How to Prioritize and Manage Multiple Blogs and Websites

Most internet marketing gurus preach only two important things for your website to be successful – Great content and great promotion. All other things that you do to a website are merely complementary to either of these two jobs.

Most webmasters, in order to diversify income and minimize risk often put their eggs in more than one basket, by owning multiple websites in multiple niches. It is a great strategy, but it ends up becoming a cumbersome process in managing a gamut of websites. There are webmasters who own as many as 50-70 websites. How do you ensure that each of these blogs are updated regularly with content, are promoted equally? This requires a lot of organizing effort from the webmaster.

The first step in getting to better management is to list down all your blogs. I would recommend the use of a software like Microsoft Excel to create and manage the list. You may always use this master database to add new websites or delete domains from the list when you have decided that a certain website is dead for you.

An important thing you need to realize is that not all niches are the same. The quantity of content, the frequency of updates and the competition in each niche are all different. Let us take two niches for example: “technology tips” and “Russian Mafia tattoos”. I would classify these two websites on the two extremes of all the factors mentioned. “Technology news/tips” has a lot of content to cover, needs a high update frequency and also has an amazingly high competition. “Russian Mafia tattoos” is a niche with very little content to add, does not require frequent updates and has little to no competition.

Simple and efficient mathematics

Here is a pretty intuitive formula that you may use to manage multiple websites:

Priority = Content quantity ranking + Content frequency ranking + Competition ranking

The idea is to rank all your websites across each of these three factors and add the ranks. So, if “Technology news” is ranked 1 on all three factors, it ends up with a total 3. With 40 websites to manage, Russian mafia tattoo at the other extreme would add up to 120.

Now let us suppose a site is ranked high on content (2) and frequency (2) but less on competition (30). This would mean that this website needs a lot of content, but does anybody care, since you have little competition? You can end up on top of the search results even if you write at a lesser frequency. So, you add the three to get you to 34. Likewise, simply add up the ranks of all the websites you manage and sort the websites in ascending order.

You now have a priority list with which you may decide the frequency of updates and level of effort to put into promotion for the websites in your portfolio. A website which is ranked 12th would not be attended to before you work on the content or traffic of the website at 11 and so on.

It sure is a lot of work. By using the above method, you can ensure that your work is prioritized and hence expect to improve gradually across all your niche websites and blogs.

About the Author

Anand Srinivasan blogs on Internet related stats at TechCrunchies.com. He is soon launching his new venture on exciting facts at KnewThis.com

This article has 4 comments

• 

  Corey Freeman

  October 14th, 2009

  This article is extremely helpful to me as I develop my own network of websites. Managing multiple blogs can be a daunting task! My advice would be to outsource the things that take up most of your time. I just started outsourcing my logo designs and I’m extremely happy with the results. =)

  Nice to see some updates on the blog.
• 

  Luca Di Nicola

  October 14th, 2009

  The number of blogs/websites I have is growing and some don’t get the attention they deserve. This is a great plan to start prioritizing them and then setting up a plan to update/promote them according to their rank. It’s also important to note that we need to stay focused and consistenet. A plan like the one you’ve layed out helps to do that.
• 

  Anand Srinivasan

  October 14th, 2009

  @Corey
  There is a friend of mine who does not even remember all the websites he owned. That is an extreme case scenario. Outsourcing is a great idea to make your work more organized.

  @Luca
  Very much agreed Luca. If we are going to put too much effort on a site which does not need so much in order to grow to the top, we are depriving one another site of ours the chance to grow equally big.
• 

  Joe Killian

  January 16th, 2010

  First off, I like your site and find it full of information. I am new to blogging and twitter and seo in general. I see the power and possibilities of it all, but I do not have a solid grasp of it yet.
  Content quantity ranking + Content frequency ranking + Competition ranking. I do not understand where you find the data for this formula. Can anyone explain it to me.
  I look forward to exploring the rest of your information.
  Thanks,
  JK.

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