This past weekend, I took a deep breath, and then waded into my too-large “portfolio” of blogs, and began doing some much needed weeding and pruning.

I have come full-circle in my blogging career and now find myself fully embracing the less-is-more principle of blogging.

Not that weeding out all those blogs was easy. In fact, some of the decisions I made over the weekend were downright painful. It’s not easy to look at a blog on which you’ve spent quite a bit of time, and realize that you need to count it as a blogging failure.

So, what criteria did I use to determine if a blog was a blogging failure? And how successful was I at letting these blogs go?

The blogs I dealt with basically fell into three categories:

1. I never had a passion for them, but they each looked like they had potential as money makers. A potential that never did get fulfilled, in each case.

These were pretty easy to spot, and just as easy to let go.

2. I just don’t have much passion for the topic, and if I looked deep enough, I know I never really had enough passion for it in the first place.

These were more challenging, but now that I have two years of blogging under my belt, I understand fully the power of blogging with passion.

Blogging without passion for your topic can be very difficult, and when you do have blogs on topics about which you happen to be very passionate, it doesn’t make any sense to continue to feed your blogging energy towards ones you feel half-hearted about.

Painful, but necessary.

3. I just don’t have the passion for the topic anymore, because life changes, I change, and it’s just something I need to accept.

I only had two blogs that fell into this category. Thankfully.

The thought of letting these two blogs go was just too difficult.

And so I took the easy way out.

I’ve arranged for someone else to blog at one of them.

And the other one I’m going to keep open, blog at more sporadically, and if it does die a natural death, so be it.

And looking forward to the future

I have a list of active or soon to be active blogs, all around topics about which I’m passionate. It’s a much shorter list, and just looking at them all motivates me and fills me with energy.

I also have a list of blogs that have been stagnating, not through lack of passion on my part, but because in the past, I was too busy going down too many avenues to really sit and develop them more fully. This list will remain in existence, with each blog marked as a future possibility, when I find some time on my hands.

And then I have a list of blogs that make me money. These are a given - I blog at these blogs because they provide the means by which I can begin to develop the blogs about which I AM passionate.

Finally, I have the blogs for which I freelance blog. Another given.

Now I’m implementing a firm rule - no more new domain names, no more new Wordpress installs on folders or subdomains.

This, I think, will be the toughest part. So I’m adding a caveat: no more new domain names, no more new Wordpress installs - at least, not for the next little while.