which is best? seperate blogs or one blog?

[RallyMcnally]

Which is best?

One blog with seperate categories, and different adsense ads based on the topic of the different blogs i write about?

or a seperate blog and web address for each blog topic?


I would like to have one blog that covers all the different categories I'd like to cover that don't fit together, is it possible now to do this with adsense? or do you need a different blog address for each topic?

[Alvin]

What are the topics you want to blog about?

You can't choose the adsense ads that appear, adsense will display whatever it thinks is the main topic on your site, not so much page specific wise.

The more niche a blog, the better it is.

[RallyMcnally]

Steves site for example: not all of his articles are about personal development per say,
he has different categories setup for whatever he blogs about, on one of his blogs it's
about being vegan and it shows google adsense ads related to vegans, on his subjective
reality/law of attraction blog entrys it shows related ads dedicated to the keywords in
that blog entry. His blog isn't a niche blog in my opinion. It covers a lot of different areas.

Does adsense show ads related to the keywords in each seperate blog entry?
or based on the entire blog?

[RallyMcnally]

this is what I'm talking about:



Steve has categories set up on his blog. He doesnt have a a bunch of different niche blog addresses dedicated to each topic he talks about. He has different google adsense ads showing for each different blog topic. How would I setup adsense to work like that?

I just want one blog, with different categories like Steve has set up, and I want google adsense to show different ads based on the keywords I use in each different blog topic. Does google adsense do that automatically? or is it a special technique?

[rossio]

Hi Rally

There are several perspectives to look at this from.

Firstly though, I would say that Steve's blog is pretty much 90% about personal development. Even the post you mention about being a vegan is related to his own personal development, the reasons for it and how he improved his lifestyle.

Even if there are 10% of posts that were NOTHING to do with personal development I would still say that his blog is very focused.

Now then, the pro's and con's of having separate sites/blogs for each separate subject matter depends on the following in my opinion:

1. How varied are the subjects? If the subjects are as varied as football, money, agriculture, fashion and monkeys then I would suggest separate blogs - but if we are talking, for instance, football, rugby, cricket, tennis - then one blog about 'sports' would be fine IMO.
2. Are you interested in search engine rankings? This is probably the biggest make or break part of the decision. If you are (and I presume you are because you are after adsense clicks) then I would seriously consider just the one blog. The reason? One blog means that all of your nice fresh content will be concentrated in one place, and all of the links you receive will be concentrated in one place. In terms of SE rankings these are two very important factors. I know I would rather have 50 links pointing at one domain rather then 10 links pointing at 5 different domains (unless those five domains were in totally non-competitive areas).
3. What is your overall purpose for the blog If it is just to make cash then I would suggest picking one good subject that you are passionate about and would happily write all day about - but that is just my opinion. From what I have heard, read and experienced you are probably better to either go for the route of having one or two very passionate, in-depth sites or going the total opposite of having hundred/thousands/hundreds of thousands of cheap sites you couldn't give a monkeys about!

In terms of the relevancy of the adsense ads on each page - I am not 100% an expert in this regard but I understand that the title, keywords and content of the page does have a fair bit of bearing on the ads delivered, but sometimes the overall theme of the site can effect it too.

I hope this helps and doesnt add too much to the confusion!

I noticed that Jill from HighRankings posts here so she will hopefully stop by and offer a FAR FAR more expert opinion than mine!

Have a great day
Ross

[RallyMcnally]

that's the thing. Choosing one focused topic is the hard part. I have like 35 different topics I'm highly interested in. I guess I'm a jack of all trades. I want to go indepth and write articles/blogs on each different topic. I would develop them all as best as I could, but it just seems so much easier to create a domain like : rallyruger.com ...and have one blog..with categories on the side for each keyword/topic....then having 35 different blogs dedicated to different areas of interest..but I guess with wordpress..i would just have to sign in with One account name and create the different blogs..so it's not that hard...

[Brutha]

How about starting do you a Blog on one of those topics?
After 3 months you have more expirience and know the audience of the blog and can dedice whether to start an additional blog or whether to blog on your site about an additional topic.

[TheBull]

This can be a tough one. I started with one blog (about programming) and decided I wanted to focus on investing and personal finance as well. Well, that seemed like a big enough leap from programming that I decided to create a separate blog for it. A month or so later I started up my 3rd blog.

I personally like the idea of them being more focused on a particular topic or two instead of really jumping around a lot of unrelated subjects. I also felt that as the blogs grow, readers would be more interested in a grouping of topics as opposed to an all-in-one blog. I could be wrong though :-)

[Alvin]

Originally Posted by RallyMcnally

that's the thing. Choosing one focused topic is the hard part. I have like 35 different topics I'm highly interested in. I guess I'm a jack of all trades. I want to go indepth and write articles/blogs on each different topic. I would develop them all as best as I could, but it just seems so much easier to create a domain like : rallyruger.com ...and have one blog..with categories on the side for each keyword/topic....then having 35 different blogs dedicated to different areas of interest..but I guess with wordpress..i would just have to sign in with One account name and create the different blogs..so it's not that hard...

Rally, I would really suggest against that. For one, your domain name factors in a lot on SEO and Adsense keyword relevance.

Now to your question about site-wide ads and page-specific ads, yes, page-specific ads do happen when the Google spiders have done their job and crawled the page.

I generally get life coaching or personal development ads like you can see on my first page:

Personal Development For A Greater Life

On an NLP specific page I get NLP ads:

NLP 101: 10 Plus 3 Beliefs That Create Wild Success - Life Coaches

And a talk about Buddhism led to some Buddhist ads:

The Monk Talks: What Would Buddha Do When Bored? - Life Coaches

The question though isn't how you can make the page relevant to the Adsense spider, it's how you can make the ads relevant to your reader.

A reader would be more likely to click on ads about Buddhism on a site that's specifically about Buddhism rather than a life coaching blog with a page about Buddhism.

P.S. If I could go back in time, I'd definitely not use the name 'Life Coaches Blog' because people who come to my site aren't usually interested in ads for for 'life coaches' or 'blog'.