How many blogs can you manage?
I have almost 100 domains registered and compared to some hobby affiliate marketers this is perhaps a small number. I started my personal projects about 2 years ago and many of the domains I bought at this time were reserved for two years and now inevitably a steady stream of renewal invoices are coming my way!
At £6 a renewal and one hundred domains that equates to around £600 ($1200) to keep them all registered for another year. Although my online earnings can easily cover this fee, this is still not an insignificant amount of cash for most of us.
How many of those Domains actually generate an income?
So here’s the problem. Out of 100 domains I would estimate that only half of them have actually generated some income, of those about 20 have actually made a profit, 5 of which actually make enough to make them worth running. And then the majority of my income comes from just a couple of sites.
So what am I doing wrong here?
Most of my domains have nothing much on them. I use a shared WordPress Install across the majority of these sites, it takes me 5 mins to go from registration to installed CMS. However the problem I have is that I don’t invest enough time into any of these sites to actually get anything going.
Every now and then I have another great new idea and hand over some more money to the domain registration company, I get the site up and running, perhaps write up a “welcome” page, an “about” page and get the site listed in Google and then I go onto the next hair brained scheme. Meanwhile it is my established sites that I have spent time building up that actually make the money.
Do you recognise yourself in this?
I have reached an obvious conclusion, if you can’t actually deliver your new website idea then you have just wasted some time and money. The goal of any project management technique should be to minimise waste. If you are working full time and you think you can deliver multiple websites then maybe running a dozen different ideas might be possible. But for most of us these spontaneous attempts to get new blogs up and running end up as wasted time where little is delivered and nothing is gained.
Ask yourself:
- Do I have the time to maintain multiple blogs? Readers will instantly spot a half finished site. Ask yourself what you do when you come across an incomplete site full of “under construction” pages or “check back soon”. Do you a) keep coming back hoping that the information will have been updated or b) find a different site?
- Can I write quality articles for each site? Sure, you might be able to chuck up a few hundred words on any given subject. But it is highly likely that without research you won’t actually know any more than your readers. Your article will be just a few paragraphs of filler text that don’t mean anything. You’ll get some SEO based traffic, but no one will want to come back twice.
- Can I engage with multiple audiences? Can you read, approve, and respond to multiple comments? You need to send out a message that there is a real person behind the blog that is listening and writing for the readers.
Go for one blog, and do it well.
Pick a subject for your website carefully and then get building. Our site building guide will help set you on the right path. It is better to have one or possibly two projects on the go that are done well than a hundred unfinished projects. This is especially true when you are still figuring out what works and what doesn’t. In the beginning you just won’t have the experience to spot a site that isn’t going to work and will most likely keep giving up before you’ve ever done enough to give the site a chance to grow.
This post is part of our series settling 29 Blogger debates.