I got on the blogging bandwagon in late 2005 and had a plan to start up a niche blog, wait for it get momentum and then make a spin off blog it. Rinse, wash and repeat. It was a good idea, but if you get too many blogs you will be spreading yourself too thin and won’t be able to keep up. Unless you have 8 brains and 24 arms, you’ll probably get burnt out on some of your blogs and they will begin to collect dust.
I’ve decided I’m going to to try a “new” strategy of posting everything on one blog and see what happens. I’m going to keep blogging on some of my favorite niche blogs and mothball the rest. There’s no way I can keep up with 50 blogs (or whatever the number is). I’ve noticed that you can still rank pretty well in Google with this Mega Blog strategy… so why not give it a shot?
The only thing that makes me cautious is a post by Darren Rowse at Problogger titled “One Blog Many Categories or Many Blogs?“. A reader wrote in and asked Darren this question and overall it seems he advises against the Mega Blog strategy and go with niche blogs. Regarding niche blogging, Darren writes:
Since I moved to this approach I’ve gone from 1 blog with 1000 pages that had around 900 daily visitors and earned just a few dollars per day to having 20 or so blogs with over 11,000 pages with 25,000 daily visitors that earns a few hundred dollars per day.
I think where the Mega Blog strategy fails is with getting subscribers. It’s probably a lot harder to keep an audience when you’re writing about 5,234 different topics. But… my gut feeling tells me it won’t matter too much as far as getting incoming search results - provided each category has more than one post.
It seems there are some blogs that are doing well by writing about several different subjects. Here are a few off the top of my head:
Neatorama - Funny stuff, cool pictures, videos, politics and anything else you can think of
Boing Boing - A bunch of bloggers posting about all kinds of stuff
J Walk Blog - Yet another blog with posts all over the map
Chris Pirillo - Mostly technology, but occasionally he throws a curve ball out there
So, what to do? I don’t know, but I’m gonna try blogging with multiple categories and see what happens. One thing I know for sure is that there’s only so much one person can do and it’s a lot easier to maintain one blog than 50. It seems like by the time I update all my WordPress blogs with the latest version it’s time to update again. Maybe the WordPress Automatic Update Plugin would solve this problem?
Another strategy in the back of my mind is to create niche blogs but maybe not get too narrow with the niche. Perhaps doing a blog about clothing and accessories would be better than starting a blog about Croc shoes? It seems with a really narrow niche you’re either going to run out of material or get burnt out. Once you get burnt out, you won’t want to blog on it. When you quit blogging, eventually your traffic dies down.
Interestingly I’ve noticed that on some blogs that I’ve pretty much quit on I’m still getting traffic even though I haven’t blogged on them for a year or two. This gives me an idea for yet another strategy - write on a blog and quit when you’re done. Treat it as if you are writing a book. Then, once a year or so go back and do a revision to freshen things up. Treat it like book publishers do… 2nd edition, 3rd edition, etc.
Enough blabbing for now…What do you think?
