You are ready to launch your first (or next) online business, a common question arises over how you should enter a given market and how many sites should you have.
It can get quite confusing, common terms like “niche micro sites” get thrown out alongside “authority sites” not to mention the various opinions people have on how many pages (sales copy and content) your website should ideally have when you launch.
Another set of questions revolve around the ideal business model for your online business…should you build a dozen niche micro sites or are you better focusing on one single site and build it over time?
Should your site have 50 pages of content or 5? Should you have a blog or is it better to syndicate content externally and build backlinks to your niche micro site?
SEEING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
I understand these are important (even fundamental) questions, yet the answer is much simpler and more intuitive than most people may think.
How do offline businesses grow?
They start small and grow (and even diversify) over time right?
You don’t go and immediately open 20 shops, you start with one or two. You work those businesses until you have a proven ability to generate profit and THEN you build a few more (based on the same successful model with the same target market and product mix).
Only when you have built a proven, large-scale business do you even consider opening another related or unrelated business – correct?
The same holds true online.
The one BIG difference online is that you have more leeway to try/experiment/test your ideas, market positioning and web design than you have with an offline business.
This means you can start wider, more scattered but with a laser-focused intent to quickly determine the winning model and then follow the same growth model that works for offline businesses.
In fact, the 6-week Information Product Profit Program inside InfoMarketer’sZone outlines a specific set of techniques you can use to quickly test and uncover hidden profit potential within a given marketplace…we actually discovered this by accident with one of our sites that now is a top profit producer for us.
To be honest, I never really understood the value in starting a business with the intent of building a bunch of micro niche sites (with the intent to either stay micro, earn a few bucks from each site or flip the sites)
What does make much more sense is to start small, perhaps even go wide if you are unsure of the exact positioning model and then after a period of testing, pick the angle that works most in that market.
Once you find that opportunity though, you need to expand…more content on your site, more content syndicated, more advertising, more PR, more social networking, more partners, etc…
The good news if you follow this process though is that you get to do all of this KNOWING that your effort or investment will lead to higher profits rather than “hoping” or “experimenting” with your time and money.
As you see, using this process will ultimately move you from the micro niche website model toward an authority model but ONLY for those sites and pages you know to be profitable.
One of the main benefits of the internet (versus building a brick-and-mortar business) is that you can quickly and relatively inexpensively test various markets, positioning and designs to find the golden nuggets. Once you see that nice mix of demand/traffic, conversions and profits – you can (and should) go big.
