Moving from a Content Site to a Blog

Question

I currently have a good deal of content written on a site, HubPages. In comparison to my other sites/blogs, my CTR on HubPages is terrible. Not to mention I do an ad split with HubPages: 60% me, 40% them.

Since the content I have written on HubPages is mixed-bag, some on tech topics, travel hubs, recipe hubs, pop culture, etc I worry how all this content would do on ONE blog. (Although it's all attached to ONE HubPages account.)

However, if I were to separate the content and put it on different blogs by niche, each blog would seldom see updates.

What would be the best move? Several tiny niche blogs or one site with all my content?

Answer 1

My recommendation would be to setup a subdomains for your different topics, consolidating them somewhat if you can, and use the multi-user feature in WordPress to manage the site as a whole. This is less expensive and easier to manage than spreading out over a lot of domains. It also seems to work better for SEO purposes but this isn't guaranteed.

You can use content rotator plugins, featured article scrollers and such to keep your more static content fresh. Also, interesting content will gain comments and thus new content. Make your site legit comment friendly but link spammer unfriendly.

I also recommend using magazine type themes for WordPress based content sites. They spur better user interaction and you can use unique descriptions rather than post excerpts to avoid in-site content duplication. You could even modify the theme to remove dates (or use a plugin) to make it less date based for more evergreen topics.

Answer 2

I would definitely go for several sites rather than one site, given the content is unrelated like that. That way, each site has its own defined target audience and can be optimised differently for that audience.

Do note that a blog is a type of content site. Typically it is one that organises your content by date, like a journal. If your content does not fit this model then a blog may not be best, although a lot of "blog" software like Wordpress can equally cope with other more general content.

Good luck.