Are those who need more than 1 site any less of a successful marketer?

I prefer to work on a few big sites instead of a ton of little ones. I used to have hundreds of sites but mostly they were a waste of time and I got sick of renewing so many domains.

I like diversity in my revenue streams.

I have learned from the school of hard knocks more than once not to tie all of my revenue into 1 or 2 sites, in 1 or 2 niches.

You never know what is going to kill your next site.

One time I operated a very successful SEO website (6-figures per year successful).

The focus was to build organic links to influence search engine rankings. For the uninitiated, that means we never bought links anywhere... We arranged to be in the right place at the right time with the right content, for people to voluntarily link to us and our clients.

Matt Cutts jumped on a soap box and said that Google was going to diminish the value of paid links.

I wasn't the least bit concerned, because we never purchased links from anyone. Everything we built for our clients were organic (non-paid links).

When our customers started heading to the hills, fearing for their life, I tried to explain to them that the announcement would not affect the services we offered.

People could not believe it.

Their reasoning was that they paid me to develop their links, so since I was getting paid to provide my service, those must have been paid links!!!

6-figures per year to $2k month revenue for that website in less than 30 days, convinced me once again of that lesson I already knew... Diversify your revenue streams...

I laid off 6 employees in less than 30 days... The end that came was no fault of my own, but it was also something I could not reverse...

I do not agree that having more than 1 site is a less successful marketer. I do not personally put all my eggs in 1 basket. What happens if you have that 1 site that is earning you a nice income, and the next day it's gone?

Definitely not, Ernie. As Bill has mentioned above, it is far better to have several different and diversified revenue streams (which could be websites in your case), as you don't have all your eggs in one basket - which can be risky in IM due to all sorts of unforeseen changes and occurrences that are beyond your control.

When you're relying primarily on organic ranking and SEO for your livelihood, the search engines can be fickle and somehow decide to kick your site off their first page at any time, without any warning. If all your income was coming from one site, your business would be destroyed overnight. On the other hand, if you have multiple sites relying on organic search engine traffic, the chances of something unexpected impacting all of your websites simultaneously would be much lower.

Of course, you could diversify even more and not just rely on organic traffic, but having multiple sites would be a good first move to protect yourself from catastrophe.

Paul

I like to diversify too! Plus not all niches are going to be big enough to support a full time income. I think its okay to earn with just 1 site or 1000...depends on where you want to put your efforts and how much you can pull from each site regularly.

Just like everyone said already, it's smart not to put all your eggs in the same basket.

It doesn't make you any less of a succesful marketer if you're running 10 sites which make you 3k a month, compared to someone who's running one site making 3k a month. In many cases, that one site may require the same amount of time on their part, if not more, as your 10 sites do. The reason for that is one big "authority" site normally requires a lot more involvement on your part... whether it may be updating it, answering customer's e-mails, answer support questions, etc, etc. Proportionately it normally works out to be the same.

Obviously that's not a hard and fast rule, and there are exceptions, but all things being equal.

Even if you do have just one big money-maker, it's still always good to diversify. You never know what's gonna happen to any particular niche or monetizing method at any given time, such as what we see with Bill's SEO example above.

Does it matter how you make money, as long as you're making it?

it doesn't but, are the methods you are using less broad and therefore making less because of it. And could you use the sites that are working and broading the topic up to create a slightly bigger website whilst still creating the smaller ones to verify whether a niche or term is worth getting into.

If you make money with your method then its a success, no matter how many sites. But use the fact you know which topics are making you money to make bigger ones covering the same topic with more terms.