Well, a few weeks ago we formally launched two new blogs under the Unreality banner – Unreality Music (my baby) and Unreality Primetime (Lisa’s baby). Comparing our strategies last night, we realised we were taking extremely different approaches.

The Challenge

Over the course of the next twelve months, we will be battling each other to see who can build the most successful blog. We’ll measure success on a number of criteria, which I’ll reveal in a forthcoming post.

The Strategy

Lisa’s approach is primarily about content-building. She’ll watch the latest TV news and blog about it rapid-fire. I’ve never seen someone compile content so efficiently. Better still, she’s now got contacts in TV publicity, so she gets a lot of the inside scoop on shows. I joked with her at the weekend that there’s no point reading the TV guide anymore, because she’s usually two days ahead.

My approach to writing is much more methodical. I’ll be writing about music, so I research the band in advance. I’m a slower writer by nature anyway. On the music blog, I’ll be working on a link building strategy and possibly trying to use social media to gain backlinks to the blog, which Lisa isn’t too worried about – she built Unreality TV up mostly on organic SEO!

The Outcome

The Blog Battle will end on 1 May 2008. Along the way, we’ll compare readership, traffic stats and how our strategies are working. Hopefully we’ll have two fairly successful blogs by the end of the year. Posts in this series will be tagged Blog Battle.

More importantly, we’ll be able to tell you which approach works best for a blog – pure content building and organic SEO, or less content but more focused on link building and social media promotion.

The goal here is to establish two top quality blogs using different methods and see how they perform over time. Although monetisation will be involved, the main motivation is to have fun building two great sites.

Anyway, we hope that other bloggers out there will follow our experiment and chip in with their thoughts and advice along the way. May the best (music) blog win!