David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

Here's a dilemma that gets banded around the interweb on a fairly regular basis: which is better - one large but fairly broad website or many small niche websites?

Here's my take on things.
 
One Large Website

Pros

1. Each page you have can act like honey, attracting new visitors and retaining existing visitors - the more pages, the better
2. You can create new content about a wide range of topics, thus reducing the chance you'll get bored with your website
3. Large potential audience to sign up to your mailing list(s)

Cons

1. Your website will be a mass of sections, each different to one another. This can be confusing to search engines leaving them unsure as to what it is your website discusses
2. Navigation will undoubtedly be poor as you'll have loads of pages to publicise
3. Can be difficult to publicise

Many Niche Websites

Pros

1. Highly optimised, tightly formed niche website are very easy to monetise
2. Search engines will love you (so long as your content is OK as well as your page structure)
3. Can cross-promote websites to help boost traffic

Cons

1. It can take time to set up dozens of websites.
2. The cost of domain names can quickly add up
3. Unlikely to see large amounts of traffic

So what's the outcome? Well in my big scheme of things, I'm going to fuse the two together.

I'm going to develop a large site that is broad but within the confines of a market segment. From this, I will link to other sites I have developed / am developing in order to reduce overlapping content. After all, it's easier (for me) to update one database rather than 100 articles.

Will this work?

I cannot see why not. My large site will become my main effort, taking up an awful lot of my time initially. However, I can pass visitors over to niche websites where they can make a purchase.

Similarly, I can pass visitors back from my niche sites back to the main site.

Ideally, this would be taken to the next level where all the "portal" sites use the same layout and theme, across multiple domain names. This might be too complex though :-)