Browsing through MyBlogLog community I found that there are plenty of bloggers who manage around 10 blogs/websites or even more. I remember that I have stumbled across some threads and DP forums, regarding how many sites should one manage in order to obtain best results. It seems like a lot of people that achieve some results with one blog, think that creating more sites/blogs would be a good strategy to multiply their positive results (in terms of traffic, income, etc), instead on concentrating on a single one.
In order to shed some light upon this issue, let’s write down some advantages and disadvantages that both strategies have.
PROs
a) Putting all your efforts in one blog, increases your chances of becoming an authority in that specific niche and even bring you personal fame. This will make things easier for you, if later you decide to get involved in other projects.
b) Additional income streams; some programs are available only for blogs that receive a high amount of traffic.
c) Higher pagerank - which will attract more organic traffic, and also raise the value of your link sales.
d) Easier to manage.
e) Depending on your agenda, it may bring you some indirect income.
CONs
a) It may take a lot of effort to become a “big shark in the pond”, especially if the competition is tough.
b) In case of data loss, due to server/hardaware crashes, it would turn out to be a total disaster.
c) Higher risk of becoming a target for hackers (even Darren Rose had his newsletter hacked recently).
d) In case the niche that your blog is focused on loses public interest (this may happen due to various reasons), all your work will go down the drain.
e) If your experience a drop in SERPS (sometimes it happens for apparently no reason) you will lose a lot of organic traffic, which might have a negative impact.
2) Developing multiple blogs
PROs
a) Easier to achieve a pagerank 4 for 10 blogs than a pagerank 6 for one blog.
b) In case of data loss, the damages won’t be as significant as for the first type of strategy.
c) Having multiple income streams from various niches may proof useful if one of them becomes less profitable.
CONs
a) A lot more work put into maintenance and updates will be involved.
b) Higher costs, since you will have to pay for registering more domains, and purchase several hosting packages (unless you plan to go for a free platform like blogger, which is not recommended anyway)
c) Obviously, in every niche that you blog, there will be plenty of others that will rank higher in SERPS, receive more traffic, and ultimately have more credibility and authority than yours.
Having all this written down, it seems like neither of these strategies are flawless. Some of the “CONs and PROs” for each of them are too important not to take into consideration. Although I think that having too many blogs is not a good idea, and the more sites one authors, the more clear it becomes that he is only doing it for the money, I don’t think that keeping all your eggs in one basket would be the way to go. In my opinion, having 2-3 blogs and concentrating all your efforts on those would be a good choice. It ultimately depends on how much time your are willing to dedicate to blogging, and most importantly, on the number of topics that you are really good at.
Last but not least, it depends on your personality; would you prefer to be a big shark or a group of piranhas?
It also depends on why you are blogging. I split out some of my blogs because the topics were so different. I don’t blog to make money - I blog to write about things I’m interested in!
http://stormyscorner.com
http://humansfordogs.com
http://mymansman.com
Stormy
I’ll be any fish you want, as long as it makes money!!
Seriously, I have 3 blogs at the moment, but they all have a different degree of work required.
My new photoblog for example, I can write up a week’s worth of posts on a Sunday afternoon, and they’ll autopublish during the week.
I agree you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin though.
Interesting post, i have 2 blogs, one is updated every single day with 2-3 new posts, while the other one gets updated something like once a week… one as a technorati rank in the 40k, and the other one around 600k..i just can’t keep posting on both sites, and promote them actively at the same time. Unless it would earn me a full time income, which is not the case right now, i prefer to focus on one, and eventually work more on the other one.
2-3 blogs seems to be ok for most people. It all comes down to how much work you need to dedicate, and how much you enjoy doing it.
As Chris said, if you have a photoblog (btw, congrats for that! I have visited it and it looks great!), that could be updated on a sunday afternoon, than go for it! However, if you need to write content for more blogs than you can handle, it will have a negative impact on the quality of the posts.
Thank you all for commenting!
If you are in it to make money off blogs, I say manage as many as you can handle. Once you can’t handle anymore and are making money, consider hiring someone to help you so you can create more blogs!
I’ve been tossing this question around myself. It is just amazing how much work it all is.
dont you worry about recover the data.. there are some companies who can give your data back wherever they are allocated… and even your hard disc crashed deep in the water
I have two blogs, one I post pretty much every day, the other every couple of days.
I don’t really have any trouble with running out of content Ideas because they are both in totally different fields.
I write one blog in my mother tongue i.e. Polish and another in English. For me it`s obvious to write two blogs not to restrict only to a Polish speaking audience.