One of the things I see many online entrepreneurs currently struggling with is the question of how & where all their websites & online properties fit into a bigger picture…if there is actually a bigger picture.
Maybe you too have multiple websites, diverse interests and various spin-off ventures which are all sort of related (or in some cases, aren’t at all) but which make up your online empire.
How do you tie them all together? How do you make people aware of all the things you do? Does your online empire hang together coherently or is it a jumbled up mess of too many sites?
You may worry that none of your sites fit together, that everything seems fragmented, disjointed and confusing and that, quite frankly, if you can’t get your head around them all, then how can you expect anyone else to?
I know how you feel. At one point in time, we had the following sites:
- A group of 4-5 sites to promote our professional services (web design, marketing consulting, graphic design and technology consulting)
- The original Location Independent blog
- A website for fitness professionals
- A personal travel blog
- Jonathan’s illustration site
- This blog
It drove me mad that they were all disparate, sitting separately, all alone with nothing to connect them nor a central hub to bring them all together. But I couldn’t see a way to bring them all together without it seeming random, odd and generally a little scatty!
Perhaps it’s the OCD part of me which felt the need to make those connections, to ensure everything fit together in the minds of people who we serve (even though the audiences are very different) and to find a way to make them all sit coherently under one banner together despite their very different topics.
But finally we found a way and it helps to feel that everything is now neatly squared away in boxes. That feels much better, thank you very much!
If this is something you’ve also struggled with, you may find the following questions useful; they’re questions which we asked ourselves when we faced that challenge:
- Do you need a hub for everything you do? Why?
- Would a single hub site for all of your projects benefit your audience(s)?
- From a personal branding point of view, should you use a personal blog as a hub?
- Is there a common goal or aim of all of your sites which would enable you to group them together? (e.g. we realised that almost all of our sites have the common aim of helping people create lives they want to live, take control of their future and live their life the way they want to).
You may wonder why or whether all of this really matters…does it? Good question!
Certainly from our experience of managing multiple sites, organising them into a logical, coherent structure helps us to manage, grow and market them. Rather than having to create a strategic plan, an individual product line, a marketing plan, a to do list etc. for every single site in our empire, we can leverage the fact that much of this can be duplicated for sites which belong to the same “family”.
For example, rather than creating separate product lines for each specific online community (which is the way we started out for the Location Independent community), we’re going to be focusing on creating resources and tools which will be useful to members across all the communities, much like the DIY Design & Branding Toolkit.
That doesn’t mean we won’t create community-specific resources where necessary but it does mean we can be smarter about exposing this product line to a bigger audience by creating tools for members of 3+ communities versus just one.
Another benefit of your online empire fitting nicely together in a way which makes sense for your audiences is what you might call “cross pollination”. You’ll likely find that people who are interested in one of your projects may well be interested in another, entirely unrelated one – we’re all multi-faceted human beings and we rarely have but a single interest.
There’s another benefit to having an online empire with multiple, unrelated websites…diversifying the risk. If all of the sites in your online empire are in the same industry, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket which is not a sensible strategy in my experience.
You never know what may happen and the unexpected often happens online, the speed of which could well take you by surprise. Building your online empire solely around a single industry may well be creating an inherent barrier to achieving your long term, future success. Not a mistake we’ll be making again.
So, I’m curious…how do you tie all of the sites in your online empire together? Does it matter? Does it help?