Website Marketing

The Value Of Owning Sites In Related Niches

Think about sticking to one niche or maybe two niches in the beginning. Your personality or interests might make this difficult but there are several advantages to narrowing your focus.

How Do I Get More Traffic?

Building traffic to a site is likely the single most difficult thing you’ll do as a webmaster. It’s a time-consuming and/or expensive activity unless you’re fortunate enough for something to go viral. You can’t just build traffic up to a satisfactory level and call it a day either. Whether you’re growing or maintaining traffic, it’s an ongoing process.

So use your previous efforts multiple times. Once you get a decent amount of traffic going to one site, it much easier to share those visitors with a related site. When your other sites are polar opposites it’s very difficult to do that. I mean, how many people on your weight loss blog would click over to your forex trading site? A lot of people at a travel blog would be interested in a hostel booking site though.

Where Do I Go For Links?

It’s a lot of work building up backlinks too. Wouldn’t it be nice to get relevant links without begging? You don’t need to beg anymore if you own a little network of sites. Unless you’re into that. You can still give yourself links with a bunch of unrelated sites but you’ll pass more link juice if they’re in similar niches. Don’t force yourself into building links from scratch for each new site.

Industry Expert

When you’re knee deep in a niche, you become an expert. Maybe THE expert. You’ll lose a lot of that if you spread yourself around too much. If you immerse yourself in an area, at least for several months, you’ll see lots of unsolved problems. Step in there, give people a solution, be the hero, and get paid.

Disadvantages

Of course, everything has a downside. There’s the whole “all your eggs in one basket” thing when you’re only in a single niche. Not trying crazy ideas is a bigger concern to me. Having tunnel vision for one topic might prevent you from seeing other opportunities. It’s always good to step outside your industry to see what everyone else is doing.

Final Thoughts

I didn’t realize the value of doing this at first so consider it a heads-up. Running a directory has little appeal to me but I’m thinking about buying or building one at some point. That’s just to make sure I can easily get high PR links. I haven’t decided for sure but I’m definitely considering it. Had I stuck to a smaller number of niches then I doubt I’d bother.

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