When Is The Best Time To Start A New Blog?

Recently, while browsing through MyBlogLog and other sites, I’ve seen a lot of people with multiple blogs, usually more than two. There is really no problem with having more than one blog, but I always ask myself that if someone has more than one blog, than it must mean their first blog is doing very well. Wrong!

And that’s where I see a problem, at least in my opinion. When checking the stats on those multiple blogs, I found that in most cases all of the blogs were doing poorly to relatively OK, but nothing more. So, instead of having one poorly performing blog, many people have several poorly performing blogs.

It is hard enough maintaining one blog, let alone 2, 3, 4 or more at once. My opinion is that until your first blog reaches a certain level or status, you should hold off on creating a second blog. If you put all your resources into writing great content, building traffic, and building a large reader base for one blog, it will be much easier to create a second or third blog, but the first one has to be there as kind of a mandatory stepping stone.

So how can you gauge the “level” or “status” of a blog and know when it’s the right time to start a new one? Well, I don’t think it’s possible to have any clear cut formula for figuring something like that out, but from my own experience there are a few general guidelines I personally measure myself up against before thinking about starting a new blog.

1. Traffic – Again, there is no particular number that can be thrown out and used for all blogs, but there are some ways to think about traffic. For example, is your site mostly getting traffic from social media sites or from organic search results? My personal view is that you should judge whether to branch out based on your organic search results as social media can be very inconsistent.

If you’re looking at traffic numbers, you should analyze your current traffic to that of the top blogs in your niche. For Online Tech Tips, I might compare myself against Digital Inspiration, HowToGeek.com, Ghacks.net, MakeUseOf.com, etc. All of these sites are very well established and well respected tech blogs.

My favorite place to see traffic levels and compare my site to others is Google Trends, which can give you very very close estimates of daily unique visitors for websites:

Personally, if I feel I am within 10% of the top blogs in my niche, I might decide to go ahead and start another site. Of course, there are blogs like LifeHacker.com that blow away everyone in the graph above, but you don’t have to compare yourself to the top 1 or 2 sites as they are exceptions that are extremely difficult to ever reach.

My point is that if I am not matching other sites in my current niche, why the heck am I going to start a new site? There are still many aspects that need to be improved.

2. Financial Aspects – Another factor that you can consider in making a decision about starting a new blog is to look at your financials. How much money are you making from your site? Do you know how much the other guys are making? Sometimes asking them is the best way to learn and to determine whether you are doing things correctly or not. Are your earnings increasing every month or decreasing?

A lot of people will say that they want to reach the $100 a day mark in AdSense and that is their goal. So reaching that number might be a sign to start a new site. For others, it could be $200 a day. Again, my view is that you should ask other bloggers in your niche what they earn on a monthly or yearly basis and compare that with your own numbers.

3. Community – Even if you don’t have a ton of organic traffic, you might have a large reader base that can serve as a good measure of when to start a new site. Some sites like TechCrunch or Engadget don’t even really need search engine traffic to do well because they have a huge number of RSS readers.

For tech blogs that I compare myself too, a reasonable number to shoot for would be 25,000 to 40,000. I’m nowhere near that right now, so should I really be starting another site? Maybe my content is not as appealing or engaging as other tech sites? If I reach those numbers, I would feel confident that my site has the quality of a tog blog in that niche.

4. Ranking – There are a lot of services out there these days that rank sites. Technorati, Alexa, Compete, QuantCast, and Wikio are just a few that come to mind. Again, it’s good to compare your rankings with those of others in your niche.

Getting your blog into the Top 1K or 5K in Technorati might signify that your site has now reached a status where it can be given a little less attention so that you can focus on a new site.

5. Limitations/Restrictions - One last factor that came into my mind was the fact that it might be a good idea to start a new blog if you have certain limitations with your current site. For example, if you feel limited by running your site on Blogger or Wordpress.com. You may also have a site with a ban, or other sort of problems related to the domain name and so on.

I would agree that there are some circumstances where it might be better to start a new blog, especially if you are writing about a topic that you are not really passionate about.

However, if you write about something you know well or that you really enjoy and you are not competing well with other sites in your niche, it would be well worth continuing to work on the current blog than trying to start up a new one and becoming even more frustrated and time-consumed. A strong first blog will carry along other blogs much better than a weak blog.

Over to the readers

What are your thoughts on when the best time is to start a new blog? Also, if you are decided to starting a new one, check the article 12 Tips To Grow the Subscriber Base on Your Second Blog.

Aseem Kishore is the lead blogger for Online-Tech-Tips, a technology blog covering a wide variety of topics including how-to tips, software reviews, and the latest tech news.