How Many Sites Should You Build?
Posted on July 19, 2007 by
Adie 
Blogging, General 
21 Comments
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?
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Hi Dee!
I’ve found out the same lesson in the same way - I think we’re in good company. I currently have 4 sites that I’m working on, three of which are mine. The third is a with a blog network.
I’m planning on changing a number of things, and the blog network writing gig is one of many steps in that direction. With a bit of work, I believe I’ll get there. Like you said it just takes constant attention and work.
The one thing I would add is that blogging requires passion, you really have to love doing it, otherwise it won’t go anywhere.
I agree with that passion is crucial. I think you can develop passion by knowing your industry well. Or you’ll find out that you’re not really passionate about your industry.
Good luck on your sites.
Just like the comment I gave on John Chow’s site, I WANT to start a new site/blog but I’m just a student. It wouldn’t be possible for me to manage another one.
Good call. It’s often hard for me to stay focused on one site, but right now with all my freelance projects, I only have time to manage one site.
Great post. I currently have 2 active blogs and 2 more in the works. All of my sites are on topics I am passionate about so content has never been an issue. Though I have become very frustrated with gaining targeted traffic and bulding a strong readership, I think these tend to be a challenge for most bloggers.
Cheers
Good job finding topics you’re passionate about.
Marketing and promotion is a different beast from producing content, so keep reading here and we’ll try to help you gain targeted traffic and building your readership. I’ll warn you right off the bat, though. Oftentimes marketing and promotion takes more time than writing content!
My opinion is that if your going to build a serious blog, stick to that blog or maybe 2-3 at the most and make them into good money makers. It is hard for me to post on 1 blog daily, nevermind more than that.
If your setting up something to just make money, your website could have the worst content ever as long as its written with a purpose. That purpose being to gain search traffic. You may not make as much money as if you had a couple really good sites, but set up 20 mediocre/low maintenance sites and youll start seeing some good income.
My personal plan is to set up those mediocre sites until i can gain enough monthly income to rely on. At that point i will take those mediocre sites one by one and turn them into real, good, and complete websites. With the traffic base your mediocre site already had it will be 100 times easier to be successful.
Im more talking about niche websites rather than blogs. I could never post regularly on a blog. Tried it once and lasted about 3 days.
Sounds like a good plan especially the part about turning the mediocre sites into quality websites. That’s an important step in my opinion.
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It makes me really happy a lot of people think the only way to make money online is blogs!
ssshush!
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Hey man,
Well, only have the time for my main site only. So much work and can’t focus on more projects. But would like to run 5-6 sites max.
Time is the only thing we usually don’t have :-) and that’s the main problem for me at least.
Hrvoje Livnjak
Whether you should work on multiple blogs at all should be your concern, not how many blogs you’re going to start.
Taking over a niche or even breaking into a niche is going to get harder and harder. You should focus on one and one only.
I believe, no matter how you try to monitor or balance quality content and promotion for all your blogs, they’re going to suffer in the long run.
Start one site or blog and make it as big as you can. That’s it. If you’re starting out on making money online, you shouln’t resort to creating small projects and thinking about the rinse and repeat process. Think big and commit instead of small and diversify.
You can diversify all you want, but don’t complain when one big site stomps your 10 small sites.
This one certainly hit home. I have three blogs, one active ‘business’ site (an aggregator) and a couple more in the works. While it drives my wife nuts it seems to fit me as I have so many things going on in my mind at once.
The downside naturally is that my blogs don’t get updated as often.
I see your point, I have 39 sites and i only work on one. Thats a waste of money spent on domains i dont use.
I only had one website then I added a blog to it.
Then I thought cool I’ll write about other topics and I saw mentioned on other sites that multithemed blogs are not popular.
I started other sites using Wordpress so that I could cover other topics. I think that even if you don’t have time to post regularly on all of your sites, you’d at least make some money through search engine & adsense clicks. You would only miss out on regular repeat visitors.
Right now I have 7 blogs and I’m happy since they cover my main interests. Only time will tell how often I’ll post on each.
[...] written about this before. And my conclusion was to build as many sites as you can without losing quality. However, [...]
For a newbie such as myself, this article is like a breath of fresh air. I like the focus-on-one-site concept. I’m planning an online business focused on my line of work for more than 20 years, wherein I see a need for creating a resource center (sort of one-stop-shop) that would be a great help to those in my field. I am, however, initially building a few blogs for the experience, and then I intend to join the Authority Sites Center for them to assist me with the building of the main site.
Thanks for the article and will be looking for more insightful articles on your blog.
Good luck on your online business. I’ve heard good things about Authority Sites Center.
[...] written about this before. And my conclusion was to build as many sites as you can without losing quality. However, [...]