Why it is More Effective to Manage and Maintain Niche Blog Websites

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Hey everyone, welcome back to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host and today I want to talk about a subject that I've gotten a lot of questions about from, you know, people we talk to who are considering starting a podcast and even some people that are already podcasters, especially when they have multiple URLs, multiple domain names that they have purchased and decided that they'd like to use. And the issue is, should they deploy or start multiple niche blog sites or should they have one core website where everything is just under one website hosting package? And I don't want to get very technical on you at all, but I just want to mention a couple things about, you know, a website. Now there's a difference between domain names and websites. They're not the same thing. A website is, you know, you have a hosting account for your Website Somewhere like GoDaddy or Network Solutions or there's a lot of little companies that provide it. And you know, there are pros and cons to all of them, and I'm not really here to talk about that today. But you can have multiple domain names pointing into one website. And that is a really important thing to understand and to consider because you may have multiple brands. I think a lot of us do. I think there's at least three or four brands that I have associated with my company and that can be problematic. And you know, I often wrestle with brand confusion myself in our company. But you know, it can be very important to distinguish different kinds of products you sell, services you sell, different, different kinds of audiences you want to attract or speak to. And having multiple different domain names is a really good way to do that. And some companies have hundreds of different domain names because they want to capture you if you're searching on Google and then come and, you know, make sure that you're going to click on a domain name, maybe that is most relevant to what it is you're searching for. At least that's one theory. And there are, you know, varying opinions on whether that's really true or that works well. But regardless, a lot of people have multiple domain names and so should you have a completely separate website for each, or should you put them all together? That's the fundamental question that I want to talk about today. And there are pros and cons to each. I guess let's talk about the pros first. And that certainly it does make sense that if you have a podcast named feed your brand, in my case, that, you know, it's very easy for people to remember. Oh, feed your brand. Well, feedyourbrand.com, which we don't have because we couldn't get it, or feedyourbrand.co in our case, is easy for people to remember where to go to. So in that sense, it may make sense to have a different domain name than your main website for your podcast. Or let's say you have some products that you sell from your company and you're going to have a URL specific for that shopping part of your website. But then you have an informational part of your website that you may have a different URL for. So should you have different websites for each of those? Well, the marketing benefits of multiple URLs, I think is pretty clear, right? You want to make it easy for people to find you. So having multiple domain names, and some people even have domain names if they have a complicated spelling of a domain name that it's easy for people to misspell, they'll even go and get the misspelled domain names. So people type it in wrong, they're still going to get to you, they're still going to find you. And there may be some great wisdom in that. But having multiple websites, you know, there are advantages of clarity from a market perspective. And, and that's the main pro that I can think of about that is having clear, separated websites that don't have multiple brands within them can be confusing. So having that clear separation delineation can be a very positive thing.

But I'll tell you, from an SEO perspective, from our experience.

Having multiple different websites for each of those domains or each of those different niche blog sites, you know, is not necessarily something I would recommend, let's put it that way, because you have to do a lot of work to maintain each of those websites. You also got to pay for hosting each of those websites. So there's a cost factor. But hosting a website for a year is usually less than $100. So it's not a huge financial impact. But just managing them, maintaining all the plugins on them, or hiring a company that's going to do that for you to do that on multiple websites is going to cost you more than if you just had one. And you know, so there are those reasons why you might consider not having so many different websites. But the biggest reason from an SEO perspective is, you know, you're going to be creating all this blog content. If you have multiple niche blog sites, you're going to be creating written content on multiple sites and that content gets ranked, indexed and ranked by Google and there is value and equity that gets built in a website for that. Part of that is a rank of your website where you stack up against the one point, I think five or more billion websites that are out there on the Internet today. And another is how many organic keywords in Google Search you're going to rank on how many backlinks you have. All those things are the measure of the value of a website. You know, the value of a website can be built up to be quite significant. I mean, people buy and sell websites for many, many thousands and hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars if you have, you know, a val enough website. And the content you're going to put on a website has a lot to do with that. And, you know, if you have multiple sites that are each trying to rank on different keywords, each trying to have as many backlinks as possible.

I personally think that managing multiple niche blog sites and trying to get each of them to rank separately, I don't think the sum is really the total of all its parts necessarily. So if you had all that blog content within one website.

That website would be a lot more valuable and be able to make a lot more money. If you want to monetize it through advertising or really any way that you might monetize it, that getting one website with all the content together and not splitting it up amongst multiple niche blog sites, personally, from an SEO perspective and a cost and a management perspective, I think is much easier and more practical than having multiple niche blog sites. So, you know, I've seen it done both ways and certainly it can be. And there may be some business reasons why you as an individual decide that, you know what, I can't have everything on one website. I've got to split it into a couple. And you know what, business decisions are great. You know what, you're the business owner, you need to make that decision for yourself. I'm just letting you know, from my perspective, you know, the sites that really kill it and make a lot of money are the sites that have the most backlinks, the most organic keyword rankings and the most site traffic. And if you split that up among multiple websites, the numbers are going to be lower for each of them. You can kind of think of it like dividing your assets between multiple websites. Each of those resulting websites is going to have fewer assets and be less effective. It's not quite the same as like, you know, if you're investing and you want to diversify your portfolio, you don't want to have too much in any one area. I mean, these are different principles and the same thing doesn't apply here. So. But there are going to be cases where if you, let's say you're a business owner and you have two completely different businesses, you have one that's in home crafts and you have one that is an automobile repair company. Those things have nothing to do with each other and they should be on separate websites. But if you've got just different niche blogs for different brand names or different facets of what is really one core business, I would personally recommend having one website have those multiple domain names though. You can just forward each of them into a page within that site. And then for the multiple niche blogs, you can have multiple different blog pages on your site if you want. You can have as many as you want. That's not a big deal. But all of that content in the eyes of Google is seen as existing under one website. And then that website has more credibility and value and, and ranks higher than it otherwise would. You can have a different category of blogs. That's a great thing about, especially if you're using WordPress for your website. You can create as many different blog categories as you want and you can just display one category of blogs on a specific page or a feed of those blogs on one specific page. And then you know, on another page have another category and another feed and then you can have it be your different facets of your brand. But anyway, one real important thing is when it comes to your domain names, make sure that you seek the advice of a professional who knows what they're doing with domain names and how to direct that domain name to get you into that specific page of the website in the right way. Because if you do it the wrong way, it can actually hurt you. In terms of Google, I'm not getting into technical details of what that is because that'll bore everybody. But make sure you get professional advice because there's a right way to forward that domain name into a page you want it to go and that's not the main domain name for that website. That's okay. Multiple domain names can forward in to different pages on a site. Just do it the right way. So anyway, this is an issue that we've had come up a few times recently, people asking about it. They've got multiple brands, multiple niche blogs and should they have one website or many? Ultimately it's up to you and you have to make your own decision on that. If it were me I would have it all on one website. Unless they're such completely disconnected subjects they have no business being anywhere near each other then I would separate them but in general put them in the one site. That's my recommendation and I'm sticking to it, at least for now. So if you have some thoughts on this, please reach out to me anywhere on social media edyourbrand or go to the blog post at FeedYourBrand Co and leave a comment at the bottom and we'd love to hear from you and we will respond. So thanks so much everybody. Be back next time with a great subject here on feed. You'd.

Sam.

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