Success Online.IN Success Secrets For Your Online Venture

I often think whether its a good idea to run many smaller sites or blogs rather than just one big site or blog with a lot of traffic. Both these options have their pros and cons.

The Many Sites or Many Blogs Approach -

• Easier to get a small amount of traffic flowing in quickly
• Keeps you fresh as you switch from project to project
• Keeps you aware and informed of other models and you learn more
• Need to nurture each site a certain amount to keep content growing and visitors interested
• Visitors may switch over to competing site  if they find  someone else doing what you are doing better.
• Risk of failure is spread across all the sites, so if for some reason one fails - you dont get hit that hard.. and can simply start something else afresh.
• Allows you to cross-promote and market your offerings to different audiences participating across your different sites. So, in effect you can build traffic to each site by cross promotion (assuming there is some benefit users get from each of the alternate / other sites).

The One Site or One Blog Approach -

• Often harder to build and grow the user base
• Keeps you more focused and allows you t ogo into the topic with more effectiveness
• Builds a hardcore fan following and readership as you progress and offer specialized content, not found elsewhere
• Allows you to become “best-of-breed” in your niche topic
• Harder to compete - specially in topics that already have power sites or power bloggers present, making it very difficult to get people to your site.
• All your eggs are in one basket. So if you put in 2 years growing the site, and it does not produce the kind of revenues that allow you to quit your day job or something that you are not happy with - you may not be happy.
• 80 / 20 principal holds (well sort of) - with 20% of the top bloggers in this area taking in80% of the revenues. But, if you can find a niche within the niche and a large enough audience for this - it may make sense to focus on this niche.
• Once visitors participate and get hooked onto your site, they’ll most probably stick for a long long time. You can even build a mini-social network around the blog/site using ning.com

My take on this question is somewhat of a mix. You should focus to build around 3 sites or blogs, if you are just starting out. Build one blog/site first - get a fair amount of traffic to it - say around 100 to 200 daily visitors… and then start your second venture. Use the traffic from the first to grow the second (other than your other traffic generating methods). Gradually build the second venture and then branch out into a third. This should be good for a while. See if any one of them has a potential to really take off, or is showing promising growth. If there is one venture that is taking off - drop your efforts on the other ones and focus on this single venture and milk it to the max. Grow it as much as you can - until you reach a peak and then use this high visitor traffic to publicize your other small and static ventures. Ofcourse if the big venture is still growing and it makes sense for you not to waste time on the smaller ventures - dont! Just keep focusing on the single high growth venture… unless you have spare time on your hands and can promote the smaller ones without harming the rapid growth of the bigger one.

If none of the three ventures are growing very rapidly, then apply the entire strategy again - and create another 2 to 3 ventures and push them. Sooner or later, if you are clever and catch on things quickly - you will hit the right note and will get a winner. Just be carefull in recognizing a winner early on before someone else takes the idea and runs with it while you are too busy focusing on all the other ventures.

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