Indepth: How To Scale Your Niche Blogging Network

While registering domains is pretty much always a good thing, it can be easy to slip into the routine of registering domains and not actually building them up to make some money. This habit is formed out of an odd combination of impatience and laziness. On the one hand we want to get as many sites going as possible and for the money to be rolling in, but on the other, writing content all day long about topics you only chose because you like the competition/search ratio can get tedious.

What Does Scalability Mean For Blogs?

Scalability is about expanding without increasing the workload on any individual, or as Wikipedia puts it “handling growth gracefully”. Blogging is harder to scale than many businesses because it requires fresh content to be churned out, without that your blogs traffic will decrease down to a certain low plateau and stay like that.

Ways To Scale

4. Keep building new niche blogs while not updating your other niche blogs.
The other niche blogs earnings will decrease, but still exist and eventually you will have a network of many seeming dead blogs (that earn a very little each day) and a few “living” ones, earning round the clock.

Advantages:

• You can do it all yourself, no need to spend resources finding bloggers to run it all for you.
• Once you are bored with a niche you can move on to the next one. You niche abuser.
• You end up with a very large number of sites, which means stability.
• If you took time off your earnings would only decrease slightly

Disadvantages:

• You are potentially wasting money that could be earned if you kept updating all the blogs.
• Your earnings will only increase if you keep starting new blogs
• Repeatedly starting new blogs and installing the same plugins and going through the same routines all the time is boring!

3. Build new blogs at a slower rate while maintaining them all

Your earnings keep increasing as your group of blogs becomes more and more popular. Once your time is filled you continue to blog on the same group of blogs (rather than starting new ones).

Advantages:

• You can keep the select few blogs on topics you enjoy blogging about. With a larger number more of the blogs will be forced over to be based on keywords rather than your hobbies.
• You can do it all yourself.
• A few well groomed blogs means a community can build up around the most successful ones, making it much more fun and satisfying.

Disadvantages:

• You have a less diverse portfolio of blogs. If one suffered an SEO penalty in some way it would make a large impact.
• Taking time off results in a dramatic decrease in earnings (not passive income)

2. Hire bloggers to run the blogs and pay them per post

You are hiring free-lance writers who are (hopefully) specialists on your topic.

Advantages:

• Your blogging business can run and grow independent of you
• If you have the budget you can ensure quality content by paying for more expensive writers

Disadvantages:

• Very high expenses!
• Your writers are not incentivized to promote the blog. They are very much writers and only writers. Part of their pay could go towards marketing, but their value there is hard to measure because one blogger could really make an effort but fail to bring much traffic and another could get lucky, how do you price that?
• You are risking much more money than in previous scenarios, which is unnecessary
• Most people can’t afford to start a blog business this way in the first place

1. Find bloggers to blog on a revenue split.

One way to do this is by inserting their adsense ID into the adsense units on the posts they write.

Advantages:

• Money is not risked
• Your bloggers are incentivized to do their best
• Runs and expands independently of you (passive income)
• You can keep expanding endlessly like this while risking very little money
• Your bloggers earnings should increase over time, which is satisfying for them

Disadvantages:

• Harder to find bloggers willing to work like this and they may be less experienced
• If the site isn’t earning enough they will leave

Conclusion

If you want to get into blogging and have a big budget, but are inexperienced I suggest trying to run a profitable blog yourself with a small budget, in order to gain experience in marketing and growing the blog; rather than simply spending lots on freelance writers wondering why traffic isn’t coming and then spending more on advertising (which is also unnecessary for the vast majority of blogs).

For most bloggers on a small budget, the best option is to go with option 3 until your time is filled and your blogs are earning enough for it to be attractive for other bloggers to blog on a revenue split arrangement there. Then you can gradually make the shift to to finding bloggers to blog on a revenue split while you get new blogs started and eventually hand them over to a revenue split system as well. Rinse and repeat.

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