The Opposite Site: Covering all the bases

My fake press release seemed to have hit a few nerves, so I've updated the entry to make sure everyone understands it's a joke… Anyhow, let's put the levity aside and discuss the Opposite Site strategy.

The Opposite Site

The Opposite Site strategy is easy to explain: after you've built a site, build an opposite site that contrasts with the original site.

What qualifies as “opposite” depends on the topic, of course. While Better Digital Photography is a great topic, Worse Digital Photography might not make much sense. Or maybe it does — a humorous approach could work here. Product-oriented sites are harder to convert into opposite sites, unless you try the humor angle. Usually consumers are looking for the “best” or “cheapest” products in a category, not the “worse” or “most expensive” products. You have to find the right angle.

Non-product blogs and sites have an easier time of it: after saying no debt is good, build a site stating that debt is great. I would stick away from truly controversial social topics, though, because there's not much money in them and you might attract some unwanted attention from various nutcases.

You can combine the Opposite Site approach with the Single-Page Site approach (or even better, the Ugly Single-Page site method) to quickly create at least two sites devoted to a single topic.

What you're trying to do with this approach, of course, is to grab more traffic. And it doesn't have to be a two-site approach, either. What about a site that straddles the line between the two opposing viewpoints? What about other sites that veer slightly off-topic or are more specialized? Or a site that is more general? Many sites can come from ONE topic. You never know which slant on a topic is the one that will end up making you money, so why not try to cover as many bases as possible?

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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