Blogging Strategy: 100 Niche Blogs VS 1 Flagship Blog

A handful of bloggers have tried to scrape the surface on which is a better strategy; aiming to have 100 niche blogs earning $1 per day, or 1 flagship blog earning $100 per day by itself. Here I present all the factors to help you make a more informed decision on your blogging strategy.

N.B.
Every blog is in a niche. The term ‘niche blog’ implies the blog in question is on an extremely focused topic or a very small niche.

Pros For Having A Single Flagship Blog

• You have time to be ubiquitous in your niche (seen as being everywhere at the same time). You can have a strong social media profile on several sites, leave comments in the places that matter while still having time to plan big linkbaits and make contacts on Instant Messenger. In other words having time on your side means you can have every promotion method on the Web in your arsenal.
• You can build a brand around your blog, which attracts more links and loyal readers and raises the value of your blog when it comes to the sale.

• It Can be outsourced more easily if you play your cards right. If there is just 1 blog on a certain topic you only need a few bloggers for it to be totally independent of you (think Blogging Tips). It is still important to take the time to ensure the bloggers you hire complement each other so that all the topics you once covered yourself are catered for. With 100 blogs on varying topics finding an ‘all-round blogger handyman’ is a much harder task, where the only alternative is paying lots of different bloggers to run the blogs which would be incredibly costly.
• You can ‘get the scoop’ on news stories. Having just 1 blog means you have time to stay up to date with the latest goings on and quickly make a post to break the latest hot industry news as soon as you find out about it. This behavior is rewarded by using voting sites like digg.com.
• There is the potential to become an Internet celebrity. For some of this gives a plus on the pleasure side of things, for others it doesn’t.
• You blog about a topic you thoroughly enjoy and understand. Most of us don’t have 100 different hobbies to blog about but we do have at least one that we could blog about all day (an example of the 80/20 rule).
• A flagship blog can be used as part of a business to relate to your customers and to keep the world informed about your company’s developments.

Put into a sentence, with 1 blog you have the time to both write and market it the best way possible.

Cons Of Having 1 Flagship Blog

• You can get stuck trying to break your way into a crowded niche. With 1 blog you are entering 1 niche, pick the wrong niche and you wont get far.
• You can run out of posting ideas. All bloggers have phases when they find it hard to come up with post ideas, but for those that fail to recover it kills their blog.
• Increased pressure to post due to the loyal readership. Niche blogs are about getting traffic from other methods and not about building a loyal following. Once you have a following with a flagship blog there is a lot of pressure to keep posting in the same way as you did to get that following, which can be very stressful.

Pros Of Having 100 Niche Blogs

• Blogs can be interlinked to increase/manipulate their search engine rankings and share traffic.
• Having a diverse range of blogs makes your earnings more stable. With a big flagship blog you might sell those $100 advertising spots or you might not. If you go on holiday you definitely wont. With 100 small niche blogs earning from Google AdSense, lack of maintenance should result in a gradual decrease in earnings down to a point where the only traffic arriving is search engine traffic, where the blogs will earn a similar amount each day amount all by themselves (I experienced this when I went on holiday). Overall, this is because the 2 blog types need to be monetized in different way.
• The blogs are not dependent on your personal brand to be successful. A brand can increase a sites value, but a brand that needs you to be there for it to exist is a bad thing when it comes to selling. With 100 niche sites you wont have to worry about this.
• Diversification of niches means at least one of the blogs is likely to get a lucky shot in at keyword sniping.

Cons Of Having 100 Niche Blogs

• A niche blogs’ growth is incremental rather than exponential. What I mean by this is that with a flagship blog if you have a successful piece of linkbait you build on it by releasing an even better post, which gets more attention than the first and it builds up and up. With a 100 small blogs, if you had a successful linkbait you would have to rush off to manage the other blogs rather than capitalize on that success. If you did capitalize on it… you would be building a flagship blog and not a niche blog anyway!
• There is no community and no fun. What is so great about blogging is the interactions with readers and other bloggers. What’s the use of a getting a traffic spike with no-one to brag about it to? (having a readership interested in hearing about traffic spikes is one of the few pros of meta-blogging)
• Domain name costs. 100 domains at roughly $10 each, that’ll be $1000 please.
• Content quality suffers resulting in almost all the inbound links being from another of the 100 niche blogs rather than an established site, making it hard to rank for competitive keywords in the search engines.

Conclusion

I definitely prefer the flagship blog method. Money can be made with either approach but ultimately it depends on knowing your own strengths and weaknesses and making the decision based on those. Blogging is still booming and if you have a good idea for a flagship blog then I say it is a good time to test-drive it.

I look forward to reading your thoughts on this.

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