Mini Sites Vs. Flagship Websites: Business Models for Your Online Empire

A strategy when it comes to earning money online is to build multiple mini-sites which generate a consistent amount of income. For example, you can build multiple mini blogs around niche topics and then turn a profit through their collective revenue.

If each blog makes you $1 a day, 100 blogs will theoretically allow you to earn $100 every day. To increase your overall income, you’ll just have to increase the number of mini-sites you own.

An ingenious way to make a decent amount of money online? Perhaps.

While it does help you to earn some money, I prefer to adopting a flagship strategy that involves building brands and very large websites. This article examines some problems I’ve found with the mini-site approach and explain why I prefer it’s alternative.

Benefits of Having a Mini-Site Empire

Mini-sites do have some benefits and these are some of the few that I’ve observed while experimenting with multiple niche websites:

• Easy to Make Money. Usually mini-sites don’t need to be popular with a large audience in other to make money. A consistent flow of search engine traffic is usually all that is needed and any deficit in ad revenue is overcome by the sheer volume of mini-websites you own.




• Freshness. Having multiple websites can be refreshing as you can get tired of dealing with a specific topic, industry or site model. When you are tired of working on one project, just invest your time on another mini-site.




• Personal Knowledge. Having a lot of mini-sites allows you to build experience in making money online. Managing and promoting a mini-site usually requires some research on the niche or monetization methods available and this adds to your overall understanding of what business models are profitable.




• Diversified Income. If one site fails you’ll still have another money maker. All your eggs aren’t kept in one basket and the source of income can be more consistent once each of the mini-sites are moderately established.

Why I Prefer Not to Build Mini-Sites

While having a large portfolio of websites can help you make money, I’ve found that this brute force approach of creating multiple sites to increase collective income does not work well for me. Here are some reasons why:

• Consumes a lot of resources. Mini-websites can be rather time consuming. You can hire a writer and manager for each of these sites but that means initial expenses on your part.

  Multiply that by a dozen websites and your expenses will start to pile up. Apart from content outsourcing, mini-sites will also require your attention when it comes to marketing, admin work and design/search optimization.




• Poor Monetization Potential. Mini websites usually will not develop a large audience size. They might get some search traffic but if left alone or poorly managed, they won’t be able to compete with the stronger sites in their niche. This just means that your ability to sell direct advertising is greatly diminished, among other factors.




• Mini-Sites will be Neglected. I’m sure many of you have started a side project or blog before and neglected it because you didn’t have the time to take care of it or because you’ve found that it just can’t compete with other established websites. It can be discouraging when your site doesn’t take off and become a success.




• Income Generated is Uneven. I currently have a bunch of websites and each of them make a different amount of money. Building more websites doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in income. Building traffic to your website is fairly important for growth and monetization and I’ve found that its nearly impossible to focus on getting traffic to dozens of websites on a daily basis.

Building Flagship Websites Makes More Sense

I’ve recently developed several niche blogs, which have become a nice addition to my collection of online properties. These small websites do make me money but I’ve decided to focus on building much bigger websites instead.

Going niche in my previous approach has taught me a lot about some specific topics and has allowed me to understand the inherent growth ceiling for smaller niches.

Most of these small sites simply do not capture enough traffic for them to be highly profitable and I’ve grown tired of capturing only a small demographic which doesn’t allow the site to be as profitable as I want.

I want instead to build large and popular websites which either dominates its competitive niche or become one of the top tier sites within the industry.

Here are some additional reasons why I think working devotedly on building one flagship site instead of many will be beneficial in the long run:

• Centralized attention. All your energy is directed towards building an incredible website that is popular and profitable. No longer will you have to divert your ideas and energy towards dozens of other smaller sites. Focus will lead to greater attention to detail and more aggressive marketing efforts.




• Leverage for Future Success. Big sites have audiences you can carry over to your other ventures. This leverage will make your future projects a success from the site. A popular website can eventually branch out into sub niches or other related fields. Never forget that people are your most valuable assets.




• Domain Trust. I like putting all my link building and marketing efforts within one website because domain trust is a big factor when it comes to ranking well on search engines like Google. Instead of putting several multiple sites on sub-niche topics, I’ll rather run them as sub-domains or separate pages on one main domain because they are likely to attract an equal amount or even more search traffic at a faster rate.




• Better Monetization Potential. The money you can make from affiliate programs is much higher when you have a large audience that trusts your recommendations. Correspondingly, a well designed and popular website will always do better on direct ad sales, which can be lucrative. A strong website will also have the ability to compete with more established websites in the search engines as well.

Creating a popular site in a competitive niche like entertainment or technology is very challenging and great success can be difficult to achieve. But it’s not impossible. If you put all efforts into learning about your competitors and the industry, you can grow your website pretty quickly.

Be prepared to be very pro-active and dedicated to your website if you want it to become wildly and consistently profitable as well. Even if your site doesn’t dominate its niche, it’s likely to retain a decent share of the industry audience, which will be beneficial for your future projects.

Build a big site and focus less on the small ones. You won’t regret it.

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