Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I started adsense by wanting to pay off hosting on my travelogue. It earns $2 a day steadily, without updates and 10 pages of content.
The motivation to create more sites came after getting my $160 dollar paycheck.
The keyword for my travelogue shows up on overture as receiving a 1700 search count. After some serious link exchanging and page optimization, my position for that keyword ended up #2 on google, #1 on yahoo, and #2 on MSN, with #4 pagerank.
The strategy I'm comtemplating is targeting modest keywords like that, not the 20,000 or 100,000 search count variety. I would focus on financial keywords, as its something I enjoy writing about, and the pay per click is up there.
So lets say I duplicate my travelogue success with 10 sites. Thats $20 a day x 30 = $600. Minus hosting and internet its $500. I can then go live a beautiful life in Moldova or Laos!
I'd like some pointers from you grizzled veterans. Does my small beans plan seem viable?
Thanks
My 50 page hobby site that I started over 6 years ago is now a +20,000 page business. It is my major source of income and it is still a fun hobby.
Welcome to WW.
I agree with G Smitty, though. I started my site as a hobby and now it's my whole living, working in an industry I love. You can't beat it. Putting a lot of energy into a single site gives you additional brand recognitiion and reputation that you can't get with a collection of small sites.
I am using dreamweaver right now to build sites. Although its great for design, I feel it might be painful when manipulating a site thats 100 or more pages. I may be wrong though, never tried it.
After getting my feet wet in AS, and learning a lot from dropping in here every day, I tried my hand at a different topic, just to see what it would be like.
It didn't take long to see that other subjects paid much more per click than travel.
I chose the "multiple little sites" aimed at small market niches approach, which is what I think the OP is contemplating. I like to fly low, under the BIG search term markets and get my business from 2 and 3 word search terms that I usually rank within the top 5.
Go for it, and don't worry about wether its likeable or a hobby. I'd choose whatever seems like the best business path.
I have a 3 word financial search term in mind, which ranks on bidtool as 1700.
Is that modest enough to reasonably expect to be placed into the top 5 if implementing a link exchange and submission campaign?
also, how many pages do you build for your small sites? I'm aiming for this next one to be 100, and see what happens from there. Then possibly upgrade my travelogue to 100 pages, expanding to more general travel material on the country itself. (my travelogue is about a small city in russia).
Before starting on a number of new sites why don't you look at expanding and adding new content to your hobby site.
It's called diversification.
I'm trapped in one site with 40K+ pages myself and if it drops out of the search engines I'm toast on the west coast.
Stop preaching to put all eggs in one basket, it's insanity and I lose sleep over it.
DIVERSIFY!
If you can scale that up linearly, you could do well. But my experience is that things grow better than linear as a site grows in size ... when a page has lots of related content, it sticks in people's mind as a place to go, and the site gets more repeat visitors, more links in other pages.
I'm trapped in one site with 40K+ pages myself and if it drops out of the search engines I'm toast on the west coast.Stop preaching to put all eggs in one basket, it's insanity and I lose sleep over it.
If you give up other sources of income such as your main career, you depend solely on the Net to generate income.
In some ways it makes sense to build your traditional career, and keep your site as a hobby. Then you are much better 'diversified.'
This doesn't have much to do with the original post, in which it was asked "build on the existing site or build additional new sites?"
IMHO, I-Bill's advice is golden for someone who is in the position to choose. Diversification has many good points, and few bad effects.
It's fine to believe you have all the right answers. But there is no need to continually try to discredit everyone else's views and successes.
Um, excuse me?
I said I was doing the SAME thing as you and it's massively risky!
That's not trying to discredit you, I'm just telling you we're both playing with dynamite and need to diverisfy.
How you process the information is up to you.
proprietors of single businesses
Yes, and they all have foot traffic or they dry up and blow away, like a couple of places here did when they revamped the train tracks and blocked a few roads for over a year. Difference is, those businesses had advance warnings, knew it was coming and had the option to relocate or sit tight.
On the web you don't have a clue when the PhDs have a brain fart at the 'plex and you just get up one morning and it's gone.
Having literally all but vanished for 3 months once you can take my word it happens. If you don't believe me, read all the threads all over WebmasterWorld of people complaining about being dropped in Google, it happens. The only way to protect yourself is have a second storefront already up and running with additional traffic as relocating won't help like it does the shopkeep in the real world.
