It is very important to distinguish the different kinds of products you sell, the services you provide, and the audiences you want to attract or speak to. Having multiple different domain names is a really good way to do that. 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. Tom talks about the pros and cons of having niche blog sites, as well as the factors involved in managing and maintaining them.

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

I’m talking about a subject that has gotten a lot of questions about from people we talked 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. 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? I don’t want to get very technical on you at all, but I just want to mention a couple things about a website. There’s a difference between domain names and websites. They’re not the same thing. A website is you have a hosting account for your website somewhere like GoDaddy or Network Solutions or there are a lot of little companies that provide it. There are pros and cons to all of them and I’m not here to talk about that but you can have multiple domain names pointing into one website. That is an important thing to understand and to consider because you may have multiple brands.

There are at least three or four brands that I have associated with my company and that can be problematic. It can be very important to distinguish different kinds of products you sell, services you sell, different kinds of audiences you want to attract or speak and having multiple different domain names is a good way to do that. Some companies have hundreds of different domain names because they want to capture you if you’re searching on Google and then 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. There are varying opinions on whether that’s true or that works well but regardless, a lot of people have multiple domain names. 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 now. There are pros and cons to each. Let’s talk about the pros first. It does make sense that if you have a podcast named Feed Your Brand, in my case, that it’s very easy for people to remember FeedYourBrand.co. It’s easy for people to remember where to go to. In that sense, it may make sense to have a different domain name then your main website for your podcast.

If you have a valuable enough website, the content you put on that website has a lot to do with that. Click To Tweet

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. Should you have different websites for each of those? The marketing benefits of multiple URLs is pretty clear. You want to make it easy for people to find you. Some people, 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 if people type it in wrong, they’re still going to find you. There may be some great wisdom in that, but having multiple websites, there are advantages of clarity from a market perspective. 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. Having that clear separation delineation can be a very positive thing. I’ll tell you from an SEO perspective, from our experience having multiple different websites for each of those domains, for each of those different niche blog sites is not necessarily something I would recommend 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.

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, it’s going to cost you more than if you just had one. There are those reasons why you might consider not having so many different websites but the biggest reason from an SEO perspective is that 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. That content gets indexed and ranked by Google and there are 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 1.5 or more billion websites that are out there on the internet now. 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. The value of a website can be built up to be quite significant.

Niche Blog Sites: Getting one website with all the content together and not splitting it up amongst multiple niche blog sites is much easier and more practical than having multiple niche blog sites.

 

People buy and sell websites for many thousands and hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars if you have a valuable enough website and the content you’re going to put on a website has a lot to do with that. If you have multiple sites that are each trying to rank on different keywords, each trying to have as many backlinks as possible, managing multiple niche blog sites and trying to get each of them to rank separately, I don’t think the sum is the total of all its parts necessarily. 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 any way that you might monetize it. Getting one website with all the content together and not splitting it up amongst multiple niche blog sites is much easier and more practical than having multiple niche blog sites. I’ve seen it done both ways and certainly can be and there may be some business reasons why you as an individual decide that, “I can’t have everything on one website.” Business decisions are great. You’re the business owner. You need to make that decision for yourself. I’m just letting you know from my perspective the sites that 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.

If you split that up among multiple websites, the numbers are going to be lower for each of them. You can 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 if you’re investing and you want to diversify your portfolio, you don’t want to have too much in any one area. These are different principals and the same thing doesn’t apply here. There are going to be cases where 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 in for different brand names are or different facets of what is 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. 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 ranks higher than it otherwise would. You can have a different category of blogs.

The sum is not necessarily the total of all its parts. Click To Tweet

That’s a great thing about this especially if you’re using WordPress for your website. You can create as many different blog categories as you want. You can just display one category of blogs on a specific page or a feed of those blogs on one specific page and then on another page have another category. Under their feed, it’d be the different facets of your brand. One 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. If you do it the wrong way, it can hurt you in terms of Google and not getting into the technical details of what that is because that’ll bore everybody. Just make sure you get professional advice because there’s a right way to forward that domain name into a page you wanted to go and that’s not the main domain name for that website. That’s okay.

Multiple domain names can forward in two different pages on a site. Just do it the right way. This is an issue that we’ve had come up a few times. People are asking about it. If they’ve got multiple brands and multiple niche blogs, 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. In general, put them into one site. That’s my recommendation and I’m sticking to it at least for now. If you have some thoughts on this, please reach out to me anywhere on social media, @FeedYourBrand or leave a comment at the bottom. I would love to hear from you and we will respond. Thanks so much. We’ll be back next time with a great subject here on Feed Your Brand.

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