I read a post yesterday on Aaron Wall’s blog (by the way, he just bought Threadwatch from earnings made selling Google stock.) I kept thinking about it and had to come back and make a few comments about it.

There are many problems with running multiple similar brands in parallel…I am going to consolidate many of my domains in the near future.

Is this always bad? For example I can have one topic: widgets, but there are multiple audiences who have a strong interest in widgets, but each has a different viewpoint of interest. One audience manufactures widgets, another sells them, and another consumes them.

Sure you could combine all of these audiences into one big group — but is that really a good idea?

In my experience online, you can really only effectively target one group at a time. If you try to generalize and “be friendly” with multiple groups at once you send messages that at least one of the groups don’t care about. Thats noise.

If your website is too “noisy” they will move onto another site that has less noise. Thats why I regularly read and post on the WebsitePublisher.net forums and not Sitepoint. Thats why Lamborghini owners post on Lambo-Power and not Car Forums.

When all of your messages are targetted to a specific group the “noise” dissappears. They hear what is important to them — and thats what they are looking for.

Here is another important concept — when “noise” is rare, your audience will be far more attentive to each message you send them — for fear of missing something good. When John Carmack makes a post on Slashdot, people listen. When an “Anonymous Coward” does.. a few people do.

There are tons of internet marketing news sites out there. There aren’t so many that are targetted specifically to website owners.

Remember, this is the internet, not television, not radio, not a book, not a movie. Think of your audiences — how are you going to reach them better than anyone else? Answer that and you win short term, and long term.