Comment on Good Business Plans Change by SEO Dave.

Failed Business Model Network of domains/sites vs a small number of sites.

Yes I’ve thought about it, but as you’ve pretty much answered your own questions with why I keep creating new sites rather than concentrate on a small number.

Take the General Election site for example:general-election-2010.co.uk. I registered the domain in June 2009, so it’s 9 months old, but didn’t start adding a decent amount of content until September 2009. When I register a new domain I’ll usually add a little bit of content (few pages) so Google’s got something to index and I have something to link to. I’ll then start building links. Sometimes I’ll get bored with an idea, $5 to register a domain for a year I buy domains on a whim and never really use some of them. With this one I didn’t get bored and added a fair amount of content and traffic picked up (currently can see 5,000 visitors a day).

Now had I tried to create this site as a sub section of an existing site in principle it would have made the ranking process faster and I wouldn’t have had to go to so much effort with links. However, I don’t have another site just about politics or even one with a lot about politics, so I’d have no where obvious to put it.

But more important than all of this, sites get banned/downgraded by Google all the time for not doing anything obviously wrong. My recipe site free-recipes.co.uk had broke the 12,000 visitors a day mark, great rankings when Google downgraded it for no obvious reason! It started to recover for a week, but currently it’s still downgraded and so it would be stupid to add more content to it.

So to protect my content I like to spread it out on plenty of domains, it’s more work since you’ve got the Google sandbox to get over which takes links and time. Some of my domains don’t even break even, mainly because I’ve got bored with them, but overall they make money.

It’s also a heck of a lot easier to find links for 100 domains than it is 5.

I’m in the process of setting up a link exchange with the Times online newspaper which is pretty cool. I doubt I’d have got the offer if the election content was on say my classic literature domain say classic-literature.co.uk. But then I can create sections which is 100% affiliate content and in the last 12 months made £130 from AdSense. Had I put that on a new domain I’d have been lucky to make £20 a year even with links.

Another one again affiliate content, made £2.85 in the same period :-) Was testing the concept of translating affiliate content to other languages to see if it could get past the thin affiliate content filters, I’d say no it didn’t work every well.

The monthly reports take quite some time to compile and as there’s already a lot of them, they don’t really add anything SEO wise to this site. So quarterly makes sense.

The AdSense alternative themes have been put on hold for a bit, I wasn’t impressed with the Clickbank AdSense like ads tests and switched everything back to AdSense where I could, so not sure what I’m going to do now.

If you don’t mind going overly spammy with ads Clicksor can compete with AdSense, but it’s the pop unders that make the money, not the AdSense like ads. You could have the standard AdSense ads and the Clicksor pop unders if you have a site that you don’t care about the visitors too much. They are very intrusive ads, free-funny-jokes.com has Clicksor and it’s competing with what the site used to make from AdSense, before it was banned from the AdSense program: I’ve stopped moderating that site, added racist jokes since if you check the jokes SERPs they are the main traffic joke SERPs! but it’s resulted in a LOT of racist comments (hence the AdSense ban)!

David Law