What strategies do you guys have? I have a video game fansite (2 years old) and a medical blog (6 months old) and I just parked another url that I'll start working on soon. How many sites do you have? How many blogs do you have? How many forums do you have? When do you decide to open another? A few pages of info, slap on some ads, move on and forget about it? Do you maintain it afterwards? Do you wait for decent traffic before opening another? Or do you open many at one time, see which one does well, then close the ones that don't? Do you have a system and operate it professionally and have (pay?) others to help manage all your sites? edit: added forums to the list.
Around 20 total. Mostly blogs. When something interests me. I noticed I was spending a lot of time reading about new mobile phone news (iPhone, N95, etc), but didn't have an outlet for it. Now my favorite news gets posted to the blog. I'm not sure how much time I'll put into it, but it's not taking much more time each day since I was already following the news. Some of each. I have a few sites that I only update about once a year, and they do very well. Others need daily maintenance. Some of each, though I rarely close old sites. I pay a flat fee for my server, so there's little harm in leaving a dormant site up there. If nothing else, it's getting older which tends to please Google, and maybe I'll redevelop an interest in it one day. A few of my sites I split revenue with, but I don't technically pay anyone.
Actually, I think this is an interesting topic for adsense. I have two very distinct sites and I, of course, have one adsense account. I know I can use channels but I really like to keep all my info separate. I guess I would try to keep one site as long as possible unless I have a completely separate idea that that really should be its own site.
I'm curious -- why? The more you split things up, the more complicated it becomes to manage everything. I try to consolidate as much as possible, then use things such as channels for tracking individual sites. I even run all of my e-mail into my gmail account - probably 25 different addresses. However, I've configured each one as a separate address, and I have gmail autotag e-mails sent to each address so I know which site the user is referring to. This makes it very easy to stay caught up on e-mail, as I can check one account from anywhere (my computer, my wife's laptop, my cell phone, etc) and see what's new.
I've got a few going. The ones in my signature and two forums. The forums are the oldest and still not getting much traffic and has only about 20 to 40visitors a day. I have no idea how to get a forum up and running....it baffles me.
I guess I'm just sort of OCD like that. For me, I've found that it's helpful to see how each site is doing in its own terms, which, channels does do... I guess I just need to do a better job of making channels and the current features of my account work for me. Basically it comes down to personal preference.
Make sure to create "URL channels" as well, which helps cover you in case you miss anything. Those are what I check on a daily basis (which site is earning how much), then I dig into specific channels if I need to do any optimization/tweaking.
Thanks for the advice. As of now, with only two sites, it's easier but that's going to be very useful if I decide to add more sites.