Photo author: fullo

Numbers. As large as possible, as many as possible. This is what ultimately all bloggers need. Whether it’s visitors, RSS subscribers, pageviews, indexed pages or god knows what else, the more the better.

But what do you do when you’re nearing maximum expansion on your extremely tight-niche blog, for example? When it seems there are, physically, no other people in your target audience than the ones currently reading your work? If you can’t build up any more, build to the sides. Expand in other niches and build a blog network.

But how do you expand into other niches most effectively and with the least technical hassle? I can think of a few ways…

Take for instance Darren Rowse’s b5media blog networks, one of the largest and most successful ones out there. B5media covers a lot of broad topics from Beauty to Video games, with multiple blogs covering various smaller niches within each topic.

Now, the way all these blogs are built strikes me quite squarely. Browse the b5media homepage a bit, expand a few categories and open a few tabs with several blogs of your choosing. Do you see it? The same basic template, with other colors. Darren found something that works and went with it over and over again. It saves time and a lot of money. But I’d go ahead and standardize more than just the template. This brings me to the first tip:

1. Pick a way: the old-school way or the WP Mu way

To think of it, you should do this first… I would favor the old-school way of one WordPress installation for one blog. The upside of this would be that your blogs would be totally independent. Anything going wrong would hit only one of them, whereas having one big WP Mu installation just begs for something to go wrong and bring your whole network down all at the same time. It’s also easier to have your blogs on different hosting accounts, servers or even webhosts, all for the sake of network safety and de-centralization.

On the other hand, a WordPress Mu install holding many blogs would most likely take up less resources and be easier to configure and modify in case you want something changed (for example if an ad needs to be moved from one place to another on all the blogs in your network). In spite of this obvious advantage, I’m still not convinced that Mu is stable and ripe enough to be trusted with your whole blog network. Moving on to another tip:

2. Create your own custom WordPress compilation

Make, pick, have made for you or otherwise select a template that will suit your needs. Easily editable via CSS and preferably widgetized. Select the plug-ins you need and make the integrations into the template. Integrate advertising and everything else you want on the sidebars. Test it exhaustively and then download and package ALL the modified files for easy deployment every time you set up a new blog. If you’ve picked the old-school way (see tip #1), for each new blog do an installation (by hand or if available through Fantastico) and then overwrite and deploy the pages you packaged. Fire up the plugins, customize the CSS and logo for this particular install and what you end up with is a brand new blog integrated into your network and ready to receive new posts and visitors. Use and reuse as you see fit.

3. As you grow, employ qualified, motivated, talented people to write for you

In the beginning you might be able to supply a constant stream of fresh content to about 5 or even 10 blogs. But as your network grows you won’t be able to keep up with the time requirements of new content and, on top of that, administrative tasks such as comment moderation. Burnout can occur and then you’ll potentially end up leaving all your blogs to fend for themselves.

It is essential that you reach out and recruit some like-minded people who are interested in writing for your blogs and that have the know-how to do so. You can do this by asking for guest posts or by hiring them. Make sure to offer fair compensation. The most common ways are revenue share and establishing a flat per-post or rate or even a fixed salary.

Note that revenue share might discourage some potential writers from joining.

People can be hired for other jobs too, such as comment moderation or technical issues such as webhost troubleshooting or graphics or code modifications.

4. Cross-link. All the way.

No matter if your blogs are in different niches, you can still do it. You can get from any blog in the b5media network to any other blog in two clicks tops. First there’s the complete list of all blogs in the category placed on the sidebar - which provides immediate access to other blogs on the same general topic in the network - and then there’s a sort of mega-widget at the bottom of each page which enables you to browse lists including all the network’s categories. That’s 2 clicks to get to any of the over 300 blogs.

You never know what other topics your readers might be interested in, so lay it all on them in an accessible way to explore.

5. Cross-posting for more cross-linking

If you get to the level where you run several blogs on tangent topics or even on the same topic and employ the services of several writers, have them write posts for the other blog, not just their regular one. Add guest blogger headers or footers with links to their regular blogs (in your network). This will further increase the visibility of the rest of your network to visitors that only read one blog. You can pay the writers their regular fee as if the post had been published on their regular blog. Note that this works best with a “per post” payment system rather than revenue share (see tip #3).

This concludes part 1 of this guide (I thought my ideas on this would fit into one part, but 1000+ words later I find that they don’t and I still have a lot to go). Stay tuned for part 2, which should be along shortly.