Many bloggers aiming to use blogs as a means to make money online are constantly thinking of new blogs they could start. It’s like the entrepreneur curse. If you are a creative person, someone who likes blogging or who has tasted income from a blog, you may find every day activities stimulate new concepts for blog topics, just like an entrepreneur who comes up with new business ideas on a daily basis.
Most good entrepreneurs - and I mean those who move forward from the idea stage to the running a successful business stage - learn a lesson. It’s called focus. Focus is what turns a start-up business from a shaky idea into a stable company, and the same applies to blogs.
Opportunity Niche Blogging
It’s true many bloggers out there are having tremendous success by coming up with niche topics, setting up a blog for each one and filling them with content. However most of these bloggers are really Internet Marketers who simply use blogs as a tool. They will often outsource, buy and generate the content for their blogs and aim to replicate a successful formula to make money. They don’t necessarily care that much for the topics their blogs are covering - they just want to fill gaps in the marketplace and make a profit doing it.
There is nothing wrong with that but my advice in this article isn’t for those types of bloggers. I want to teach bloggers who consider their blog topic their passion. They probably write their own content and do most things manually. This doesn’t mean that they don’t come up with ideas for new blogs on a regular basis. In fact they may even go so far as setting up multiple blogs and buying up domain names for “future ideas”. Unfortunately these bloggers quickly build up a graveyard of neglected blogs since it’s hard for one blogger to keep multiple blogs full of fresh content if they are the only author.
Focus On What You Are Good At On Just One Blog
In most cases I believe, and I’m speaking from experience as someone who has started new blogs and shut them down just as quickly and learnt a hard lesson about stretching myself too thin across multiple blogs, that you should stick to writing for one blog and make it special. If you pour all your energies into one blog that blog will have the best content, the most traffic and be as good a blog as it can be.
Consider you have the ability to write ten blog articles per week. Would it be smarter to produce five blogs and post two articles to each one, or post all ten articles to the one blog?
I am convinced that having one “best” blog, your showpiece, is the best plan for a solo-blogger with limited blogging time.
I say limited blogging time because there are those out there (I won’t name any names - Darren Rowse, cough cough…) who can produce phenomenal amounts of content each day. For these individuals writing to multiple blogs at once is more realistic since they are capable of regular and consistent high quality output - in fact too much output for just one blog - they would drown their blog in content if the 50 articles per day they are capable of all went to the one place. These types of bloggers are rare though and most likely you are a 1-2 articles per day at most kinda person.
Clarity Of Purpose
There’s another reason to focus on making one really great blog - clarity of purpose. If you have just one baby you can put all your time into nurturing it, guiding it, responding to comments and making it the best it can be. I don’t know about you, but having only one thing to worry about, with a clear direction means I can really do a good job. While in general it’s not good to have all your eggs in one basket sometimes in blogging terms that’s the best strategy - you can always diversify *within* the one blog.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to focus your energies on one blog is the search engine rankings. If you keep writing to a blog consistently over time - about 12 months should do it - your rankings will start to really improve. If you have been following my SEO advice, in 12 months time you could have a search engine powerhouse of a blog, instead of three blogs with sub-par search rankings because your energy and promotional efforts have been divided across multiple blogs. And let me tell you something - if you can dominate the search engines the traffic can be huge!
Blog With Other People
If you simply must start multiple blog projects then plan to outsource, hire or partner with other bloggers to ensure you don’t divide your time and attention across too many focuses. This is a lesson I have learnt recently as I have converted my blog, Small Business Branding, into a multi-authored group blog - and it was one of the best things I have done. Now Small Business Branding is growing nicely with the help of many great writers and it may very well one day take over my current main blog - Entrepreneur’s Journey - in terms of traffic and popularity.
Here’s to your blogging success,
Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King
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