Smooth expansion of website scope

[arikgub]

I have a website devoted to "blue widgets" with a "bluewidgets.com" domain. The site has been doing pretty well, climbing to the top 10 in SERPs for the "blue widget" related keywords. At this point, it looks to me that the site has reached its max potential within the limited blue widgets niche.

As a possible way forward, I consider to expand the website scope to cover ALL widgets - "blue", "red", whatever. First, I would like to register "widgets.com" domain and redirect all "bluewidgets.com" requests to "widgets.com/blue". Then, I will build "widgets.com/red", etc.

My primary concern is keeping my current blue widgets ranking in and after the expansion process. How do I make this transition as smooth as possible?

And perhaps a more general question. When you reach the top 10 goal, and you know that investing more time and energy in the website can lead only to marginal traffic increase, what do you do? Do you expand the website or start a new venture?

May be instead of expanding the scope, I should start new "blackwidgets.com" and "greenwidgets.com" websites?

[tedster]

Definitely a judgement call -tough to advise. I've been successful both ways. If you expand the existing domain, be sure to tend to the backlink situation. Ofcourse,a new domain will need the same, but you're more likely to remember links with a new domain.