As we get started with building our virtual estate empire, we have to ask ourselves this question: Do we build a network or small sites or one or two really large sites?
The answer is that it’s better to create a network of sites. There are several reasons for this, but the most important reason is that you simply get more links with more sites. More links generally means more traffic. More traffic means more money.
One of the things you’ll do to promote your sites, for example, is submit them to various web directories. In general, each website can only be submitted once to any given directory. So if you have one gigantic website, you only get one link back from the directory. And that link is from a single category. If you have twenty websites, each website can get its own directory link from a very targeted category. You’ll see a similar pattern with social bookmarking sites.
Then there are the links between your own sites, which will carry more weight than links within sections of a site. Yes, Google knows they’re all your sites as soon as you put your AdSense code on them, but so what? As long as you’re linking smartly between sites (links from similarly-themed sites — see How To Link Multiple Sites) then you’ll benefit.
Then there are the other reasons for using multiple sites:
- Keyword-based domain names: Having a relevant keyword in the domain name is an easy search engine optimization technique. You can’t do that with one site that covers multiple topics.
- Saleability: You can sell individual sites in your network if you need to raise some quick cash.
- Ad targeting: Although Google does a great job at targeting ads most of the time, on larger sites certain ads can “take over” the ad slots for most of the pages, even if those ads aren’t necessarily relevant to a specific page’s topic of discussion. Having a site focused on a single topic ensures that the ads stay focused as well.
The downside to having multiple sites is that there’s more to manage. When Google requires you to change the privacy policy on your sites, for example, you’ll have to do it N times. You’ll also have to track domains and web hosting accounts.
Then there are the expenses for domain name registration and web hosting services. It’s cheaper to run a single site than a network of sites.
But the advantages of having an AdSense network outweigh the management effort, in my mind. So that’s what we’re going to do in this series: build our virtual real estate empire using a network of websites.
Next we’ll look at creating the first site in our network.