5 Things to Know While Starting a Blog Network

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When you start out with professional blogging, you follow a cycle. You create your first successful blog, and then you move to starting another blog, and then another.

All professional bloggers dream of having a successful blog network so that they can build a reputation in all kinds of niches. And for many bloggers, this dream does come true.

But for the majority of bloggers, this dream remains just a dream because of the many ups and downs they face while trying to build a successful blog network.

Blog Network
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Starting a blog network is not an easy task.

Every blog in a blog network must be popular in order to make the entire blog network popular.

You will face many hurdles while building and maintaining a blog network. Many bloggers eventually quit because of these hurdles. To avoid such situations, you need to stay positive and remember a few factors which are very important to building a blog network.

Building a Blog Network? Things you should know

Proper Planning:

If you want to make your blog or blog network successful you need to have proper planning. You need to be clear about your goals and what you want to achieve. Make a plan and a detailed checklist of all your necessary intentions.

Your plans should include:

These are just a few must-have tasks in order to make and build a blog network. As soon as you start building, this list will shift and change and it will be wise to re-evaluate these intentions when that network is up and running.

Hard and Smart Work:

After planning, it’s time to start implementing and doing disciplined work. Make sure you meet your deadlines. Find the best way for you to be productive and active in writing articles, as well as in social media.

Maintaining all of the blogs and actively promoting them is a very time-consuming task. Blogging is not only about writing articles. Blogs need constant maintenance and promotion in order to be successful.

So if you are planning to build a blog network, make sure you prepare yourself mentally and physically for all of the necessary hard work that’s about to come.

Building a Team:

If you want to make your blog network successful it’s important to update your blog on a regular basis. Therefore, it will be better if you have a team who can help you in managing your blogs by doing things like:

  • Writing articles
  • Promotion
  • Managing social networks
  • Building email campaigns
  • Handling the blog’s technical side

Having a team helps you to maintain your blog even when you are busy with other things.

  • Note: When hiring writers, make sure they can provide you with unique, updated, and quality articles.   Low quality content is not a good thing to put on any blog.

Also, one of the mistakes we often do when managing multiple blogs is we tend to ignore some of our lower performing (or less interesting) blogs as we move ahead. My recommendation would be to follow a posting schedule and stick to it.

For example:

  • Blog A: 20 posts a month ( 5/week)
  • Blog B: 8 posts a month ( 2/week)
  • Blog C: 4 Posts a month (1/week)

On the first of every month, schedule posts on all of these blogs with the frequency you have decided upon. This way, you don’t need to worry about updating in the middle of the month. And, if you want, you can always post new and fresh content right away.

Proper Management:

Preparing a plan or a team might be easy for you, but managing your blogs according to that plan and actually managing your team is always much harder.

Keeping and sticking to your plan for all of your blogs while maintaining all of the errors and problems your blogs may be having is not easy, but it’s very important.

ManageWP Backup
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You can make use of tools like ManageWP to manage all of your WordPress blogs from a single dashboard.

You should also consider hosting your WordPress site on a Managed WordPress Host like Kinsta to stop worrying about any potential hosting issues.

Also, keeping your team motivated and giving proper feedback is a very important thing to do. Here at ShoutMeLoud, our team uses Slack to stay connected & it works out pretty well.

Slack for team communication
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Investment:

If you are planning to go big, you have to think big.

  • “Money makes money.”

Have a decent budget for the marketing of your blog as well as other necessary tools.

There are many free and paid tools which you will need, and also as I mentioned, you need to outsource a lot of work.

The investment factor depends on the individual. Ask yourself this question:

Regardless of extra investments, there are a few basic things which are required. One of those things is investing in reliable web hosting for all of your blogs to avoid downtimes and/or poor maintenance.

You may also choose to invest in SEO services or blog designs which will help you gain a wider audience with a more professional appearance.

You will also need to pay your team.

One of the hardest parts about running a blog network is managing and updating so many social media profiles at one time. I suggest a professional tool like SocialPilot.

Things to Remember:

Maintaining multiple blogs is not a one-man job. You need to learn how to delegate tasks in order to get all of the work done on schedule.

Many bloggers, including me, find it hard to delegate work and end up doing most of the work ourselves, which is a pretty wrong approach. If your target is to build a big network of blogs, you need to create a team hierarchy and assign one blog to one team.

You also need:

  • an SEO person
  • a designer
  • a marketer
  • a B.D.O.
  • and many more people as you grow and expand your network.

You need to be really focused and aim for something really high.

For example, you can set your goal as something like:

“I want to create a network of blogs bigger than Lifehacker.”

It’s important to aim high, but never compromise the quality of your blogs and give every blog its own identity.

Try to take advantage of branding by keeping something similar in all your blog networks; this could be a design element or could be the name of a domain.

For example, here at ShoutMeLoud, we use “SHOUT” in many of our brands.

  • ShoutMeLoud
  • ShoutMeTech
  • ShoutDreams

I hope the above tips will help you when starting a blog network of your own. But if you have more questions related to maintaining and managing your network, please ask in the comments.

These are a few factors which you should keep in mind before starting your blog network. If you are aware of some other important tips to starting a blog network, do share them with us. We would love to know your views.

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A Shouter who love to help the blogging community grow.

28 thoughts on “5 Things to Know While Starting a Blog Network”

  1. Kevin

    Thanks for a great article.

    Very good tips for those trying to create a network or even one great site. It might be hard for most as most new bloggers start off with no budget which means no team. Any tips for that?

  2. Arun@ dailywiki

    Excellent article harsh, i have started my own website similar to suite101 and ezine articles. Hope i will succeed from that venture. I have certain goals to be reached at the end of each year.

  3. Rahul @ MazaKaro

    proper planning is essential , i would add looking for more , when you start doing this kind of things, even if you believe you’re very good at it and you don’t need to search about it ,you’re wrong , i believe in looking for experiences and knowing more about it , cause that helps a lot !! thank You

  4. Irfan Siddiqui | RealTimeTricks

    I think its sense before starting anything either its blog or your daily stuff you need a proper planning without it you might face failure. I remember one of my friend started blogging a while ago but suddenly after a month or so from its starts he quite, why? Just because he have no planning, only reason he had started blogging was me. 🙂

  5. Jai Prakash

    I agree must know about all thing at staring point.
    Image logo also good.Thanks for sharing

  6. Samantha Wright

    Top post, thoroughly enjoyed reading thanks for sharing. Its also important that people understant if your concentration is on 5 different blogs instead on one then you’re going to be disheartened by slow progress you can only do so much.

  7. Swamykant

    Proper Management and the frequency of post matters alot.

    Nice Post. Thanks for sharing your knowledge

  8. kbharath

    Thanks for sharing this awesome article. i am new to blogging platform i am getting some invitation from other blogger to get merged with them and to start a blog network were all the team members can work on one blog. so these are the things i should keep in mind befor starting a blog network thanks for sharing this article it really helps me thank you.

    WR
    Bharath

  9. Bilal Ahmad

    Planning and Management is the key factors that will lead you to success. Saying “No” to every thing is the big hurdle so always be positive and thing will happen they you want.

  10. Athul @ Juniorhero

    hey gr8 points…. so the key behind SML network revealed by Ruchi 😉

  11. Mani Viswanathan

    Well starting a blog network is easy. Perhaps, maintaining it is where the difficult part lies. Thanks for this post Ruchi. Currently, I don’t have any plans for blog networks. Maybe me in the coming years that may change 😛

  12. Whiztechy

    Glad you like the post Abhishek.

  13. Rahul

    I have plans but i am finding very difficulty in executing things.
    1) Setting up new blog
    2) Content
    3) Backlinks
    4) Waiting for search engine traffic to come.

    It is impossible for person who do job and maintain blog network. First 6 month for every blog needs lot of articles promotion and work behind. Then you have to repeat this process again and again. Hence successful team building or investment is necessary.

    1. Whiztechy

      Rahul if you are facing problems in above points then I would suggest you to read few related articles on ShoutMeLoud because we always write articles after experience thus I am sure you will get few working tips. Working in a team is always good.

  14. Chief

    Great points! I like your heading format, very creative and effective. We started our blogging club just to primarily use peer pressure to get a critical mass of posts going. It is not as sophisticated as your network but the social aspects help to sift in some education along the way. We are all learning about the tools, what is interesting content and how to make the most of social media.

    1. Whiztechy

      Hey chief, I guess in blogging we all are learning and I would love to know more about tools, social media about which you are gaining knowledge. Do share your views and experience with us.

  15. Imran

    I agree, its not only blogging it is very thing what you want do and you require proper planing hard and smart work and a dedicated team handling their own set of jobs.

    1. Whiztechy

      Right Imran, because of lack of planning and smart work many bloggers fail to get successful and thus finally quit.

  16. Poonam

    Well said about team building…..helpful article for pro blogger 🙂

    1. Whiztechy

      Thanks for comment Poonam, hope others find it useful :).

  17. Vijay

    Thanks for providing the nice information. I will try to fix my missing part.

    1. Whiztechy

      Glad you found information useful Vijay.

  18. SathishKumar

    Interesting Ideas. I am thinking of a creating a blog network of my own, but I recognized it clearly, that I can’t do it along. Hope I will get my team members soon. Thanks for providing these useful tips.

    1. Whiztechy

      Yeah Satish, its better to have someone with you who can take care of your blog network when you are busy. Wish you luck for blog network.

  19. tushar

    no doubt if you are interested in starting your own blog network, you have to to do some really hard work very smartly….
    and a lot depends that team members are dedicated

    1. Whiztechy

      Agree with you Tushar, Blogging is more of smart work rather than hard work.

  20. Jens P. Berget

    Very interesting article. I would probably never start a blog network myself, but I would be interested in joining one and to contribute.

    1. Whiztechy

      Glad you like the article Jens, hope you get good network to join soon.

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