Scaling up or Spreading Out - What's Your Strategy?

Good question---I am curious about the same. I have one site---I am going to have to develop a few more sites over the months--I am just too nervous developing only one site and all my income relying on this. But I am still doing similiar site and linking them together.

A mixture of both.

If you are looking at this in simple terms.

Say you scale up business #1 and you obtain a high ranking position in SE's and you get the majority of the traffic, even if you have a low profit margin you can gain a large return - in most cases. You get better at managing your business, you learn more about your target audience, you can fully optimize your marketing budget, etc. This is probably the best method based on personal experience. Many others agree, even in the offline word with brick and mortar establishments.

If you aren't able to obtain a high ranking in SE's, your return is modest, easy to manage, you can move on to other markets and spread yourself a little more thin. You can manage business #1, #2, and #3, and while the return on each might be modest - in total you could earn the amount you want.

On eBay, I sell specific things that nobody is going to undercut me and I have good market control for being the most inexpensive seller. Someone does undercut me, I make my items a loss leader or not profitable for a month or two and I butt them out as a competitor and prevent others. These items are probably 75% of my focus. I've scaled this up to contain thousands of items across several accounts which I'm the cheapest for, thus I make the sale 99% of the time. Through my volume, I've made a lot of money that has allowed me to hire employees to manage other parts of my ventures, such as niche site creation based on the products offered by a highly reputable retail ecommerce store in China which I present internationally and manage a marketing budget for, for a good mark up.

What we did was build one main website and concentrated on marketing this for one year straight, once this was making a steady profit I then I decided to build 3 more sites as I understood the market and what my target audience wanted, thins such as... price, quality, layout, etc...

What we did then was make the #1 website the main brand and then built each of the other sites around this brand, there is so many ways you could choose to scale up... but having 5 websites in the top ten of G will bring you a lot more income than having 1 website in the top ten.

You can also build professional sites with everything in for around £1000, compared to brick and mortar rents this is absolutely peanuts and well worth the investment.

Its also great for split testing and you can have Sky high prices on one website and the lower end on the other, its definitely worth it after year one, heck you could even do it straight away but I would recommend getting to know the market inside out first.

According my opinion less is better. You cannot focus 100% on too many sites.