Hey!
I've been writing 2 blogs for the past couple of years, one focused on Software Engineering and the other on general life things (e.g. philosophy, psychology, self-improvement, etc). Recently, I've created another blog focused on Entrepreneurship. At the moment, they all live on their own domains.
My purpose in writing the blogs is (1) I really enjoy writing, and (2) I want to build a personal brand (all of my blogs mention my name, and each link to another). However, it's becoming hard to maintain the blogs. They each run their own instance of the software, meaning any change I make in terms of design/security fixes/SEO/etc, needs to be replicated to other blogs (where applicable). I need to keep separate contact emails per blog, and in general this setup is too complicated, thus discouraging me from writing. Moreover, building domain authority is hard, since every blog essentially starts from 0.
I also own a domain for my name. It shows some about me information and links to all the blogs. I was considering consolidating all the 3 blogs into one under my domain name, and do a 301 redirect from the old domains to the new one (I don't mind owning the domains for some time, as links to them are circulating on the web already). This will eliminate the hassle of bootstrapping and managing each blog individually.
In order to keep proper audience segmentations, I could create a high level category and put each blog into its own category (for example, as subdirectory `https://examples.com/blog/category/software-engineering`). I doubt many people check the blogs themselves, and most traffic is coming from me sharing links to new content, or people searching for a particular thing that is indexed by Google, thus leading to a specific blog post. But even if there are people who read the blogs by RSS or check the website directly, they still can use dedicated RSS per category, or just access a domain with subdirectory for the category.
I understand that it will probably hurt SEO in the beginning, but I'm fine with that. It can also lead to some readers churning, however with proper categorization I don't see a reason why (things like "similar posts" or "next/previous" could be category segmented, thus creating the illusion that the reader still reads a blog about, say, software engineering).
What are your thoughts about it? Am I missing something? Is it a good or a bad plan?
At the risk of exaggerating, “my whole life” blogs are for young people and for people who don’t care about building an audience. LiveJournal was for teenagers.
The more specific the blog, the more you are able to develop an audience for that niche.
By contrast, a blog that contains everything in your life will only appeal to your friends.
There is a deceptive almost exception: people who are funny. They seem to break the rule. They seem able to talk about whatever they want, and they still have an audience. But in that case, they actually have a niche: humor. Everything they write is funny, so people who like humor read it all.
But unless you are reliably funny, stick to narrow topics.