Owning more than one Blog as part of a business plan

In the bloggers world, we usually have to stay on message on one site in one niche, and not really wander too much, in what we are thinking or talking about on the blog. Unfortunately, most humans are more than one dimensional and have more than one interest. This is where multiple blogs single writer comes into play, and why it might make sense to have more than one blog to extend your viewer ship and test out different writing skills.

This blog is a member in a group of blogs, one for cool movies, one for streaming media, this one for web 2.0 business and all things that matter, as well as a BitTorrent blog that is occasionally updated. One of the other things we do is own our own Digg Clone here at Yasvs as a way to keep track of the articles we find most interesting, or use as source material. Most are very new, but this process of multiple blogs not a new idea either. One blog, especially as you get braver as you get more audience, might also not make good economic sense.

If you are dependent upon adsense or yahoo ads, then you know that visitors equates to clicks at about ½ of 1%, and it is not until your readership hits 10,000 that this is a meaningful number, ½ of 1% of 10,000 is 50 clicks. Of course the bigger the number, the more meaningful, the more potential there is to make more than enough money to cover hosting costs.

Of course you can buy ads to pad out the number, but that gets expensive, so the other lower cost alternative is to have sister blogs. Read Write Web has four blogs under their collective framework; Download Squad is part of a major framework collective blogging system by Weblogs Inc. We have our own set of four blogs and will more than likely launch two more before the end of the year.

This is very dependent upon how much time the blogger has, maintaining four blogs let alone six can be a daunting process, especially if your goal is to write at least one article per day for each blog. This is where guest blogs, paid pieces, and having your friends help you out for a small (say five dollar) cut of the action. This can help maintain your quality standards, and give your friends some exposure to the blogging business. Moreover, just to make sure that this is a well-known point, if you are looking at making this your primary income, it is a business, and you have to treat it like a business.

This is a fairly classic business design, get a flag ship product, and then launch a number of spin-off products based off the original successful model, but with enough of a twist to make it look, feel and act like a new product.

You still have to maintain the quality standards, the originality standards, and all the other things that make your blog unique. This can be problematic across multiple blogs, but if you have chosen your passion and your hobbies, there is always something new to blog about, get adept at using Google news to find breaking information as inspiration.

After a while owning multiple blogs becomes a habit, and you develop a rhythm that works for you. It is manageable, you just need to set aside enough time to do it, and turn it into a repeatable process, something you can do every day.