As a polymathic content creator I have always found myself doing many different things. While some folks have said to focus on one thing/endeavor, or focus on ONE Niche. I.e. "niche down niche down", or whatever the prevailing wisdom is these days.

I have found that my pluripotent nature, and polymathic life cause me to not be able to do just ONE thing. That is okay, and so I realized its not about doing one thing or doing many things. Rather it is about HOW do I do many things well. Where a lot of polymathic creators get caught up in the dynamic of fighting against the norms of niching down. I rather skipped past that, although it still gets me sometimes, and I tried focusing on how to being more omnichannel.

My sub-brands like 🎮 PolyInnovator Gaming and 🔧 The PolyTools Digest are like arms of an octopus. With the torso being the main PolyInnovator hub, and that is where things get interesting.

Innate Ghost CMS Feature: Multiple Newsletters

To be honest there is only one other one I can think of that has such a natural ability to have multiple newsletters. That being buttondown, which is no where near as visually appealing as Ghost.

On this website I had moved the PolyTools Digest from Beehiiv to here, and then onto the newer PolyTools website after that was completed. Same with the Gaming and Swimming newsletters too, which were on the Paragraph.xyz and Substack platforms respectively.

Eventually I realized they would do better with a consolidated members pool. As people were often subscribed to more than one, and this way I only needed one membership too.

Creating a pool of paid content for each arm, but it all being connected.

As of late I've been asking myself does the PolyTools brand even need its own site? At first I thought yes, which is why I scoured the internet to find the right solution. Ghost again ironically, and I even paid for an expensive theme.

This was a visual mockup I came up with with the idea of the other site being a subdomain of this one, and how it might work.

The problem is that even though on the front end the Ghost experience is great, it doesn't really work that well for me ADDING the tools to the site. Also the blog posts take up the same "content type" as the tools. So they get cluttered real fast, and I can't visually separate the blogs from the tools. That makes it hard if I want to write about automation tools for example, and then I can't use the Automation tag.

Or else it will show up next to the tools. Which I guess could be nice, as a way to get people to read the post per se. However I'm not super into pushing that hard.

The other level of complexity is the various vast array of tools and tool categories I've amassed. I started using Airtable for the database, and so I wanted to use something to make a site from that. However the tools failed, and same for the notion tools too.

Eventually I decided on using Airtable for my own list, and then Ghost for the public list. I then had to move to NocoDB as the pricing for Airtable kept going up. I am still thinking that maybe I could create an interesting Notion database, with a different view for each Category.

Then create a PAGE on this site for each category, and embed that database view onto that page. It may not be as pretty, but it would be far quicker to update than what I am doing now. I also need to think about my goals.

  1. Grow the websites, and the email newsletter list. Which is harder when it is more than one site.
  2. Save money to accomplish my moving goal, which the 2nd site costs a hosting fee each month.

As you can see my problem is not easily answered...

For one thing I could be blowing it out of proportion, and just need to leave the 2nd site alone. Make some posts, and move on.

On the other hand I could be being pragmatic, and while I want to give the YouTube a chance to shine on its own. Maybe the website does not need to be isolated.

SEO for the most part is sort of dead, and you are no longer really ranking for search terms. Rather you are ranking for quality content and writing, and optimizing for readability. Which are what humans and AI agents want, not necessarily what google or bing needs anymore.

I try to write in chunks (like this conclusion being multiple separated sections), and I use dividers to separate things. My point is that your website doesn't NEED to be about only one thing anymore, but you need to give the option for someone to pick 1 thing or many things if they choose to.