One Blog or Many Blogs: Which Is Best?
As I continue with my AdSense-friendly blog series, I realize that I haven't touched on the one-blog-or-many-blogs question. Implicitly, though, I've been favoring the multi-blog approach, which is why I've been giving quite detailed WordPress installation and configuration instructions. Let me explain why I favor the multi-blog — or blog network — approach.
It's All About Targeting
If you've learned anything by now from my writings, it's that properly targeting your blog or site is extremely important for so many reasons. Not only to get the right AdSense ads to display on your pages, but also so that your site is findable in the search engines and to attract and maintain a steady and repeatable stream of visitors. The latter is particularly important with blogs.
But I can do that with blog categories, you say. Yes, to a certain degree. Putting everything including the kitchen sink into one giant blog is going to make things harder, though. Don't forget that the domain name and page URL can go a long way to getting the right kinds of ads. And yes, you can classify everything nicely into categories and provide category-specific feeds that your users can subscribe to…
I bet, though, that most people don't bother subscribing to a category-specific feed. They'll just subscribe to the main blog feed. And if you end up posting many items across those different categories, they'll find it hard to keep up and winnow out the chaff. In the end, they'll just unsubscribe and go looking for what they want elsewhere.
Creating Your Own Blog Network
What you want to do, then, is create your own blog network. Each blog in the network is focused on a single topic, ideally a very narrow topic. Readers only subscribe to the ones that interest them and don't get flooded with irrelevant or uninteresting posts. Your ad targeting is spot on, too, because all the content is related to the topic at hand. Everyone's happy.
Well, almost. There's no doubt that setting up and maintaining multiple blogs is more work than running a single blog. And you may find yourself busier because you'll feel the need to post entries more frequently to the individual blogs, a problem you don't have with only one blog. But that's the price you have to pay. And this means, by the way, that there is a limit to how many blogs you can run as an individual before having to enlist others to help you out.
The Synclastic Network
My own blog network is slowly taking shape. I call it the Synclastic Network. Synclastic is a mathematical term meaning curved toward the same side in all directions. The root of the network is Synclastic.com, the oldest domain I've registered, older even than EricGiguere.com. So far the network only has three blogs in it: Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense, GeekAffiliate and J2ME Programming Guide. But more are on their way, and I also include non-blog sites in my network.
Of course, you may have reasons — and they can be perfectly innocent — to not link all your blogs together. So your blog network may be more of a virtual concept.
Whatever you do with your blog network, establish common processes to simplify your life. Keep copies of the plugins and themes you use. Tag and categorize your posts consistently. Optimize your ad placement as much as possible. Create links to the various administration consoles and keep a list of userids and passwords somewhere safe. Use hosting services that make blog installation easy.
Processes let you concentrate on the content. And that's the important part of a blog network.
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
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One Response to “One Blog or Many Blogs: Which Is Best?”
[...] get when you read Eric’s blog: … As I continue with my I haven’t touched on the one-blog-or-many-blogs question… Let me explain why I favor the multi-blog — or blog network — [...]