I’ve been thinking a lot on whether it’s a good idea as a publisher to focus on several smaller blogs, or try to build a real power house. In my opinion, it’s not an obvious choice for someone that wants in the new media publishing sphere.
On one hand, having a bunch of smaller blogs means that you can cross-link and -promote to launch new projects, as well as drive traffic from one blog to neighboring niches. That’s a good thing, and what blog networks such as b5media does.
So what’s the problem with this? Well, do you have enough energy and focus to really manage a bunch of blogs to an extent that they are successful? Chances are you’re spreading yourself thin, and that means that the blogs aren’t reaching their full potential. You might end up with a bunch of blogs sporting a few hundred visitors daily, which might or might not be enough for you.
On the other hand, if you build one (or a select few) power house blog, you can put all your focus on it, making it precisely as good as you can since there isn’t anything else competing with the time and energy you spend on it. This should result in a better publication, which in turn should be able to amass a whole lot more readers, and that means more money.
Then again, you’ll have a hard time to launch it since there isn’t a network of smaller blogs to promote it across. You might also be having a hard time to take it to the top notch level, since competition might be hard, and when you’re putting all your eggs in one basket you’ll have to generate a whole lot more than you do for each small blog if you go with the wider solution.
If you need to make $500 monthly, that’s $50/blog if you’ve got 10 smaller blogs, compared to actually making $500 on one power house.
I think the latter is harder.
On the other hand, becoming the #1 voice in a niche is pretty hard if you’re not being the best you can be, i.e. are spreading yourself thin, so if you want to achieve this power houses might be for you.
I don’t know what’s best. What do you guys think? Multiple blogs, or power houses? What’s your poison?
Originally posted on December 11, 2007 @ 1:25 am