What do you guys think is better? Sites that completely focus on one niche, and then review the affiliate products (i.e water4gasxxxxxx.com) or a general review site that includes a page for each niche (i.e productreviews.com/water4gas). I have been using the latter since it cuts down of hosting and domains, in addition to establishing a little credit. But I notice most of the PPC competitors are using a niche specific site. I've been doing pretty good against them, landing a couple of sales a day, but I can only guess how many sales they make. What do you think is better?
Personally, I prefer lots of small niche sites over larger hub-like sites that try to cover multiple niches. I think there's pro's and con's to each, but in the end for me it comes down to this, having a separate site for each niche costs next to nothing and provides more freedom and opportunity to expand upon any specific niche that gets hot for you...where if you have a single site then you'll be limited to only growing that hot niche in ways that are consistent with your overall site. It may seem like a minor thing, but when such little things as layout color scheme and even a single word in your sales copy can have drastic effects on conversions I prefer not to be limited in any way at all with niche sites.
Hi Andre, You might be able to accomplish what Scott mentions, which is also the way I think you should go, by using sub-domains. Of course, you can have unlimited http://my_nice_review.mysite.com subdomains. Just an idea. Sam
Yes, I would agree that a lot of individual niches would be better off on individual sites. Cramming them all together some times makes it confusing for the potential clients.
As Sam mentioned sub-domains are an option too, however there's been some discussions about search engines (specifically Google) trying to distinguish between valid sub-domains (being used as they think they should) and marketing sub-domains. Cutts blogged about this a while back. To me, that's the writing on the wall not to invest the time in building niche sites on sub-domains. But, I'm not suggesting others shouldn't do it if they want to. The thing is though, with multi-site hosting and domains being so cheap, you literally only have to make 1 or 2 sales per year to break even with each niche so to me it's a no-brainer to give each niche I enter its own domain and site. If money is too tight, start with a Squidoo lens (better than sub-domains in my opinion), and do some article and social marketing to make a few sales, then invest in a couple domains... make a few more sales... invest in more domains... and so on.
Those are good points Scott, and I think I am beginning to agree with you. However, I disagree with your statement about the cost. Sure, money wise it is pretty cheap for a domain, but the amount of time to build up each individual site is quite a lot. If you had to build a general review site to a decent PR with back links, it would be much faster than developing a bunch of different domains. I am still am deciding on whether to start on niche specific sites.