Many bloggers eventually reach a point where they ask themselves: should I launch a new blog? Maybe you have other topic ideas that don’t fit in with your current blog, or maybe you want to diversify your income sources. There are many good reasons to launch a second or multiple blogs.
Some people are so passionate about one subject that they want to pour their heart and soul into their “main” blog and grow it as much as possible. Other people recognize the success they’ve had with one blog and think: maybe I can do this with several more blogs!
I think you probably already know the answer as to which person you are. Before I grew my main blog to $10,000 a month, I had already begun planning for future blog expansion into new niches. I now run a total of 8 blogs!
Why You Should Have Multiple Blogs
I’m of the belief that you should run multiple blogs if you can. Here is why:
- Reduce Risk: If you only have one blog, you are putting all your eggs in one basket. There are no financial managers who advise investors to put their life savings into one stock. It’s just not smart. If you blog full-time, you need to have multiple blogs to reduce your risk and reliance upon one site. Imagine if Google slaps your site with a penalty. It doesn’t matter whether you did or did not do anything shady; sometimes companies make mistakes and you pay the price. Is that a gamble you want to take?
- Grow Income Faster: Launching a second blog after mastering the first will inevitably help you grow your new blog faster. You know what you’re doing so the struggles you faced the first time around won’t be as much of a setback as they were in the beginning. This in turn, will help grow your income faster.
- Discover Untapped Niches: Starting multiple blogs means you can branch out into new topics and potentially discover a goldmine. This is exactly what happened to me with my third blog. I started writing about a specific area of the fashion industry that virtually no one else was writing about. I saw traffic growth much faster than I did with my first two blogs!
As you can see, from diversification of income to faster growth, there are plenty of reasons to start multiple blogs or niche sites.
When You Should NOT Have More than One Blog
I think the only case where you don’t need more than one blog is when your blog is tied to your personal brand and you show your face on the blog often. You may have brand deals and in-person income streams that came about from your blog and you know that you can work your network if anything were to happen to your blog.
That’s the only time I would say that you should pour all your effort into building your personal brand and blog instead of expanding into new territory.
I’m not in that scenario. All my blogs are “anonymous” so my personal brand or face isn’t tied to them at all.
How to Run Multiple Blogs
If you agree with me and think it’s time to start working with multiple blogs to grow and protect your business income, here are my tips. You can launch new blogs using these steps. I’m simplifying a lot of this work to keep this article short and to the point, but you can find plenty of resources on this site for the details involved in each step.
Launch Now
My first piece of advice is to narrow down your blog niche, settle on a name, and buy the URL as soon as possible. Put the most recent WordPress theme on the blog and don’t worry about any plugins just yet. Install Google Analytics so you can start tracking pageviews.
Write Your First Pillar Articles
If you can’t think of a name, but you know the niche, then go ahead and start writing your first pillar articles right away. You should have one pillar article for each category you plan to form a blog around.
Publish your pillar articles as soon as they have been written. Don’t worry about images, design, or anything except content.
The reason for this is that there is a “sandbox” period where Google doesn’t rank your site highly because it’s simply too new. It hasn’t had a chance to get links, gain traction and prove its authority in the SERPs.
I like to launch my blogs with around 7-10 long-form posts and then let them sit for about 6 months. I use the latest year’s theme (like WordPress Twenty Twenty One) and I don’t add any featured images.
Once I have time, I start building out the content.
Determine the Long-Term Content Production Plan
Once the blog has been launched, it’s time to think about a content strategy.
Do you want to outsource the content or write it yourself? How much time can you dedicate to producing content for this blog? Will you handle social media yourself or outsource it using VAs or software tools?
There’s a good chance you’ll need to outsource a lot of work if you want to scale all of your blogs. Unless you’re a writing machine and can pump out long-form content on your own, looking into outsourcing blog content by hiring freelance writers is a smart idea.
Once that’s in place, you’ll probably want to hire a WordPress Content Manager to help you post all the content your freelancers give you.
Stay Organized
When I first started working with multiple blogs, I made a big organizational mistake that probably could have been avoided.
I kept track of my different blogs’ income when I should have been tracking each blogs’ posts and maybe the traffic.
There are two problems with tracking blog income as the primary growth measurement when looking at your overall business:
- You will naturally want to grow the blog that makes the most money
- You can’t really control your income – but you can control your output
How Many Blogs Can One Person Reasonably Have?
I would not recommend running more than 10 blogs at once, unless you have a full team in place to help you run them. Realistically, 7 or 8 is the maximum number of blogs I would recommend running at once. You can go with with an authority site, or niche down into a smaller niche content website. A mix of both is ideal!
Bloggers Who Run Multiple Blogs
I came to the conclusion that running multiple blogs was a good idea thanks to several bloggers who published their own income journeys. Aside from creating your own digital products, running several blogs is the only way to hit those truly astronomical income levels like $80,000 a month and beyond, without creating courses.
If you’re looking to read blogs written by people who run multiple blogs, niche sites, and authority websites, here are a few sites to follow: