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Do You Go After The Big Fish Or Lots Of Small Fish?
Posted in Internet
The other day, I was talking to a webmaster friend about working on a new joint project together. While brainstorming for ideas, a few different routes were investigated. Should we make one, unique website, which dominates its respective niche and churns out money, or create hundreds of small, easy-to-setup throwaway sites which collectively make a good deal of cash? How about make a large network of arcade gaming sites, publicize them on a massive scale (by pouring thousands into Adsense and other advertising programs), monetize them, then kick back and reap the return? Sounds easy enough.

Personally, I find that a balance of large and small sites is the perfect portfolio. It’s much better to keep your eggs split into many different baskets, especially online. In a virtual world where your money-making machines are intangible, and consist only of thousands of lines of code stored in a server somewhere far away from your home, there’s no telling what can go wrong. Server outage, DDoS attack, site hacking, script corruption, crazy man with a gun raiding your datacenter: they all can ruin your day. With large, thoughtful sites set as your main “income generators” and your small, pre-scripted sites set up as “backup generators“, you’ll be sure to have a steady flow of money coming in everyday of the week.
Owning large websites can have its benefits. For one, they look much better on your portfolio. When company’s are interviewing you for a new job, they’d much someone who was the chief editor, lead designer, and founder of IGN.com then someone who uploaded a bunch of pre-made arcade templates to a server and pressed the magic “GO” button on the install script. These are two totally opposite extremes, but it gets the point across.
They’re also more brand-able. A large website consists of a site which has a vast following of users. You can easily leave an image in user’s heads when they visit; they’ll remember what your unique website’s domain name is called, but they won’t remember what ‘the arcade site’s name that their friend yelled to them from the other side of the computer classroom’ is. Not to mention that more brand-ability means more advertisers. Advertisers love associating their product/service with a web property that’s known to lead its respective niche; brand-ability means more money for you!
Everyday I see tons of new webmasters make this decision. Do they want to be ingenious and rock the Internet with the latest idea? Kevin Rose of Digg.com did that. Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook.com did that. John Chow of JohnChow.com did that. Or do they want to be the “lame ducks” of the Internet generation: feed off the larger sites, attract users through black hat SEO techniques, and copy the money making techniques of thousands of other Internet developers?
Which path will you follow to your success?
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