Managing Multiple Blogs

I’m sharing with you WHY I’m managing multiple blogs with a full-time IT career with four kids at home so you can be inspired to start your own blog.

I’m a mom of four and I run four blogs (that number includes this one), and I also have a full-time career in information technology as a product manager. I wanted to share the reasons behind why I have so many blogs, what motivates me in keeping all of these blogs, and what my ultimate goal truly is.

As a female entrepreneur who has young kids at home, I crave the ability to explore my capabilities outside of my career and managing my household. You can say that these blogs are “me” time. I know most people aren’t like me, but I’m wired to figure out “how can I make a dime out of this?” It’s my motivator. I know it sounds greedy, but I am cut from the motivation cloth.

I’m going to share with you my other motivations on starting multiple blogs and the WHY behind them so you can at least understand my mindset and hopefully inspire you to look introspectively on the WHY behind your own blog.

Motivations for Having Multiple Blogs

I wanted to share my motivations with you because I think mindset is truly important. Having a strategy or vision is really important because when you start carving out time for a blog and maintaining content, you are taking time away from potentially spending with your family. If you are going to trade this, what’s your why? I’m going to share mine.

Getting FIRE

No, I don’t mean fired from my career, I mean our FIRE journey. With four kids, it’s going to be tough. I have to get cars, put them through college, pay for some of their weddings, to me, that’s a lot of money. The FIRE movement is the ability to get to a point where you are financially independent. My goal is to make the same income that I am making in my IT career into my online business.

More Flexibility

Being able to be FIRE means I’ll have more time flexibility to spend with my kids. I know, I’m spending time “away” right now writing content, but it’s a step forward in being able to take off randomly to meet them down in college in a decade.

Learning

I’m a continual learner. I love learning about ways to make money online. It’s kind of like a sick addiction. It’s amazing to see something you’ve poured your heart and soul into turn a profit all without leaving your house. Being able to learn on the fly, create on the fly, and make passive income without leaving your home is freaking amazing. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Diversifying Income with Multiple Blogs

Now that I understand the landscape of the different ways to make an income online, it’s been very eye opening to me in that each blog can have a different monetization strategy and technique. I’m going to share with you each of my blog’s topics, how I monetize, and why I continue to keep up with the craziness.

Here are the general ways that you can make money online.

• Advertising Revenue
• Affiliate Marketing and Sales
• Sponsored Posts
• Product Sales
• Service Sales

With the multitude of ways to make money online, and being able to learn the work behind them, it enabled me to pick and choose which combinations of blog income I want to have for each of my different blogs.

I wanted to share the strategies for each of my blogs and how I plan on monetizing.

Site 1: Lifestyle Blog (Broad Niche)

My lifestyle blog is to document my journey as a working mom of four with managing DIY projects around the house. My hubby is pretty handy, so I can document projects pretty easy and relay them on the blog. I’m also pretty crafty, so doing projects with my kids while also taking photos for the blog is an awesome way to knock out two things with one stone.

From a monetization perspective, I’ve tried thinking about a product, but nothing really speaks to me. I don’t really want to write a book on motherhood or being a working parent. I really do not want to create a DIY ebook or anything around it. For now, I’ve settled on ad revenue, affiliate marketing, and sponsored posts (lots of brands love that I have little kids).

In short:

• Monetary Goal: Advertising Revenue, Affiliate Marketing, and Sponsored Posts
• Personal: Write about my home projects (and make money doing it in parallel) and learning about collaborating with other businesses.

Site 2: Marketing Blog (Broad Niche)

This is my marketing blog. The one you are reading right now. I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in marketing, and I love that I get to use some of my education that I got as my side hustle. The goal of this blog is honestly to share what I’ve learned as I’ve cycled through all of these blogs. I will also use this to help other small businesses through an online course or selling private coaching.

For me, I feel like there’s just about a course on every niche of blogging and small business marketing. What I have yet to see is a product/service that specializes in project management for a blog. That’s what I’m going to do next. I have EXTENSIVE knowledge around tools that large corporations and enterprises are using, so if I scale that down to sell a course on time and project management, it would be fairly easy for me and students to get value. I also like one-on-one work, but it’s just not scalable right now.

In Short:

• Monetary Goal: Product Sales, Service Sales
• Personal: I love sharing knowledge and marketing is in my blood, so I want to share my love of the business side of things.

Site 3: Cooking Blog (Specific Niche)

This is one of my favorite blogs to date that I’ve started. I started ghostwriting for my mom and documenting all of her recipes (you can see the food blog income reports). At the time of this writing, I just got approved to Mediavine for the placement of ads, so  am really excited about that taking off and finally making some money after nine months! My mom and I collaborated a lot on this blog, and I absolutely love that we started this together. It’s been an amazing culinary experience that has brought both of us together more than ever.

I do plan on helping her create an online cookbook with her best recipes, so that will be what we use for product sales.

• Monetary Goal: Advertising Revenue, Affiliate Marketing, and Product Sales
• Personal: I’m working with my mom and she’s documenting all of her beloved recipes, what’s not to love?

Site 4: Technology Blog (Specific Niche)

This is the newest blog of my portfolio. Here, I’m learning all the things I need to be successful in my CURRENT IT role. Crazy right?

Monetary Goal: Advertising Revenue, Service Sales

Personal: I’m in the IT field where the industry is changing constantly. I’m finding that there is not a lot of material or documentation on it. Based on SEMRush, it doesn’t appear that a lot of people are even searching for it. For my own purposes, I’m starting a blog in the IT field in a very narrow niche just to see if I can replicate my success with our food blog while also stepping up my game in my current full-time career.

Diversifying Income Streams with Multiple Blogs

As you can see, none of the blogs have the same combination of revenue streams. I think that’s okay because it means that I am diversifying my income so that I can recession proof my business in the event that there is a downturn in one of the different areas.

Summary for Multiple Blogs

There you have it, my personal and financial motivations for starting four blogs and maintaining them. I have never outsourced my content and have ever accepted a guest post on my lifestyle blog. I love creating things on my own because I can then say I truly did it and know the process. That might not be scalable in the future.

I started my food blog income reports starting in month 6, so I already had somewhat of a headstart and didn’t document everything I did from the beginning. Check out the food blog income reports.

I am starting a technology blog income report in month 1. I’m excited to start my journey and letting you guys know how it plays out!