I'm just now building a site. I'm trying to decide what the best route is here. I think if I keep it all on one site, I can interlink them and people will stay longer with so much interesting and USEFUL stuff to read. Plus they'll come back since I've sparked their interest and they won't have had time to read it all. I'm not seeing the benifits of breaking it all up into a bunch of smaller? What do you guys think? Without going through my notes, I have approximately (either finished or outlined): ~10 articles on ebay buying, selling, and searching. ~20 reviews (with a catchy twist) on products: motorcycle helmets, computer components, consumer electronics, cars, game systems. ~50 howto's, mods, and repair articles on: computers, electronics, motorcycles, game systems, laptops, networking, etc. ~10 (at least) productivity/self help articles. ~10 poker articles ~10 (at least) money making, stocks, and financial articles. ~20 articles teaching practical calculus (includes pages on many elementrary concepts needed along the way) ~?? tech news: I could write all day on new/current technology news and their implications if I wanted to. (but so many already do...) ~?? documenting my site building from the ground up. At the moment, I could probably add an additional 10-50 articles a month to this list, and I have a friend that wants to write also.
Make a bunch of niche sites. Your articles are over a wide range of topics and putting them all into the same site will not be effective.
Make smaller sites -> 1 site with to much content which is not related = confusion and hard to market. loads of sites = easier to market -> better converting visitors
I need to think of some good examples. But off the top of my head, what about sites like lifehacker that have a little of everything? I notice that stevepavlina has a lot of articles about business, and johnchow has a lot of random articles too. How will a site with ten articles on ebay be able to make any money in the giant sea of similar sites like that? What about dividing it all up into sections or tabs within one site? Or create multiple sites, but have them each lead to a tab at a main site, eg. notebookreview.com and brighthand.com
In the short run you will make a lot more money and have an easier time marketing smaller niche sites, but in the long run you might be wishing you had originally created one main site. I know this is true with myself for some small regional websites i made a few years back.
Curious. I should look into this more. I've read it somewhere before, (can't remember where) but only gave it cursory thought. My goal is to build my site/sites up to a strong following by 2009 and be living off the income by 2010. I'm not really interested in short term gains at all as long as I can trade that for steady long term. Is 20k unique visitors by 10mos and 100k by 22mos realistic?
A site that has a wide range of different subjects will do much better than the one that has just a few. That's just common sense. You can do 20,000 in less than a month. We are talking only around 700 a day. You can do 100,000 in far less time than 22 months! It's not hard at all.
I thought so too, but I've been reading a lot of things saying that niche is the only/best way to make money. Which of course, is disheartening to someone like me. I've dug up some good info on google about this, I just need to find some time to read it. Are you sure we're on the same page? I meant, 20k per month by 8 months and eventually build up to 100k per month in just under 2 years. If I'm shooting too far under or over please let me know cause I really have no idea what kind of potential there is. Just doing some quick growth charts in excel shows that if I start off with between 50 and 1000 unique page views my first month, it will take between 28-42% of steady growth each month to hit my target in 22mos. I feel those %'s are a LOT to hope for. (although this doesn't take into account that growth likely changes to logarithmic at some point)
Point of interest: This post is now in the top ten Google results for several keyword combinations about splitting up a site into niches or not. I really need to get this thing up and running, lol.
I think if this is your first website, you're better off keeping it as one main site. One large site gives you a bigger presence on the web for the future.