Business Ideas
Lots of Niche Mini-sites or One Authority Site?
The concept was simple, could be implemented fairly easily, and didn’t seem to require a lot of marketing experience.
So, this type of question often comes my way . . .
I want to have multiple streams of income and not put all my eggs in one basket. Shouldn’t I create 100 small sites in different niches to protect my income?
The logic of the concept and set up is that if each site only brings in, say, an average of $2 a day, the sum total of all the earnings is over $70,000/year. If you want more income, you simply add more mini-sites to your network of little money-makers!
To a lot of folks that sounds like a safe, fairly easy, and sound way to proceed.
But my own feelings on this approach are pretty definite. I prefer the “gorilla” sites – the big authority sites and portals. The ones that are seen as the authority or ahub of the niche in that marketplace. Here’s my reasoning:
I tend to sit in the camp that says to focus on the quality of your one main site and products as that’s what really sells. Quantity of Internet properties doesn’t guarantee anything except a lot of work to maintain each and every site.
What good are lots of sites that gather dust and make few, if any sales at all? They cost you in time, money (maintaining domain registrations, hosting) and patience in keeping them going.
Others have said not to put all your eggs in one basket and that you need multiple streams of income.
Yes, I agree to a point, but here’s the thing …
You can have multiple streams of income and not put all your eggs in one basket even though you have one central business site.
Your focus just has to be on building or licensing (or having others create for you) multiple backend products and/or services. That’s where having some quantity can protect your income from shutting down when a product becomes outdated or sales dwindle for some other reason.
When you think about the tasks that most people would agree you need to accomplish with your website like adding content, building a relationship with customers, sending out emails to nurture your subscriber list, doing SEO (onsite and off), getting back links, advertising, forum posting, creating multiple back ends, handling customer service, etc, etc, etc … it makes the choice even easier … 1 site or 100?
How can you really accomplish all these important tasks if you have 100 sites? And believe it or not, some addicts have 1,000 tiny sites making a few cents each per day. About the only answer is to outsource it and pay others to help you. Ratcheting up your business in this manner brings with it a whole lot of other issues.
You have to remember that sales and income are the result of marketing. If you spend an inordinate amount of time on “building” sites and products for various and sundry niches your sales will generally reflect that fact. You can not simply throw up a site, grab a few back links, and expect it to run on auto-pilot and make a consistent income with no further attention from you, the site owner.
Besides, there is evidence that Google and other search engines now are penalizing these “thin” sites and not sending them traffic that maybe they did once upon a time (a few years ago). The search engines are interested in a relevant user experience at a web site they recommend (serve to the user) and the end user experience at these tiny mini-sites is not typically very good.
Just remember that there are a thousand ways a business owner can spend his/her time working on an Internet business. But many of the tasks necessary to keep web sites maintained don’t bring in revenue. The real key to success is the actual task of selling.
Focus on marketing and selling … putting offers in front of targeted customers.
To your online business success!
Steve Browne
www.stevebrownedirect.com
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