Blog

Yesterday I gave an introduction on opening new blogs to strengthen one’s ‘home domain’. These personal-niche blogs revolve around topics that you can easily write about: hobbies, health conditions, musical interests, video games, and so on.

The concept is that these “personiche” blogs require initial effort but don’t need to be frequently updated thereafter. As the months go by and you hammer away at more serious and time-intensive problogging jobs/projects, these blogs slowly get strong in terms of Google PageRank, traffic rank, and monetization power…and so does your whole domain.

The Benefits

With disciplined SEO and great content right off the bat, each of your new blogs can get Google PR 3 or 4 in the next PR update (5 is doable, but difficult to achieve when these blogs are merely ‘auxiliary’ rather than the backbone of your problogging). If my understanding is correct, the Alexa traffic ranking service lumps together traffic for all the subdomains, and every blog that contributes traffic to your home domain’s rank helps a lot.

Aside from using blog monetization systems that partly depend on your PR and traffic rank (e.g. Text Link Ads), your highly targeted blogs can have good Adsense CTRs (a discussion of what makes a good CTR can be found at Darren Rowse’s site).

After six months or so of opening a couple of new blogs, you might be looking at a home domain that has an increased traffic rank and gives you a steady stream of income from multiple sources, even if your efforts on each “personiche” blog have tapered off.

In my experience, monetization is not the be-all and end-all. When you link your good-PR blogs to new domains/projects, the PR juice can spur the growth of the latter. I believe Google regards links coming from the same domain with less weight than those from multiple domains, but still, it’s better than none. An example: my subdomain blogs helped me and my teammates place high in the Philippines’ first two SEO competitions. They also helped put a couple of new, start-from-scratch domains in the search engine results fast.

Last (and maybe the least important for the income-minded), having a diversity of blogs under your home domain (or home ‘portal’) makes you more human, more interesting in the eyes of your readers. This is great especially if you’re looking to build a strong online persona.

Personal Examples

For the past year or so, I’ve unwittingly carried out this technique on my own domain, which is also home to my two main sites. I won’t link the niche blogs here (that’d be too much self-promotion). Instead, here are the topics I chose:

Health — I’ve been suffering from asthma since childhood. I decided to share my experiences on an experimental blog; experimental, because I just wanted to see if a new rarely-updated blog can have good search engine referrals. I’ve written less than twenty posts for the blog, yet the earnings are more than enough to pay for the next few years’ hosting and domain expenses.

Hobbies — The moment I bought my first airplane miniature model, the first words that popped into my mind were, “Blog It!” I blog about every model I add to my collection, as well as my wish list. Less than a hundred unique hits per day, but the monetization is turning out to be decent (not wildly successful).

Books — I love fantasy, sci-fi, and history books. I picked one genre of the three, then created a blog. Funny thing is, I never got around to ‘formally launching’ it, much less writing content. But believe it or not, search engine referrals do trickle in (due to some SEO I did a few months ago), and visitors sometimes click on the ads. Rare clicks, but no doubt, once I get around to writing actual blog posts, the site can contribute some food on the table.

Video games — You see, I’m a huge fan of a 1998 space-sim game that never attracted mainstream fans but earned a small cult following. I created a blog that has more static pages than posts. The jury’s still out on this one; small cult following translates to few visitors, with only a few ad clicks.

Seven Steps

Last but not the least, here are seven steps you can follow when creating “personiche” blogs to strengthen your home domain.

1. Identify the topics you can write about with ease. It’s either you’ve mastered these topics already, or have the burning desire to explore and learn more about them.

2. Do some keyword research. Run some blog searches (e.g. Technorati, Google BlogSearch) for competitor sites or related posts, and see if the advertisements displayed on those pages are targeted enough.

3. Deploy the blog. My favorite choice is WordPress, which is very SEO-friendly in my opinion (do change the default permalinks, though!).

4. Do the preliminary SEO. Optimize the site by choosing a good blog title, adding meta information in the HTML code, configuring the WP permalinks, and so on. If you have existing blogs, add the new blog to your blogrolls.

5. Initial burst of content. Five posts over two weeks and a few more timestamped in advance (to be automatically published in the future) are a good start. Make sure these posts are keyword-rich and interesting, with your own writing tone and voice.

6. Further SEO. Armed with good content (and better with a good blog design/theme!), submit the blog and its feed to directories, build links from related sites, join a blog carnival, and so on. You can also write short articles on the blog’s topic with a link to your blog, and submit them to the many free article directories out there.

7. New content, now at your own pace. Have some free time in between your major problogging projects? Squeeze in some “personiche” posts.

Rinse and repeat.

Ryan’s recent post, How To Squeeze More Income Out Of Your Blog inspired me to add to the excellent points he raised, based on experience.

Many bloggers who own multiple domains or write for other people’s sites have what I call a “home” domain, which might host the blogger’s main blog, personal blog, web portfolio, or CV. (Mine’s at Corsarius.net.) This means the home domain doesn’t even have to be a blog and can be a static site.

A good way to raise the value of your home domain (value in terms of Google PageRank, Alexa traffic rank, etc., which can be monetized) is to create sub-sites with their own subdomains or subdirectories. One of the easiest sub-sites to create are blogs, which can be deployed rather quickly (e.g. WordPress). What’s great is that blogs, as most of you already know, can be easily updated with content, at your own pace.

The last phrase is important: at your own pace. You might ask: “Isn’t this a little bit crazy, because for blogs to be successful, they need to be regularly updated?”

True. However, if you’re already managing/writing for a slew of blogs, there’s no sense in spreading yourself too thinly by opening new blogs that will take away your time, ruin your momentum with the existing blogs, and probably cost you your problogging “day job”.

This means that for your home domain, you can open blogs that don’t need to be frequently updated. If you can update them fairly frequently (such as once a week), then better! But an initial burst of keyword rich posts followed by a trickle of new posts from time to time, combined with search engine optimization will do.

Are these spam blogs?

Heck, no. If you want to fill your home domain with generic, article directory-content blogs, then go ahead, but do remember that your home domain carries your name and reputation. The blogs you would want to open are a cross between personal and niche blogs, blogs with topics that you can easily write about: hobbies, health conditions, musical interests, video games, and the like. (At the risk of sounding a bit too absurd, I’ll call these the “personiche” blogs.)

Because these topics are fairly attached to your life and you’ve amassed quite a sum of shareable knowledge about them, you can easily create content. Let’s explore some of the example topics we listed above.

Hobbies — A book blog is an easy pick. It might be as simple as featuring the latest book you’ve read, plus a short review. Scrapbooks, chess, scrabble, model trains, RC cars — all these are blogs with highly-targeted content.

Health conditions — People search the Net for professional medical advice, but they also like to hear personal experiences. For example, if you suffer from allergies, you can write posts on what you’re doing to combat them, with a bit of allergy-related health news and trivia. Just don’t get overly “endorsing” of a particular health product you use, or else you run the risk of being accused of merely advertising.

Video games — Same with books, you can create posts on your collection of video games, or build a blog centered on one game or one genre (e.g. multiplayer online games).

Needless to say, these blogs are NOT meant to form the backbone of your problogging endeavors — you’ll need to focus on just a few blogs for those. But if one of the suggestions above strikes you as a topic worth investing a lot of time and effort in, then by all means, do so.

A reminder: Be personal with these kinds of blogs! It’s your experiences and opinions that count.

In the next post, we list the benefits of creating these “personiche” blogs under your home domain, as well as some examples from my experience.