No doubt you have asked yourself the question “Am I better off building a large authority site or should I build a number of smaller niche sites?” Which business model is better? And of course, you get a different opinion depending on who you talk to about this. I had a pretty detailed conversation about this topic recently with someone who had downloaded my starter kit. He and I agreed that this topic is worthy of a blog post. So here is my take on the subject.
Why I don’t just build one large authority site like other people sometimes recommend:
The main reason I don’t just build one large site like other people sometimes recommend is because I know I am going to lose interest in that site if I try to focus all of my attention on that one site. There is no doubt in my mind that it will feel too much like work to me. Tell me how that would be any different than going to work at a factory assembly line every day? It really wouldn’t be much different except you would be going to your home office to do the work instead of driving to the plant. That doesn’t sound like much fun to me. I want to be working on a business that makes me want to jump for joy!
Another reason that I would not rely on one big site, especially from the start, is because you won’t know for sure if you are in a great niche or not. In fact, you really don’t discover the great niches until you have a number of different sites running in different niches. That is when you realize that some niches are hugely more profitable than others. Imagine if you spent years building a site in one niche that earns peanuts because it is a lousy niche. I own sites in some really lousy niches like that. And you don’t realize those are lousy niches until you have built the site and tried to monetize it well. If you have enough sites, you will hit one that makes great money.
Yet another even more obvious reason to not work on just one site forever is because you are putting all your eggs in one basket. Even authority sites fail from time to time. There are lots of people who killed some pretty darn great sites because of Google Panda or Google Penguin. No website is truly safe, not even an authority site. I admit that authority sites are usually much safer, but they are not immune.
Does That Mean I Recommend Building Lots of Sites?
No, not necessarily. Some guys out there will tell you that they have hundreds of websites. I used to be one of those guys. That was the business model I started out with too. I used to bang out sites as quickly as possible in many different niches. I hoped to get each website earning a buck a day. That would get me $200 per day in income which is pretty decent work from home money. Wouldn’t you agree?
Do you know what happens when you try to run that many sites though? For starters the sites themselves totally suck. They aren’t going to be authority sites. And I already wrote about why I think you are better off building authority sites compared to tiny “old school” niche sites. It is impossible to bang that many good sites out within a year or so and keep the quality level high. I have never seen anyone who could actually do that. Lots of people can generate that many sites in a year, but the quality of the sites suck.
And you know what happens when the quality of your sites really suck? You have to trick people into visiting your site. That’s right, you have to trick them. The reason you have to trick them is because nobody actually wants to land on that site. So you don’t get a meaningful amount of referral traffic. You have to manufacture all of your traffic in one way or another. Usually that means trying to use crafty SEO tactics to trick Google into ranking the site high for a certain keyword phrase. That isn’t much fun at all. I promise you it’s not. I have done that. That business model sucks in my opinion. I guess some guys like it? More power to them.
Managing a large number of sites like that is also a bigger chore than you realize it is going to be. You will end up needing to buy software or pay for services to keep track of things. Or else you will be forced to outsource more things which comes with its own set of headaches. Maybe you like managing other people. I sure don’t. To me it is an unnecessary pain in the rear.
Is there a happy medium for building niche sites that are still authority sites?
I believe there is. That is the business model that I teach in that starter kit. In my opinion the best model is to find a happy medium in between a huge authority site and a smaller authority site. In my opinion it means building a site that is about a dozen pages long up to about thirty or so pages long. That is what most of my top earning sites are. And they aren’t that hard to build.
Most times, if you are honestly trying to build a useful website, it is going to take you about a dozen pages to really explain your topic thoroughly like I recommend doing. If your content is evergreen and all you need is twelve pages then so be it. Just build the site according to how many pages you need. I bet you that as the site matures and as you work at promoting the site you will probably discover some other topics you should write about that you missed when first launching the site. Use those new topics to build new pages around and increase the size of the site a little bit. But, don’t just add new pages for the sake of making the site larger. The new pages should each serve a useful purpose to the target audience. The new pages should still fit together into your jigsaw puzzle of a website. If the page doesn’t fit in there to honestly make the site better, then it shouldn’t be there at all.
If you are building sites that are about a dozen pages to about thirty pages in total, then in a year’s time you should have yourself a nice little portfolio of anywhere from five to twelve websites. With that many sites you are bound to hit a niche that is a good earner. The other sites will earn money too, just nowhere near as much as your good earners do.
You can keep building new sites until you arrive at whatever number you are happy with.
And if you really want to you can buckle down and work on building out the good earners into larger even more profitable authority sites. But doesn’t it make sense to wait till you know for sure that it is going to be worthwhile?
And believe me, it is a lot more fun to be able to work on a number of different websites with different topics than it is to work on the same site every single day. Each day you get to decide which site you feel like working on. Doesn’t that sound like a much more enjoyable working experience?
