Are most of your sites affiliates, affiliate + content, or pure content (with Adsense or what have you)? Or something entirely different? The reason I ask is because I often hear people talking about managing lots of sites, and I wonder if what that means? Don't worry, I'm not asking for niches or get-rich-quick secrets. I'm just curious about the type of site(s) you run and how you're able to keep up with them. Caffiene doesn't count.
Mostly people just build the sites, do some seo to get some traffic and go to another project.. Unless it's all automatic, you can't really update 843 sites frequently
For high maintenence sites such as forums, you need to put in staff and systems. I run a large forum with 27,600 members and there is no way I could run the forum by myself. For the early years I spent much time on it and held its hand. I brought in other admins and moderators and gave them a very well defined set of rules. They learnt the systems such as (if a member does blah, then the mod needs to blah, then blah) which covered most situtations. Now the place runs itself with no input from me and they still do exactly what I wanted (when situations arise).
Start with a couple of websites and get them to be successful on your own. Once they are sustaining a decent amount of capital, then outsource all the grunt work on them to somebody else to free up your time. For example, I have a site that generates $10/day. All I do to maintain it is post 2-3 paragraphs of information. The 30 minutes it takes me to do that is not economical, so I pay somebody $5 to do it. I'm still making $5/day off the site and I don't have to touch it now. It works with just about anything if you set it up properly
i used to think that, but i now have a bout 30 sites on the go, i try and get a mixture of sites (not all sites about gaming or not all sites about sports etc) and update them based on the mood im in, if i feel sporty one day ill update the sports one, if i just read an intersting gaming article ill update my gaming site etc.
Some choose to make 30+ sites and some choose to make 2-3 and take much more care of them. 30+ is only good to do experiments while if you run 1-2-3 you can really make or at least try to make something new/useful which would have much bigger impact than 30+ "just another" sites.