How to get success by authoring multiple blogs

As a blogger you'll have three major enemies: time, motivation and inspiration. Making small gains with an individual blog isn't hard to do (and can be managed in a very short period of time). So let's muse around the subject of having multiple blogs.

Taking a single blog to stratospheric levels of attention is very, very difficult; think John Chow, Shoemoney, Darren Rowse, DoshDosh, etc. These sites pull in tens of thousands of unique visitors a day and that's a difficult level of attention to achieve and maintain. However, it's not that difficult to build a website that achieves 500-1500 uniques a day. Now do you see where I'm going?

Can you write on multiple topics?
Most bloggers I know have at least 2-3 areas of interest and that's a good basis for being a strong writer in that field. While you may aim to be the next Darren Rowse it's unlikely that you'll get there just by running one website (hell, Darren runs loads and makes most money from his Photography website I believe). So if you think you've got enough to say on more topics, it'd make sense to try and author multiple blogs.

Authoring multiple blogs is very, very hard
Time becomes a big factor here. You may have been managing fine writing consistently high quality posts for your primary blog but adding a second (or even third) website to the equation complicates things. You can't neglect your primary blog but without spending sufficient time on your other startups you'll never get anywhere.

Success will come by weighting your effort properly
You need to evaluate what topics bring you the most attention for the least amount of time. Sure it's great to have blogging integrity but writing good posts that no-one cares about is a bad use of your time and a sure way to fail. You need to work out which material is the easiest to promote given the time it took to write.

Example from Seopher.com
I used to use this website as my technology based blog and I slipped into a lot of Linux related topics. It was very obvious from my Linux writings that the reviews were the least lucrative posts to write: with a simple distribution method and lots of niche attention. Not only that but they deliver consistently good search engine traffic throughout the year. Therefore I've recently started Distro-Review which allows me to focus entirely on reviews. I know the attention they receive, I know how to promote them and the effort-to-traffic ratio is pretty good. A review can take 3 hours or so but the traffic can last all week - that's much better than Seopher.com experiences.

Immediate gains
If you know the niche well then you should be able to publicise your content quite quickly and get the new site out into the open with decent content. I've done that with Distro-Review and the first week has been excellent. I launched the site on March 1st 2008 and it received 5,000 visitors in that first week. So it goes to show, if you know the niche you can make it work.

It really is a case of knowing how to balance your time properly. If you're like me you work throughout the week and you'll probably have other responsibilities too (relationships, kids, whatever) so you need to work out which posts give you the best attention for the time they took - these are the ones to focus on where possible. Or you could just pay someone to write for you, that works too. Check back soon for a post about hiring writers.