Merging Your Blogs – Part 1: Should I do It?

This blog post is Part 1 of 2-blog post series on a blog merger topic. Here’s Part 2

I’m sure you have experienced this: You started out with one blog, and for some reasons, establishing another one to blog about another interest of yours seems like a great idea. You keep on blogging diligently on both, and suddenly you discover an under-served niche that you can have a shot to be an authority on that niche; then you start another one.

Then, before you know it, you end up having 5 blogs you need to regularly maintain (blogs should be regularly updated, you know… blog posts are blogs’ main ingredients; without the ingredients, what kind of dish are you going to make? Not only that, how to deal with the loads of promotion you need to do on social media? How to manage advertisers’ ads better?

Eventually, you feel burnt out and you start neglecting 3 of the 5 blogs you run, because you simply don’t have the resources (read: time, energy, and money) to run all 5.

You start neglecting 3 of them, and let them cruelly swallowed by the busy blogosphere, with thousands of blogs launched everyday worldwide.

Not stopping there, you start to feel that the 2 blogs you are left with often publish blog posts with overlapping topics. Then, you are thinking about combining those 2 blogs. Is it the right decision? Is it the right time to do so?

Well, the above is a fictive story of a blogger; however, I am sometimes in that position. I am considering merging several of my blogs sharing similar topics (and sell the rest.) Why?

Because I love building blogs. Growing them is another story, and I’m definitely someone who is not really keen in growing blogs – at most 3 are still manageable.

Merging your blogs is a good idea if…

1. …you feel you want to give up on your non-main blog(s)

Instead of letting your blogs die a slow death, it’s better to merge the going-to-be neglected blogs with your stronger, similar topic blog – and, like what I mentioned above – sell the rest you don’t have the time (and passion) to maintain.

2. …your blog posts topic overlaps in 2 or more of your blogs

Here’s an example: You are running a personal blog talking about almost anything, including your hobby, scrapbooking. You are also running a blog about scrapbooking. You often blog about similar things on those two different blogs.

Unless you are going to go niche all the way with your scrapbooking blog because it’s generating you more revenue (niche blog tends to make you more money if and only if you demonstrate expertise in that niche,) I suggest you to rethink about your intention in running 2 different blogs.

Running 2 blogs and posting everyday on both means you are working twice as hard as running one blog only. If you don’t have a strong reason to do that (different audience, revenue consideration, build-for-sale-later, etc.) just merge your blogs; problem solved.

3. … your primary blog makes more than 80 percent of your total income

Using the example early on this blog post, if one of your 5 blogs are making more than 80 percent of your total income, it’s probably better for you to merge 2 or 3 of the rest with your main blog. You see, one of the remaining 4 blogs is only contributing 5 percent of total income; let’s just say that such blogs are dispensable. Why?

Either for your main blog(s) or other blogs, your workload for each blog is pretty much similar – but with a world of difference in income. It’s only logical to focus on the best performing blog(s) vs. so-so maintenance on all of the blogs in your network.

Some word of cautions

Although looks great on paper, merging 2 different blogs is not an easy task: You need to ensure that when both human visitors and search engine bots are visiting your soon-to-be-merged blog, they are directed to the right location on the new location. Why? The answer is so that you are not losing both traffic and search engine ranking. This can be achieved by properly setup permanent redirection (301 redirect) – more on this latter on.

Be sure that you think twice before you merge your blogs, as blog merger can be very difficult to undone.

The next big question is, how to merge your blogs? That’s for Part 2 🙂

Photo credit: Trois Têtes (TT) via photopin cc