One Blog Or Many: Choosing The Right Pathway To Profit For You!
February 23, 2011 Posted by ThomasThis is a guest post by Thomas who writes about entry level mining jobs.
One of the topics that seems to be draw the biggest conflict of opinions between internet entrepreneurs is the debate between single blog owners and those who own multiple blogs – and today we are going to take a look at which side of the argument is right.
Is it better to build one website with a determined, tunnel-visioned focus, or would you make more money spreading your time and effort between 2, 5, 10 or even 100 blogs?
What I wanted to do was look at both sides, listing the benefits that I see (and have experienced) for each estrategy.
One Blog, One Focus
I remember when I first started looking into online businesses, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could run more than one blog. The effort that I was putting in to my site, I would have needed a lot more than 24 hours in a day to even entertain the thought of a second one.
So, What Are The Benefits Of Running A Single Blog?
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You Can Laser Target Your Focus
Spreading your focus between multiple sites means that your attention is constantly shifting from one site to another. Think about the effort that it takes to launch and run a successful blog and then try multiplying that by 5. You are sharing your content creation, your networking, your link building – you are going to end up with 5 sites that are taking forever to gain momentum, and most likely you will start to give up on them before they have a chance to succeed.
By focusing on one blog, all that energy is compressed and you start seeing results much earlier – providing motivation to continue.
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You Can Build Community
Community requires interaction. And unless you are in the thick of the action, connecting with other people in your niche and taking the time to reply to every comment, then building a large and influential blog is extremely hard ( not impossible – just incredibly hard). If you are dividing your time between a few different blogs, then keeping your finger on the pulse of your niche is almost impossible. Try even running multiple Twitter accounts, soon enough you will most likely pull back to just one.
By having a single blog you are able to take the time get to know your readers, build community and relationships – resulting in a growing blog with raving fans.
Load Me Up With Websites!
But doesn’t more websites mean more profit? I started off with one and decided to branch out to a portfolio of website and these are a couple of reasons why.
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Eggs & Baskets
One of the most commonly touted investing tips to hedge your risk is ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. What this means is don’t invest all your money (or hope) on one single method, because if you build one website or one income stream online – what happens if your traffic suddenly takes a hit, or your niche suddenly becomes unpopular? (It can happen)
Having multiple sites that all earn you money means that if one of your blogs takes a hit, then you are not going to lose everything you have worked on.
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Target Multiple Buying Communities
I don’t like to think that I am greedy – just opportunistic. There are plenty of markets (niches) that are desperate for information and products and by focusing on just one site, there is no way that you can target all these different pools of buyers. While I am not at all endorsing an effort of trying to tap into every single buying community out there – why not dip your hand into a couple of different pies?
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Forces You To Work Smarter
The one thing that running multiple blogs taught me was that I if I was going to handle these blogs (and make them all profitable), then I needed to work a lot smarter. This meant:
- Outsourcing the little jobs that are time consuming
- Fine-tuning my content creation skills
- Work out how to get new blogs up and running as quick as possible
- Cutting back on time wasting tasks
So Which Strategy Is Best For You?
Now this may seem like a bit of a cop out, but the truth is that only you will know which strategy is right for you.
I know people who successfully use both of these strategies to build full-time online incomes and it basically comes back to your goals and which of these strategies will help you achieve these goals.
Thomas Sinfield blogs at Mining Jobs No Experience, where he shares how you can find work in the booming Australian mining industry.
37 Responses to “One Blog Or Many: Choosing The Right Pathway To Profit For You!”
It’s not hard to say that almost every successful online marketer has far more than one blog. I prefer to focus on one main blog which needs to be updated everyday or very frequently, and to expand our earning channels, why not build some niche sites that are supposed to be very suitable for affiliate programs ?
The more the merrier for me!
Another very weak guest post. I guess you accept anything Tyler. Nice way to devalue your own blog: stuff it full of crappy guest posts.
I have multiple blogs and I have to admit that I sometimes slack posting on regular basis! Good post though
Initially, you have to prefer the blog and then maintain the blog with the great support. And, thanks a lot for sharing your experience on here.
Super lame post. Even the biggest of the big bloggers have other projects. Way to get backlinks for entry level mining jobs, a lame site for a lame post. Tyler have some standards.
A typo in the very first line. I stopped reading at “be”.
Thanks for the excellent post.
Why does it have to be one or many? What about 2 or 3? Some people simply have more than one passion and would do well running a couple of blogs. It doesn’t have to consume 24 hours of a day.
I manage a number of blogs, but have freelancers who update the blogs on a schedule. However, I do blog for passion and run two blogs of my own. I agree that having one or two blogs is best, as you can better target an audience, and have more time to dedicate to the content.
I agree as well. It can be hard to keep up with at times but outsourcing, and freelancers help a lot.
While I also agree that this post was basically devoid of ANYTHING resembling useful content, I had to laugh at the comments that were equally useless, posted saying the post was useless, just to get yet another backlink. 🙂
Isn’t the interweb fun?
You make some great points it all depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Totally agree! I find that if you keep aiming at making money, you will not like what you are doing. You really need a passion for what you do!
Hi Thomas thanks for your tips. I agree with you, don’t put eggs in one basket. I never do that.
[…] that discusses a subject near and dear to many a would-be Internet professional: should you have one blog or many blogs? Naturally, there are pros and cons to either approach that need to be weighed quite […]
thanks for these tips, you put a lot of time into it and i appreciate it Tyler.
I guess its purely dependent on the blogger..if he/she is capable enough then maintaining multiple blogs is not something impossible.. 🙂
I strongly support that “All eggs in one basket” funda.
I guess we should go for multiple ventures in order to recover the loses made in one venture by the profits made in other.
to generate money online one should have multiple sites. the more no of websites you have, more your income will be… so multiple site idea really should work.
I think it really depends on what you main goal is, you can make it either way if you want it bad enough.
My strat. is to go for few quality places because of time. But I never follow it and always have too much on my plate.
yes having more websites means more money, but you got to realise that its not easy establishing all the websites at once and generate money from them.
You are right friend.
Personally I like to mix it up a little between 3-4 large sites as well as adding a number of smaller targeted sites.
I think it all goes to having not too many eggs in one basket which can be really risky at times.
I think its very important not to spread yourself too thin otherwise you’re focus gets diluted and you lose the full potential of some quality content.
Thanks for the guest post Thomas. I think as we start out with our first blog it is normal not to want to be overwhelmed by having to manage many blogs. Only later do most of us feel that it is time to branch out.
– Robert
Having many blogs gives more credits as i prefer to have many for my business
Its better to have one blog and manage one set of stats, design and readers…
Thomas,
I think this argument is a mute one if you are talking about “real” blogs and not niche blogs/websites. A real blog is frequently updated, like Tyler Cruz’s blog, and builds a community and following with repeat visitors, while a niche website has content thrown up and then rarely needs or receives additional content.
If a person wanted to run five blogs on different topics, and each blog was being updated every two to five days, then it would be next to impossible to maintain such a set-up. There would not be enough time in the day.
However, building niche sites that only require extra backlink building and no additional content, it would be easier to have ten, twenty or more of those.
Do you build other niche sites, like your Mining site?
– Andrew
I manage number of blog for different topics using different strategy. I guess that it is totally depend upon the blogger how can they maintain it.
I think its very important to have more than 1 income stream however I do find that I lose focus once I am juggling 3-4 sites at once
Al
Your right it is hard to choose what path to go down i guess it really depends on how far you go with each different vertical.
I think starting out a lot of niche sites is worth more than concentrating on building up one big blog.
I am having 4 blogs at this time. But my complete concentration is only on a single blog. I am working on it regularly. Its the best way to work on a single blog at a time to make more profit.
Focusing on one blog is still the best option if we really want to make it a big hit. Eventhough some have recommended creating multiple blogs, I would still opt in with the former.
Hello Thomas, It’s my first time to hear about that website but I love the idea behind it. I enjoyed your articles. This is truly a great read for me. I have bookmarked it and I am looking forward to reading new articles. Keep up the good work!