Hi, I was just wondering what would be better, to have one big site or say 15-20 smaller sites, which can offer better returns when you offload them or use advertising to monetize them?
IMO One big site is better than 20 smaller site Coz its easy to maintain and more easy to advertise it
It is so much easier to mange one or two big site than it is a number of sites. I have 62 sites.. it's not easy! But it pays the bills...
15 smaller sites ... 15x the linkbuilding potential. After building X,XXX links you tend to hit a brick wall. Having other domains would allow you to leverage duplicate links on some sites and push even more link juice to your network than would be possible with only 1 domain. Sure it's more work though, depends on the profitability I guess.
I thnk manging 2 or 3 big sites is a better option because handling different 20-40 sites won't be that easy.
It depends on your business goals. If to sell links it's better to have many sites. But in most other case one big site is much better!
The problem is to make the site the Big! This probably would require substantial monetary investment. Unless you can code in a server side language, otherwise then you have to hire coders and pay big bucks for a script that has alot of bells and whistles and maby add more features to it later on. Then you have to Advertise and SEO it. Its possible the site might go viral or most likely not. Then you may have to wait 1-3 years for it to hit a popularity point where its under 10K on Alexa or whatever. So it takes time. One example I think of is there is this site called GodTube.com and it used a script called Clipshare. ($200 script) The site went viral, and they were approached GLG investment group and offered 30 Million dollars in Capital investment. Myself too I bought this script and I'm trying to make a video site. But it takes time. I hardly doubt it will go viral or that I'll get a offer from GLG partners, But it might become big if I just keep adding videos to and hold on to it for few years.
Im going for a network of sites, all in the same general genre, a genre ive been into since i was 10 lol. I have 9 domains so far that will be part of that network, 2 of which have been sites since 2005. I need to buy 3 more domains to complete the first phase. That will bring me to 12 sites in total at that point, including my main business site. When the 12 sites are up and running ill consider my options, I think i will be too flat out to add more, but im tempted to fork into a few very specific sites in the same genre. The great thing about this is: a) I can link all my sites on each one, and there all relevant so no google penalty. b) The traffic swap potential is huge. c) Branding potential is huge. d) Having seperate, strong keyword domains, is great for SEO. Im not sold on the subdomain concept. Eventually ill be going for a common user login as well, like you see with gamespy etc.
I think that you could get the best of both worlds If I can put it that way. How? Well, get the big site up and running and then create a lot of hub sites on different UGC platforms like Squidoo, Hub Pages, Zimbio and the like. You would be amazed how much traffic you could get from them, especially from squidoo lenses. The good thing is it takes you like minutes to setup such a page, it's free and if your content is relevant to the site your promoting you could get a higher position in the lensroll and search engine results. One big site and several pages on UGC platforms is the way to go IMO.
One site. You will work your way for a PR 5 and you will be high in Google. With many small sites nobody will find you.
go for lower number of sites. It will be better for you like anyone here mentioned. It is going to be a nightmare to manage 20 - 30 sites. Seriously! I have done that and hate it so much. For now, I concentrate on several big sites only. So yep, go for one or two big one!
I guess the other major factor is whether your sites have user generated content or it all has to be written by you, the webmaster...
One big site is better unless you have time to run tons of smaller sites. however, advertising can get expensive on alot of little sites. Once its been advertised however, small sites can rake some major cash. --sean