Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have some content to put up and I'm trying to think of the best way to do it. I have divided the content in 5 parts (blue widgets, red widgets, etc). Each part has 5-7 300-600 word articles.
Do you think it's better to build one general widget site OR 5 targeted niche sites? I'm not going to rewrite any of the content. Maybe down the road if I have time--doubt it.
I was just thinking, from an adsense perspective, it's easier to take 5 new sites to $1 a day than one new site to $5 a day. Also I was thinking that by doing the individual sites, the ads will possibly be more targeted.
Thoughts?
But in the end, the quality of your content is probably more important than this issue.
Would the satellite sites weather the update better or not?
I write from the position of 2 core sites and 100+ satellite sites and even though I have tried to steer the dependency of earnings from the core sites (about 70%) over the past couple of years, although overall revenue has increased considerably the two core sites still contribute the same 70%!
Having written that let me tell you that the 30% the satellite sites earn is nearly 400% my original monthly earnings across ALL sites.
Would I do it the same again? Possibly so simply because many of my satellite sites now are widget, country, domain and language specific.
It probably creates more work however using CSS I can change a specific site very rapidly whereas a core site requires a lot more future-proof planning.
One great advantage of satellite sites is that one has an index page page to present new products, articles etc, and if this is updated regularly then Google will spider more often. Great for one's SERPs.
And before you ask, yes, all these sites are linked together since they all have different subject matter or are presented differently for each specific market.
Ad targeting should not be the problem so long as your titlebars, meta tags and on page text all equate to the overall information of the page.
Sounds like a total of about 30 articles 300-600 words each. That doesn't sound like a lot to really divide up across five sites. If you intend to grow each independently then that'd be good but a site with just 5-7 pages is unlikely to draw any substantial inbound links. If it's a standalone site with 30 articles and it's going to remain largely unchanged after you launch, I'd put that up on just one site then start looking into your next topic.
I've been going down the route of building several sites on different topics (and my topics are very different) but I find that the adsense topics leak. It's as if Google decided that I write about red widgets so it should show lots of red widgets for my publisher id - even on my site about blue widgets. If you're going to get ads for red widgets anyways, you may as well have just one site...
I am not worried about the work or cost for domains/hosting/etc. That's all covered.
These sites would most likely be built out. For example, it might start with say 5 pages, but maybe I add 2 pages per month minimum per site. In a year's time, the site has 30ish pages of good content.
I was also thinking of the possible sell off factor in a couple years. If I make 1 site, I will need to sell or stay. If I sell, I will need 1 large buyer. However, if I have 5 sites, I can sell 1 or more and still stay within the niche. Also, I can find separate smaller buyers.
