One or many sites to make money?

After posting about the 50 amazon site challenges, I had a few private conversions about whether do you need one or many websites to make money. Rather than highlight the pros and cons of each methods, which many had already talked, I just want to say you will need to do both. It is just a matter of timing in terms of which one do you embark on first.

I believe that focusing everything on one site will make the site a quality site. However, the challenge is knowing what niches to focus on. Some will say follow your passion, which is a good advice but you better have a concrete plan on how to monetise your passion beyond just adsense, which tend not to pay well for 'passion sites'. The thing about passion sites is that they are also competitive because most of our interest are the same and there is oversupply of information in such markets. On any single day, there will be more sites about video games than can openers.

So, beyond passion sites, you can have niche sites that target markets which are not based on any broad interest. In these markets, you need to know what product converts well and is easy for a beginner to dominate. This is when the many site strategy becomes useful.

No data in the world can 100% tell you how easy and profitable a niche is. Most often than not, the best niches I am in are 'accidentally'. They are found through the analytics on my sites and hence are not competitive but are lucrative. To maximise my chance of finding these niches at the early stage of my online career, I started many sites, and creating lots of longtail keywords in each site. You will be surprised at the ways that people can find your site if you have a broad enough keyword base.

It is only after you have found such a niche then you can focus on your efforts to make it a super authority site that can draw in thousands of visitors per day and earn you a full time income. If you want to create such a site when you are new to making money online, the chances of picking a wrong is going to be sky high, which is why I don't recommend such a strategy to beginners.

If you are new to making money online, I suggest create a couple of small sites in niches to test their conversion and your SEO ability. You can also create a boarder site when you find your golden goose.

Posted in: seo tips