. There are no unmet expectations or surprises. “adds clear value” means that the link is not there for the sake of the link but actually adds value to the reading experience. This applies equally to blogrolls, links within posts, and links within social linksharing applications.

Anyone disagree?

Be your own blog network
Blog networks are a good idea - a group of people with a common goal (or a company with a consistent policy) that share resources and advertising across multiple blogs.

I run 20 or so blogs from one hosting account - it is an advanced plan, sure, but the resources are there to cover periods of high traffic when a post is Dugg or Stumbled and there is a traffic spike. It costs me $20 a month, not a lot more than a single blog plan with an Australian ISP.

Apart from sharing resources I also share links through the reframe and crosslink principle. It does sound a little self-gratifying, but I can share link love with myself any time I want I try not to overdo it.

Turn every good idea into a series
I believe that the best muser posts are written in essay style - they are a coherent argument for a particular point of view, with an introduction, a set of structured points, and a concluding summary. If each of the argument points is good enough to support the point of view, then chances are it will be good enough as a post in its own right within a series.

This post is, strangely enough, the genesis of a series. Self-referentiality is a fine thing in post writing as well as in humour

Keep an eye out for the series.

Todo lists of some sort are vital for:

• recording posting/series ideas,
• new blog/domain concepts, and
• marketing ideas.

I’d like to talk about a couple of tools that I use in polyblogging every day.
Simple list management
I use todoist.com for todo list management.

Todoist is brilliant for simple lists - just create a project (a bucket for ideas) and plug away. It handles dates in a very mature way - you can enter next Tuesday as 4 MAR, March 4th, 4/3/2008, or just “next Tuesday”.
The mind map alternative
I also use mind maps in my day-to-day consulting work.

Mind maps are good for storing ideas that fit into compartments - and smaller compartments within them. Once you’ve used mind mapping software for recording a lot of ideas in a hurry you’ll never go back

I use MindManager Mac (on the Mac) and MindManager Pro (under Vista) - both of which cost money - but there are free alternatives like FreeMind (Wikipedia has a list of available alternatives).

UPDATE: Nathanael just mentioned Mindomo (a web-based mind mapping tool) on Twitter. Basic access is free and there a premium advanced (USD6.00 per month) version. I’m just looking at it now - early indications are that it is worth a look.

If you would like to know more about either of these tools, or about todo list management in general, please leave a comment

I’ve come across some other people that run multiple blogs on the Aussie Bloggers Forum - we’ve even had a discussion on the madness that is blog collecting.

First step - the definitional adventure
The talk on the forum got me thinking about what the cool kids called someone who runs multiple blogs (apart from “nuts!”)

I thought initially that this might be called polyblogging (as opposed to blogging on a single blog, which might be called monoblogging to match). So I googled on “polyblogging” and got results that inferred the following alternative definitions - that polyblogging is:

• writing on multiple blogs,
• writing on multiple topics within the one blog, or
• blogging about polyamory.

Of these, I favour the first - and when I think about it, this is mainly because it fits my own preconceived ideas of what polyblogging might be. I don’t begrudge anyone any other use of the term. I just felt the need for a term that encompasses blogging on multiple blogs.

Let’s pretend for now that it means what I want it to mean
…and run with that one for now.

You may be wondering why anyone in their right mind would try to keep up with multiple blogs when most people hardly manage one. Good question. Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of writing for multiple blogs.

Advantages of polyblogging
The advantages - to me at least - are:

• Multiple niche blogging: When I feel the need to write on information architecture, I can write for HumaneIA. When I come across a recipe that I like, I can put it on Faux Cuisine. If I want to write on metablogging (that is, blogging about blogging), then I can put it here on Facibus On Blogging or over at On Blogging Australia. Each of these blogs has a niche, and by keeping multiple blogs I can write content that will be posted amongst similarly appealing material - and this helps increase page views for first-time and serendipitous visitors.
• One person blog network: By writing for multiple blogs, I can reframe material from one and make it suitable for another. Events and news in one niche help to inform the others, with legitimate and frequent cross-linking. With the best of intentions in the world to share the link love, and making an effort to read widely, I’m still more likely to remember my own writing (and link to it). This is great for inbound links (but there is a potential downside listed below).

Disadvantages of polyblogging
There are also several downsides to writing for more than one blog. Again, speaking from personal experience they are:

• Split attention: There are only so many hours in the day, and with a heavy consulting workload, I find it hard to write more than a couple of posts a day. This has to be spread over the dozen-or-so possible blogs that they could go on (that is, blogs that I own that are even semi-regular recipients of fresh material).
• Organisational overhead: Organising posting schedules, regular research (such as email newsletters, RSS feeds and books) in multiple niches, contributing to multiple forums - all takes time and brainspace that may be in fairly short supply.
• System overhead: When Wordpress releases a new version, believe me, I know about it Keeping up with the latest plugins also takes time - there is a minimum necessary administrative overhead for any Wordpress blog - multiply that by several blogs and it soon adds up.
• Cost: Even though I’ve polyblogged on the cheap (having a hosting plan that allows multiple domains and buying them from myself via my Godaddy.com reseller account) it still adds up.
• Reduction in sharing that link love: I mentioned this as an advantage above, but it is also a disadvantage. I have to guard against being my own echo chamber, and linking to my own stuff at the exclusion of deserving others.

Monoblogging vs Polyblogging: is there a right answer?
No.

There may be a right answer for you at this stage of your blogging career - for me, I write for multiple blogs because I enjoy it, regardless of how sensible it is or otherwise.

Your mileage may vary, depending on the range of your interests and your available time (not to mention your ability to organisation and self-motivation).

How about you?
How many blogs do you write for? Are you a monoblogger or a polyblogger? Can you think of any advantages or disadvantages I’ve missed?