Multi Niche Blog Vs Single Niche Blog : Which One Should You Start?
Are you planning to start a blog, but don’t know what blog topic to choose? Should you start a blog focussed on a single niche or should you start a multi niche blog?
In this article, I am going to tell you which one is better when it comes to choosing between a single niche website and multi niche website and why. Let’s get started.
Single Niche Blog Vs Multi Niche Blog : What’s The Difference?
Before knowing what single niche and multi niche websites are, it is important to know what a ‘niche’ is. A niche can be broadly defined as a sub section of a big market or an industry.
For example, if ‘fishing’ is considered an industry or market, ‘deep sea fishing’ can be considered its niche. Similarly, if ‘gardening’ is a market, topics like indoor gardening, community gardening etc. can be considered its niches.
Single Niche Blog
A single niche blog is a blog that focusses on one niche topic or interest. If I want to start a single niche blog in the gardening niche (based on the examples above), my niche topic would be either indoor gardening or community gardening. I will only focus on one topic or niche and nothing else.
Multi Niche Blog
As the name suggests, multi niche blog is a blog where the author writes about a variety of niches under one domain name. Many lifestyle blogs and news blogs we see online today are perfect examples of multi niche blogs.
Multi Niche Website Example
One of the popular lifestyle blogs I came across recently is ‘A Cup of Jo’. This is the perfect example of a multi niche website.
This is how the author describes the blog in her own words. “Cup of Jo is a daily women’s lifestyle site founded by Joanna Goddard that covers style, design, culture, food, travel, relationships, and parenting”.
As you can see here, although this blog is called a women’s lifestyle site, it covers a variety of topics like fashion design, style, travel, relationships, food and more.
When I went through some of the pages on this blog, it was obvious to me that the author also writes about topics like politics and finance. That basically means that the author writes about almost any topic she wants, on her blog.
And this is exactly how a multi niche blog works.
When I analysed the Cup of Jo website for keywords, three of its top performing keywords were these.
- I love you
- Apple crisp
- Baby names
As you can see, these three keywords belong to different niches and don’t seem to have a common interest. And that’s how multi niche websites usually are.
On the site Cup of Jo, it looks like the main monetisation strategy revolves around advertisements and sponsorships. I am sure the website owner also makes a ton of money with affiliate marketing.
This is one among only a few successful multi niche blogs I have come across, that was started by an individual and not a company.
My Experience With Multi Niche Blogs
I have had my share of experiences with multi niche websites in the past. At one point of time, I had two multi niche blogs. Both of these websites, however, don’t exist anymore, because they failed to take off. I was unable to generate any significant revenue from these multi niche websites.
Although I was thrilled with the idea of writing about many of my favourite topics under one blog title (domain name), I somehow failed to bring enough traffic to my multi niche blog. And most of my traffic never turned into buying customers. I used to write about travel, entertainment, spirituality, business and many other topics on this site.
What Should You Do?
Now let’s come to the important part. What exactly should you do? Should you start a single topic blog or a multi niche blog?
And my advice for you would be to stay away from multi niche blog.
Yes. If you are just starting out in the blogging world, it is better to stay away from multi topic blogs. Start a blog that focusses on a single niche or topic. Here’s why.
Multi Topic Blogs Can Be Difficult to Rank
Yes. And that’s why I failed with my multi niche blogs. They are really difficult to rank on search engines like Google, if not impossible.
As you will be writing on a variety of topics and keywords in a multi-niche website, it probably becomes hard for search engines to say exactly where your website belongs. As the main topic of your blog isn’t specific, your search engine rankings may suffer.
May Be Difficult to Grow Loyal Audience
As your blog posts are about almost every topic under the sun, it becomes very difficult to grow a loyal audience and readership. For example, let’s assume that you have a multi niche blog where you write about cooking, business, travel and more.
Let’s suppose you wrote an article about ’10 ways to work from home and make money online’ yesterday, and wrote an article about ‘how to make an apple pie’ today.
What happens when a visitor comes to your ‘work from home article’, likes it and searches for more of your relevant content, only to find the article about the ‘apple pie’.
He or she may immediately lose interest and leave your website, only never to return (unless he/she is into pies!). Because of varied interests, it becomes really difficult to grow a loyal audience.
Very Low Conversion Rates
Because of the exact reason mentioned above, the conversion rates may also suffer. Even if you get a ton of visitors to your website, converting those visitors into buying customers may be difficult.
Building A Mailing List Can be Challenging
Because the audience that arrives on a multi niche blog has different interests, it becomes very difficult to offer a freebie and build an email list.
If I have a multi niche website where the freebie I offer says ‘download our free guide to learn everything about bitcoins’, most of my audience isn’t going to opt in to get my free guide, because not all of my audience will be interested in learning about BitCoin. And that’s where the challenges arise.
Similarly, if you want to create an info product and launch it to your audience, it becomes almost impossible to do so, because of different interests.
Lower Ad Revenue
You can have a higher ad revenue in a single niche blog than in a multi niche blog. Also, getting sponsorship offers for a multi topic blog may be really difficult.
Are There Any Advantages?
The single advantage of starting a multi topic blog as I see is that you are never going to run out of content ideas. As you can write about almost any topic that comes to your mind, it is going to be pretty easy to quickly come up with your next blog post or article.
Conclusion
This is what my thoughts are about single niche and multi niche blogs.
I personally feel that starting a uni niche blog is a far better approach than starting a multi niche one. I once made a mistake of starting a multi niche website and wasted time, money and resources. I don’t want you to do the same.
Then again, opinions vary from person to person.
If you still want to start a multi niche blog, you better do your research properly. You can have a look at some of the popular multi niche websites to get a better idea about how things work in this arena.
But please keep in mind that most multi niche websites today are high authority websites that have large teams consisting of a battalion of writers, editors, graphic designer etc. They have the man power and other resources to produce quality content in bulk quickly.
That’s why you need to properly plan out your content strategy and do a thorough competition analysis before starting a multi topic blog, if you want to ever create one.