1 site or 10 sites? Decisions to be made

I am still in a quandry as to whether I should focus on one large authority niche site or 10 smaller niche sites, and my viewpoint seems to change everyday. There are pros and cons to both and as I?m less than 6 months into my niche site adventure I have plenty of experimenting left to do.

The Pros & Cons

With a single authority site I can focus my efforts into one subject including articles, SEO, promotion, etc and this should mean larger traffic and more revenue, but, and there always is a but, if the site is a failure then I have put all my eggs in one basket and I have zero income from 100% effort. But the possibility of large profits are there if I succeed.

10 smaller sites, which I?ve mentioned as my aim before, means diversifaction, with sites spread over a wide variety of niches. These sites will have less content, take less time to manage, but still include the same amount of effort into SEO. The benefit is that whilst each site will earn a smaller amount of revenue, if some are failures, or have a rankings drop, then I still have some revenue and still have the successful sites to focus on. Less content and smaller niches mean that I will have less traffic and less keywords to link back to though. Profits will be smaller but the more sites I hav, the more I could earn.

Is it all about the money?

Do I want to create sites just to earn money, with content written solely for the aim of getting clicks, or do I want to write websites that people will actually find useful?

If I?m being true to myself then money is secondary to creating useful sites and I think I?ve got some important decisions to be made. I hate crappy websites, with poor navigation, and loaded with adverts so why am I creating them? A lot of blogs say this is the way to go, but I?ve seen a lot of great looking and useful niche sites that are making money without making massive compromises. Security Guard Training HQ by Pat Flynn from the Smart Passive Income blog is a great example of how to create a successful niche site and if you read his blog you will get a lot of useful information about how he created the Security Guard Training site. The site looks professional and I would trust virtually everything I read on it. This is how all my sites should be.

The Solution?

The best compromise is trying to make ALL your sites authority sites, with great design, and useful content. This will mean going back to basics for me and going through all my niche sites and deciding which ones warrant the most attention and perhaps starting from scratch. Google will be providing the majority of the search engine traffic so it?s wise to read into the which are split into Design and Content guidelines, Technical guidelines, and Quality guidelines. If you can follow all these rules then you should be on the way to having a site that not only your readers love, but that Google also loves, and more content, means more keywords being indexed, and means the chance for more visitors and more revenue. If there is any justice (and you?ve picked the right niche) then a useful site will succeed.

Let?s start from the beginning

So it?s back to the start for me, and let?s see if we can get back to the kind of earnings I was making before I got distracted and lost my way. To answer the question in the title of the blog, I will have 10 sites, but I will treat them all as if they were the only site I had.