Blogs are a great way for non techie people to get their ideas online fast, but they’re not the only show in town. If you’re serious about making money online then I would recommend launching a few websites as well. I don’t have any super secret expert knowledge in the area but based on my experiences I think there are some definite advantages to having some websites to compliment your blog.
- Diversification – If you intend on making a living online then you’d be foolish to put all your eggs in one basket. They sort of already are in one basket because you are totally dependant on the existence of the internet but spreading your income across many different sites and blogs is a good way to try to reduce your risk as much as possible in case one site/blog goes tits up. You could just create loads of blogs of course but that would be difficult to maintain.
- Content closer to the top level – I don’t know if my title makes any sense so let me explain. The content pages of a blog are usually filed like this: website.com/year/month/day/CONTENT putting the actual content three directories from the ‘top’. Based on past experience with my own sites, the closer content is to the ‘top’, the better it is for PR and search engine ranking. I could totally be talking out of my arse here and I have nothing to back this up, but that’s my theory on it. With websites you can easily set content up however you want, keeping it closer to the ‘top’ if you choose to. You can probably accomplish this with blogs as well but I bet it’s a scary and complicated process.
- Interlinking between sites – Blogs give out link love seemingly willy-nilly. Website owners are a lot more stingy. Getting links from a blog to a quality website is a lot easier than getting a great website to link to your blog and I wonder if this could make a difference in the link’s perceived value. Again, talking out of my arse but I feel links from websites are more valuable. If you’re the webmaster of some quality websites then you have control over how to distribute them and can link your sites together making them all stronger.
- Not as time consuming to maintain – You can be up and running with several interactive, well designed blogs in an afternoon but they’ll need to be updated regularly which will be a nightmare if you have loads of them. Building a few quality websites will take a large investment of time early on, but once everything is set up you’ll be able to kick back on the beach adding updates only when you feel like it.
- Lack of community – Creating a community is why many people blog but there are advantages to having a website that has no community whatsoever. No community means there’s noone to keep happy. If you want to you can neglect your site without feeling like you’re turning your back on anyone.
I’ve been converted to the way of the blog but I’m still not convinced they’re the way to go if you’re serious about making money online. But then again I’ve never been too fond of change… I still use Notepad to build my sites for god’s sake! Am I just being a dinosaur or do you think that a web empire can be built on blogs alone?
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