The Entrecarder: Multiple Blogs and Market Segmentation

2008-01-05

Multiple Blogs and Market Segmentation

This past week has been quite an education and much of it came from the collective expertise found in the Entrecard community. While I have blogged off and on over the past couple of years, I'm awed by the sheer volume of good blogs that I've run across. One truism that I've encountered in my real world adventures in the business world is that you only get to be a "newbie" for a short while and those impressions are extremely valuable because the largest part of the general populace are always going to be newbies.

I have a couple of different areas of interest that don't really fit together into a single blog and I started off with the idea that I would have multiple blogs so that I could write to niche audiences. I've since segmented the potential audience into 6 different categories:

1) Intunique - A word that I borrowed from ancient programmers (people my age and older) and applied to the concept of "unique intelligence", hence Intunique.

2) BizBeacon - My branded word for my online business activities. This blog falls into the BizBeacon category, as do my other online marketing activities.

3) Provorem - A contrived word resulting from the two cities that represent the core of Utah County--Provo & Orem--where I reside and work. The content for these blogs--which number over 25 at the moment--eventually will meld together into a website that deals with our local business community.

4) Ready Health Products - This company is owned by a relative and I'll spend some time blogging on several sites to drive traffic to the main website.

5) Anonymous Blogging - I've got some ideas for blogs that I think will be entertaining (think PG-13) but that I'm not sure I want to have fully integrated with the rest of my blogs.

6) The Rest - Blogs on Driving, Volleyball, Genealogy, Positive Thinking and more. My creative outlet.

I'm still in the process of determining how I want to reach each audience and how best to monetize my sites. My first inclination was to include as many ads, communities, feeds, directories, etc., that I could on a site. OK, so it looked pretty busy and unattractive, and there was only so much that I could fit above the fold. Honestly, while it's a good thing that there are so many ways to earn money with your blog, it can be challenging to figure out which path to take. So, as I was already committed to multiple blogs based on audience, I decided to expand the concept a bit and design different blogs--with the same content--for different marketing approaches.

For example, I reworked my Intunique blog that is hosted by Blogger so that it was "optimized for Entrecard." Many thanks to Turnip for his Top 5 Entrecard Tips and Tricks, as I realized that my page had likely been too full of ads to be of interest. Basically I wiped most everything off the site except for the Entrecard and my own ads. And then I bumbled my way through setting up a BuzzBoost through Feedburner so that the content from my main Intunique blog gets posted on the Intunique blog that I have optimized for Entrecard.

I have since repeated the process for another Intunique feed site that is focused on Communities: MyBlogCatalog, BlogCatalog, OthersOnline & SpicyPage as of the moment. My thought was that I can continue to build that site so it's visitor friendly, a site that will encourage lingering and poking around, something that the streamlined Entrecard site isn't designed to do. My plan is to have at least two--and maybe more--Intunique feed sites that address different marketing approaches tailored to specific types of advertising like Adsense, Amazon, CJ, Adtoll, and the many others out there.

I'm pretty excited about the prospects of this market segmentation approach to monetizing my blogging and have to smile about the fact that all of the structuring work I am doing is getting in the way of writing!