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.