How Many Sites Should You Build?

What is the optimum number of sites you should be working on?

I first found out about making money online through Darren Rowse of Problogger fame. I read Problogger and found out Darren had multiple blogs. He was making six figures. This inspired me to buy a bunch of domain names and start a couple blogs.

I thought I would spend a couple minutes a day on each blog and that would be enough to start making money.

I didn’t make a lot of money. In fact, I just had a couple blogs with low traffic. Also, my blogs didn’t get updated daily like I had planned.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my first foray into online business.

• The learning curve for making money online was steeper than I thought.
• I’m not Darren Rowse. I didn’t have his experience, so I wasn’t very efficient in my blogging. I didn’t know the blogging tips and tricks to save time.
• You need to be very familiar with an industry, or you’ll run out of things to say.
• Even if you’re a fast writer, it still takes time to think of a blog topic.
• If you link out a lot, it takes time to keep up with the other blogs in your niche.
• I greatly underestimated the importance of promotion and marketing.

Blogging is hard work. Blogging takes time.

I know I’m talking about blogs, but the same principles apply to other types of websites. Every website should be updated regularly with quality content. Every website should be marketed continually.

Here’s the fundamental principle I’m trying to follow. Build as many sites as you can without suffering in consistent quality content and promotion. If any of your sites are mediocre quality and you’re not doing much to improve it, you’ve started too many sites.

It’s funny that many of us think online business is so much different from offline business. Many of us somehow think it’s a lot easier to keep up an online business. However, we should be running our online businesses like offline ones. None of us would think of starting multiple brick-and-mortar businesses if we had limited time. In the same way, we shouldn’t start multiple sites unless we have enough time to manage all of them well.

How many sites have you started? Currently, how many sites do you think you can focus on?