Why Building One Site is Better Than Building Multiple Sites
Posted on March 4, 2008 by
Adie 
General, SEO 
42 Comments
I just read about someone who’s trying to make 5,000 sites in a year (found via SEO Book). His goal is to make a dollar a day with each site. If he can accomplish his goal, that’s a cool $5,000 each day.
Obviously, building 5,000 sites in one year is an extreme number for most of us. The webmaster in the above post has a staff of 300. Many of us don’t have any staff members, much less 300. But this story got me thinking. How many sites should you focus on?
I’ve written about this before. And my conclusion was to build as many sites as you can without losing quality. However, I’ve come to believe that in today’s online world focusing on one site is the most profitable business model.
Online Business Models
I’ll state my reasons for choosing the one-site model later in this post. For now let’s look at the evolution of internet business models. I got these concepts and pics from John Reese’s 6 minute video, It’s All About Authority.
In the beginning, online business people realized they could make more money by dividing their efforts on multiple sites. Instead of focusing on one site, they built other sites that linked to their first site.
Next, they tried crosslinking between their sites. This proved to be more profitable than the first model.
Then, they thought, “If crosslinking works with a few sites, what would happen if we built more sites?” So, they built huge networks of crosslinked sites. This made them even more money.
However, in the last year or so, the internet business landscape has experienced drastic changes. Because of these changes, the one-site model is the best.
What Changes?
Reciprocal links are dead.
Actually, they’ve been dead since 2005. You can build 10 sites and crosslink them all you want, but those links won’t count for much. Also, Google penalizes sites with too many reciprocal links.
Domain trust has become a very important search engine ranking factor.
Domain trust is a hot topic in the SEO industry (read here and here). Good search marketers all agree that domain trust is a huge part of Google’s current algorithm. In a survey between 37 search experts about ranking factors, domain trust (the survey called it “global link popularity”) was the 3rd most important factor.
How do you increase domain trust? It boils down to getting many quality links on a consistent basis. As you build more and more quality links, your search traffic will increase exponentially. But you need more links than you think. It takes time and effort to build those quality links on a regular basis.
Here is a graph highlighting the power of domain trust.
Notice how the traffic volume grows exponentially as you increase the number of links. Basically, you will get much more traffic from 1 site with 1000 links than 10 sites with 100 links each.
The competition has increased, both in quality and quantity.
I got this principle from John Reese’s video. More people are trying to make money online. Look at all the make money online blogs. Many of these blogs are less than a year old.
Webmasters are more skilled. In the past, you could enter a niche and be the only webmaster that knew about SEO and link building. Links were easier to build, because webmasters didn’t know the value of links. Today most niches are filled with skilled webmasters. Try getting a link today from a quality site. You’ll have to spend more time and/or money.
Big offline businesses are allocating more resources into online ventures. ESPN, a popular sports TV network, recently hired a full-time blogger. USA Today, a popular newspaper, has 20 blogs. Big book publishers are beginning to publish their content online. Business like these have sites with a lot of domain trust.
How do you dominate the stronger competition? By being more efficient with your resources and being really good at one thing. Focus your content production, marketing, and monetization on one site and you’ll build a strong site that will overcome the competition.
It’s like the all-in poker move. Find a good opportunity and push all your chips in the middle.
The social nature of the internet is growing.
Social media sites are growing faster than other sites. Sites like Facebook and Myspace are changing the way people think of the internet. More people are participating in the social web. This growing audience is becoming used to community-based sites like blogs, forums, and social networking sites.
These users don’t just surf the web for information. They also want a social experience. They want to interact with other users. They want to visit sites with an existing community. If your site is not able to provide a social experience, if your site doesn’t have a solid membership base, it will be considered outdated within a few years.
What’s the best way to build a community-oriented site? Put all your resources in one site, because it takes time to grow and maintain a community.
Think about it this way. Would you rather have 10 blogs with 100 subscribers or 1 blog with 1000 subscribers? I’d take the 1 blog. It’s easier to maintain. You can do less writing and marketing while reaching the same amount of people.
Can I Ever Build More Than One Site?!
Am I saying your should never build more than one site? Not necessarily. The one-site model is the most profitable model today. Yet I understand that we’re humans and we like variety. Building only one site can get boring.
I like John Reese’s principle:
Dedicate at least 80% of your time and resources to your primary website.
You can use the other 20% to explore different opportunities and niches. Also, if you want to juggle multiples sites, it’s best to outsource much of your work.
Conclusion
So, take action today. Think big. Think long-term. Think real business rather than a hobby. Think ONE site.
Pick a niche, buy a domain name, and begin pouring value into it as best as you can. While most internet marketers are juggling too many sites and chasing the latest fad opportunity, you’ll be building a big site that will crush all their little sites.
Popularity: 26% [?]
If you like this Article then please subscribe to my full RSS feed.You can also subscribe by Email.Related Posts
Two thumbs up for the ESPN blog, done by Henry Abott:
http://myespn.go.com/nba/truehoop
I only found the site after ESPN added it to their main basketball page, and since then it’s been a daily read.
Another NBA fan :)
True Hoop is oftentimes better than the regular ESPN NBA columns.
Amazing article, and really a good eye opener to most. I remember when I first start I thought of the concept of starting a bunch of sites and thought it was good, but now, not so much. Now I’m really looking into adding new features to one of my sites when a year or two ago I would of made a completely separate site for that feature.
Thanks for the positive feedback. And great example of staying focused on one site instead of starting a new one.
Indeed, focusing on one site only to improve it and make a quality site is way much better than confusing your self with 5000 sites. And the more important, you will not be just spamming around the internet with useless sites just because you want to make some money online.
In any case i believe his project will fail and he won’t reach the goal.
But that begs the question, what if an even bigger site comes in and crushes your one-and-only ‘monster site’?
Usually, small sites gets crushed while big sites get bought out because they’re much harder to compete against.
There is always the opportunity to do it better and cheaper than a huge guy that will crush you. Huge guys usually die under their own weight.
I have run a profitable chat operation for 15 years (chatropolis.com). Our worst years were when we were in a huge office building with a large staff. Today I run the same operation with one programmer,one html designer,book keeper,lawyer and accountant. On occasion we farm out some work.
Many less popular and less profitable operations take 100 people to run.I can run those operations with a staff of 3 and one dedicated to getting me Greygoose martinis. Today running a tight operation is significantly more important than running a big operation. Ask, bianca.com,the-park.com,chathouse.com or talkcity.com. All concentrated on being huge not being better at what they did. Now they are all dead or in the process of dieing.
Think better and bigger will be a byproduct. You may have to hire someone to count the money;-).
A very interesting post, and something that I have given a lot of thought to myself. I have made a post on my blog referencing this post ( Build one site or many? ). I agree with your analysis, but at the same time I believe it can be incredibly difficult to obtain a high ranking from one site. Reason being your one site needs to be in a niche with enough potential traffic. Most niches with enough traffic are competitive, and it is really difficult to get a high ranking for a competitive niche. So I still believe there is a place for the smaller sites that may cover a sub niche. I have outranked the BBC, The Times etc by using a small mini-site without very few inbound links.
Many niches are very competitive, but I think if you do enough market research, you can find a sub niche that has a good search traffic volume while also not being too competitive. Market research is the key.
Also, referring to your last 2 sentences, why not make that smaller site bigger? Unless your sub niche is extremely small, you could find more keywords that will prove profitable. Then, simply optimize a page targeting to keywords and get some inbound links to the page.
The smaller niche can be developed with a couple of adjacent themes also. Really small niches usually have other close by niches to grow into. Often this nearby niche will have many of the same keywords.
Rick
At the risk of sounding like yet another sycophantic link chaser…
I just want to say this is one of the best, well thought out articles I have read on where blogs are heading.
You are an oasis in a fairly dreary “copy and pasted” desert. great read :)
Thanks for the positive comment. It made me day :)
I like how you put your blogs on one domain.
i agree that single website is the way to go if you target top se rankings. but there are more ways to earn online - ppc, link sales, etc. in this case single site approah is not the best option.
Conclusion - if you gonna make REAL money online you need 50,000 dollars to spend on marketing or/and building your own spam empire (5,000 sites = 5,000 domains + 5,000 hosting accounts).
Notice: There’s a way to use cross linking without reciprocal links, it still does work well ;-)
Yup, that’s a lot of money.
So, how do you cross link w/o using reciprocal links? You could do 3-way and 4-way links, but I’ve heard that Google is cracking down on those type of links, too. If they’re not, they probably will in the near future. Even if those type of links work, it’s still time consuming to build them.
I prefer to build one big site with good branding so it gets quality links naturally.
[...] Barizo discusses this in his recent post over at NetBusinessBlog: I just read about someone who’s trying to make 5,000 sites in a year (found via SEO Book). His [...]
[...] illustrates for you why building one site is better than building multiple sites. I agree. Concentrate on one strong, profitable authority [...]
[...] I just found a great article on Net Business Blog stating that it’s better to focus on building one authority site than to build many small ones. Very interesting, go have a [...]
lol, 5000 sites a year nothing, try 5000 sites a week and all on auto-pilot. :-)
[...] mer om: Why Building One Site is Better Than Building Multiple Sites, Quality Link Building : Social Links, Reciprocal Links and .edu & .gov [...]
[...] 6:41 Net Business Blog - One Blog Better than Multiple [...]
I am also a proponent of one site. In fact, as important as backlinks for domain trust, is building long tail content to bring the traffic in in the first place. If you don’t start attracting the first round of (potentially link-building) visitors, then you won’t get the second and third and fourth. I generally recommend planting your blog directly on your main site so that the reinforce each other.
I wouldn’t say a single website has to be the way to go, but 5000 is a complete other extreme. Some websites simply just don’t blend into one though so you’ll end up running a couple anyways, time dedication to it is important though so I’d recommend to run any second sites with a couple of partners to prevent it from being left in the dark or getting too little attention at times.
After all it’s hard to keep focusing on multiple sites, 300 staff members for 5000 sites will still be quite a task to maintain.
Great point about finding partners to help manage multiple sites.
Fantastic information!
I think far too many people create 10 crap blogs when they could develop and maintain one good one.
I agree with this post 100%. I used to have several hundred sites and due to the time restraints the quality was poor. I am now concentrating on around 10 of the best ones but 50% of my effort is going into 1 main site.
The key to being able to downsize is to use different monetization models tailored to your sites customer demographics.
[...] membuat blog yang bagus bisa mengutip kata John Reese’s seperti yang ditulis NetBusinessBlog “Gunakan 80 persen waktu dan tenagamu untuk mengurus blog utamamu, selanjutnya gunakan 20 [...]
I disagree with your comment that you should only have one website.
If I write about pet supplies, Internet technology, mens fashion underwear, and gardening supplies on the SAME website, most people won’t bookmark my site because only certain topics appeal to them.
You should have one website per theme.
I enjoyed the article. Thanks for the interesting content!
Reciprocal links are most definitely not dead as long as they aren’t sitewide reciprocal links.
?ks v?i mitu?
Minult k?sitakse v?ga tihti, kas teha ettev?tte veeb ?he domeeni all v?i mitmele? N?iteks erinevad tegevused (blog, epood, support jne) v?i erinevad keeled erinevatesse domeenidesse. Olen olnud arvamusel…
I’m officially confused. This post just popped up in NetNewsWire, and the date says March 4 2008, but all the comments say they were posted in Sept/Oct 2007? Huh?
I completely disagree with your notion that one site is better than several sites. I can see your position that focusing on the business (an essential skill) will be more likely to bring returns. I can see your point that gaining links to one site is going to be more rewarding than having a handful of links to several sites. However, your whole concept of having one business site that can serve multiple audiences is doomed to failure. Here’s why. Online behaviour has a significant difference to our behaviour in the offline world. Offline, for instance, we choose a magazine, say, that covers our particular interest, such as cars. However, we don’t read the entire magazine; there are sections we don’t like, things we ignore etc. In order to fulfil our interest and get complete coverage we’d probably need to buy dozens of magazines and choose the best bits. But, in the real world that’s costly and time consuming, to say nothing of the environmental damage. Online people do things differently. Instead of sticking with one site that almost fulfils all their needs, they take the best bits from a wide variety of sites, ignoring the bulk of each site they visit. What this means is that online we are looking for highly specific sites that offer highly specific information for highly specific psychological niches we have in mind. Consequently the “all things to all people” style of web site is no longer of interest. That means if your business site focuses on too wide an audience you will lose out. Offline, you could get away with it; online, not any longer. This means, for instance, if you run an online hotel booking service you can no longer provide a site that is generic; people are looking for hotel booking services that specialise. So, if your online hotel booking service focuses on one site, you will lose out. The only way to change this is to have dozens, if not hundreds, of specialist sites. We are in the midst of a huge change in the way people engage with business. Radical differences are on their way. In fact, the whole concept of business is about to undergo an overhaul, putting the consumer firmly in charge and making the decisions. If you focus on one web site, you are doing that with “old business” eyes, not the ones we need for the new world.
Having said all this, I agree, it is a huge management issue for people in business. Just how do you focus your efforts if you have to manage thousands of sites? That’s why your notion of focusing on one site makes so much sense. But it is sense for the “old ways” of doing business and is unlikely to succeed in the coming new way. How you solve this dilemma though, is a real question that no-one I’ve spoken to has an answer.
In every business start up, the focus of direction is very important.
Nowadays the internet is full of contents,some good and bad. It’s become a important task to filter out the quality website on the net.
I prefer to spend more time to build one authority site rather than tons of useless websites.
Thanks post!
This makes great sense, and it is something I have been wondering about for quite some time. Thanks for the great info - and those pics are beatiful!
I build travel affiliate sites and I prefer to create sub niche sites for each destination rather then create one massive portal. How can I ever compete with established travel sites like Tripadvisor or Wotif? It’s impossible.
By creating more focused local content ( including domain name ) I am able to create enough extra value and credibility to make a sale.
Graham mentioned above “for instance, if you run an online hotel booking service you can no longer provide a site that is generic; people are looking for hotel booking services that specialise.”
He is exactly right. Leave the large generic portals to the established players who have 100’s of programmers etc.
I can only be competitive if I divide and specialise.
im not sure this is completely true. Maybe have a main website with a couple of websites to compliment that website. That is what im shooting for.
The point being missed here is that google is profiting off of our good SEO work (providing relevant search content) and they make the dollars without any compensation to us. Without SEO - google wouldn’t exist as it is today.
I agree with the concept here. All the previous methods are to appease google.
- DK
I don’t think I could deal with more then two sites. I’ve tried and I get anal about organization.
Great post, people have often asked me why I only have the one blog and this helps justify it.
However, if you build small sites that are easy to be monetized (like the current trend - proxy sites), it’s not that hard to make 5k sites even in a month. However, if you want to build 5k blogs and you think you can maintain them in quality, you must be crazy!