Leaving a comment on someone's blog the other day I read another commenter write "I need to get back to my blogs now". I was taken aback a bit. A stay at home mom running multiple blogs? Hmmm.
If you are serious about making money with your business blog you need to run multiple business blogs.
There are opposing opinions out in the blogosphere about starting multiple business blogs. Some bloggers cautiously encourage starting several blogs and spreading the start dates out in time.
I'd say, forget cautiously. Forget spreading them out in time. Start a new business blog when you feel inspired. Don't let anyone tell you you'd spread yourself thin. When you start multiple business blogs you will find that, depending on the topic you were inspired to pick, each blog will have a completely different audience. You will be in for surprises. You'll find it easy to drive scores of new targeted visitor to one blog from day one through straight referrals from forums and blog comments. The other blog will do better with search engines, and build up audience over time. You will find that the best marketing approach will depend on the blog.
This is what I found with two of my new blogs. Another big difference was in monetization. Take google adsense's eCPM. eCPM stands for effective cost per thousand impressions. What represents cost to Google represents revenue for your blog. I found eCPM differed by more than a factor of 10, ranging from $0.5 on the low end to $11.00 on the high end. Big difference in eCPM. Big surprise.
You'll learn a lot running multiple blogs.
True, there is more management involved with starting a new blog. You need to tweak with the blog to make it user friendly, navigable. You need to market it to drive targeted traffic. You need to make it dofollow, of course. You need to encourage and reward commenting. These tweaks take some time.
However, learning how to do a certain tweak with one blog will help you do the same tweak for the next blog in half the time. Bringing in startup traffic for blog #2 will take much less time than for blog #1.
Depending on whether you blog one hour a day or 10 hours a day, you won't be able to keep up with all the blogs all the time. You won't be able to keep in touch with your audience for a while.
Don't worry, your blog audience, commentators, subscribers, even new visitors would rather not hear from you than get an uninspired piece of information from you. Writing inspired blog posts beats posting frequently. Plus, neglecting a single blog for a while has unintended advantages. You will see what the long-term residual influx of new visitors from forums, blog posts, and search engines. More on that in a future post on keeping track of your visitors with google analytics or similar services. When you leave a blog alone for a while, make sure you continue collecting the visitor information!
It turns out many successful bloggers run several blogs simultaneously. I'll write sometime about techniques to make operating several blogs more time effective such as Firefox Profiles, separate email accounts and the like.
Do you run multiple blogs? If you do, what were the surprising differences you found in running them? Comment ahead!
