I’ll start today with the recent post from Darren from April 5th: A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks.

In this post he says that if he were going to start a blog network fresh today as a single blogger that he would make it focused on a single niche.

I don’t know exactly how he defines a niche, but I’m going to say that a set of blogs all focused on issues of interest to women would count as a niche.

The advantages he lists in doing this are (1) being able to cross promote across the blogs and leverage the traffic, (2) Selling advertising, (3) SEO. I believe all 3 of those would work with my ideas for blogs.

Next section in the post: “How I’d Start a Niche Focused Blog Network”.

1)Work hard at building a blog with a good profile and traffic base on a single focused topic

He says its a mistake to start out new with a bunch of blogs all at once. Definitely agree with that. He says he would pick something reasonably wide that could be broken down further. Mine could be considered too wide, but at this point its what I’ve got. It won’t be any problem breaking it into more specific topics later.

He says he would work on this first blog for 6 months or so ‘before even thinking about launching more blogs’. That sounds good, but I’m already cheating a bit - I’ve already thought about more blogs - but then I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t been would I?

That gives me some specifics to work with. I’ve had the blog longer than 6 months, but since I went for a time without writing I’m considering myself to be starting at the beginning. But I will try to make it no more than 6 months before adding another blog.

So, 6 months to build up a “good profile and traffic base”. I wonder how he defines that? A good profile isn’t something you can quantify too well, at least I can’t think of how. “Traffic base” - I could look at 1) unique visitors a day (from log files), 2) how many feed subscribers I have and 3) how many comments on average I get per post.

1) Unique visitors. I got a new computer recently and have not installed the statistic software I used to use on it yet. I will probably have to upgrade it too. It is FastStats by Mach 5. I don’t have time now, but I will have to check into it soon and see how much it costs and how to go about upgrading.

2) Feed Subscribers. I just a few days ago got a feed burner feed, so I don’t have many subscribers yet. I think the feedburner subscriber number would work well as an overall way to gauge how many people I have though. I’m too embarrassed to say how many at this point. But it can only go up at this point. How many subscribers should I have before launching another blog? I’ll look around the next few days at how many other blogs have and make an estimate for what would be a good goal for me.

3) Comments. Not doing too well here yet either. I’ll come up with a number to shoot for in a few days with this too.

Well, that gives me some homework to do! And meanwhile keep writing at the other blog. I have plans for the posts for this week, but don’t have anything written yet, so I will be busy!