I’ve known bloggers who literally have hundreds of niche blogs, each used to promote a different affiliate product. On the other hand I’ve also known bloggers who’ve never had more than one blog during all the years they’ve been at it. They’re each successful and make a lot of money so there’s really no right or wrong. So let’s take a look at what makes them different to help you decide how many blogs you should own.
Choosing Your Topic
Your topic or niche choice will have a lot do with your decision. Niche bloggers typically have multiple blogs because they look for niches that have low competition to search ratios and focus on one specific product. Instead of blogging about dogs they’ll blog about caring for your dog’s toenails and promote toenail trimmers for dogs.
These niche blogs are easy to set up and maintain but they have several drawbacks. The target audience isn’t overly large and more important, one niche blog doesn’t generate enough income to replace your full-time job. Even if it did, it wouldn’t be reliable for the long haul because affiliate products regularly rise and fall in popularity.
One of the reasons these blogs are so easy to set up is because all you have to do is provide information and promote the product. You send your visitors to the advertiser’s sales page and he takes care of the conversions and sales. So while they may not generate a ton of money each month they’re so easy to set up you can make up that deficit by creating multiple blogs.
Another benefit is the variety. You’ll soon find out that blogging about the same topic, day in and day out, becomes a chore comparable to making an appointment for a root canal. When you run multiple niche blogs you cover a wide variety of topics so if you don’t feel like writing about one you can move on to the another.
So far, I’ve been talking about niche bloggers who build dozens of small blogs. Then there are the bloggers in the middle who have two or three large blogs. These bloggers typically have one large blog that they use for branding purposes or where they earn the lion’s share of their income. And for whatever reason they also want to blog about something completely unrelated.
When blogging about two or more unrelated topics it is best to have your blogs on different domains and keep everything separate. You’ll rank better with the search engines and you’ll be better able to target your traffic.
The drawback is the amount of work involved. You already know how much time it takes to build and maintain one high-quality blog, now multiply that by two or three and you’ll see there aren’t enough hours in the day. Something will eventually suffer and you certainly don’t want it to be your main money-making blog. If you do decide to add more blogs to your business, be prepared to bring on additional bloggers or outsource some of your content.
Now, you’ve probably noticed these larger, multi-author blogs cropping up everywhere. Many of these bloggers were in the position you’re in right now. They wanted to increase their income and add some variety or start blogging about a new interest. Instead of creating several new blogs across separate domains, they found a way to make their new content ideas relevant to their existing blog and simply expanded their categories.
This allows them to keep everything under the same marketing umbrella and build their brand instead of watering it down by spreading themselves too thin. Now, instead of making a lot of little footprints all over the web they’re a massive force to be reckoned with.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!