After achieving success with his own personal blog Smart Wealth Rich, Jonathan Phillips decided to launch a collaborative blog for freelancers. Launched just 6 months ago in July of 2007, Freelance Folder proved an instant success.

Contributors at Freelance Folder include Dave Navarro, Amrit Hallan, Naomi Dunford, Jonathan Bostrom, and many others with a wide range of talents and experiences.

Have you ever thought about taking your blog from a solo project to a multi-author project? If so, here’s an exclusive look into why Jonathan decided to start a multi-author blog and what it’s like to manage one.

Why Did You Decide to Start a Second Blog?

The main reason I wanted to start a second blog was because I realized my goals and interests changed a lot since I started blogging, SmartWealthyRich is my first blog, and I did a lot of experiments with that blog. I’m really happy with the results I got with SWR, but my interests changed so much over the past 4-5 months, starting another blog in a different niche seemed like the thing to do, and I’m pretty happy with the results so far.

Why Did you Decide on a Multi-Author Collaborative Approach for Freelance Folder?

I wanted to start a multi-author blog for 2 reasons, first because I thought it would be less work than running a blog all by myself (not quite ), and I like to work with small teams, share ideas and all – and also because I know I would not be able to write 4-5 posts about freelancing per week. So having writers and people to help me out is great. And of course this blog can be used to launch other projects and get some nice exposure. For instance the 30 Hours A Day program that Dave Navarro is working on.

What are the Challenges of Running a Multi-Author Blog?

3- There are some differences and challenges, but it’s pretty much the same as running your own blog. Though I really like to ask questions and start conversations with my readers, I find it’s a little more difficult on a multi-author blog, readers go there for the content, not necessarily to ‘chat with you‘ as they would on a personal blog. In other words, you have to share the ‘spotlight‘ with other writers, and that’s what’s fun

How Did Your Grow Your RSS Subscriber Base So Quickly?

I just checked and right now on FreelanceFolder we have 1900 rss subscribers. We started this blog in July 07, and within the first week we got posts featured on LifeHack, and other authority blogs, and recently we got linked to from LifeHacker, ABC News, and other high profile sites and blogs. Of course making the Digg frontpage a couple of times definitely helped, I’m really into social media sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Reddit, etc.. so that helped a lot.

What Advice Would You Give to Others Who are Thinking of Starting a Multi-Author Blog?

I could probably write a mile long answer to that question, but I’m still learning, every week I learn something new, I’m no expert as this is my first multi-author blog, but I think the best piece of advice I could give would be to network with people in the same niche. And that’s for single author blogs too, not only for multi-author blogs, but if you’re thinking of starting a multi-author blog, networking with other bloggers is crucial, this is how you get writers, links, guest posts. Even better if you already have your own blog, you can then use this one to kick start your new one

How Did You Attract Authors to Write for Freelance Folder?

I simply wrote a post on my other blog, SmartWealthyRich, told my readers I was planning on starting a new blog and I was looking for writers, and I got a really good response, 8-10 e-mails, some were interested in writing 1-2 posts, others wanted get more involved and write on a regular basis, and others wanted to write only 1 post as guest bloggers. I don’t really have any requirements when selecting writers/bloggers, I simply ask for some writing samples – it’s even better if the person already has a blog. It’s not like it’s a job

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