100 sites....is it doable?

goood stuff. Stupid Autoblogs! They should be punished.

So true. I'm doing this now.

I'm going through the exact same thing as we speak. Pretty big initial investment and some hard work, headaches etc but starting to pay off now.

I project that by December this year all investment will be recouped and from there it will be profit all the way.

To the OP, don't build 100 sites if you've never had a profitable site before. Build a few sites and make them profitable first. Then you'll be able to scale it up.

Cheers

Not trying to hijack the thread, but I think some good information has been given in response (at least for me anyway). I'm a brand newbie to IM and I'm assuming the OP is new as well. My question is generally speaking, what are people's thoughts on buying niche sites while trying to get started. I've purchased two that I plan to rewrite the articles that were included as well as work on one from scratch. I'm wondering if that's too ambitious to start.

Absolutely yes.

just covering a few points from above.

Yes, if you have never done it before test a few first as getting the right keywords is crucial. Get that bit right first.

Automate the build with template or clone blog tool.

Right choice of keywords means easy ranking without too much serious backlinking but again some form of automation incuded to reduce the workload.

Ongoing maintenance is very little. Assuming Wordpress then occassionally upgrade to latest version + plugins (don't do every upgrade every time!)

Almost no need to add additional content unless you produce a particulaury high performing blog (I know that sound backwards but - improve on success -don't chase failure)

Use unique content, forget scraped or articles. You only need a few posts as long as they are keyword optimised. I find if you rank in the top three they will generally be happy there for 12 months.

$800 a year in domain renewals (YES!) thats $8 a blog. That's 1 months income from a poorly performing blog - so 11 months of it profit.

Amazon and Adsense convert well on small blogs (correctly targeted keywords) even with surprisingly low traffic.

Thanks for saying that these sites would be SPAMMING. I'm getting really sick of seeing cookie cutter sites everywhere I look. It's depressing for someone that wants to make money online to see these things everywhere.

It's a lot of hard work to take on but if you
follow a proven system that works you can
do really well.

The backlinking will most probably need
outsourcing unless you like doing it yourself.

I can't believe some of the comments that are coming out in this thread - especially from people who have NOT ever had over 100 sites.

All this "it's impossible to manage", "they would have to be autoblogs", "your income could disappear overnight", "better to have fewer that are better quality" etc..... It's all BS....

Sorry to be so blunt but people are saying this stuff like they're facts when they're just opinions and largely based on having NOT done it.

I've had a LOT more sites than we're talking about here and so I'm saying this from experience not speculation.......

You CAN have hundreds of GOOD sites that enable you to make decent money - and there are many ways to do this.

As an example here's one way that I use:

I have a network of 120 sites that serve one purpose - To give me high PR places to get links for myself and my clients.

For sites I have 2 full-time article writers who provide new, unique (not auto-fed or spun) content to them on a daily basis. I don't run ANY advertising them - they're purely information sites and useful to their visitors.

How do I make money? I get paid for getting search results for my clients and these sites are the main way I do that. I also use several fellow warriors SEM services to spread extra love around and I use all the normal strategies too, but my ability to immediately get a client 120 high PR links from my own network has a lot of value. I used to have many more sites but that required more work and I found the 80/20 rule applied (20% of the sites were having 80% of the impact) so I trimmed down to the 120 best ones.

Then there's the other side - I've been online for over a decade and I like to create new sites, so naturally even if I just built one a month I'd still have over 100 by now also.

This whole discussion reminds me of the PPC discussions - don't spend your money on PPC because you could lose it. That only happens if you don't know what you're doing and start spending without a decent strategy.

Building sites is the same - sure you could waste a lot of money if you bought 100 domains for 2 years and then never put any sites on them, but it's not hard to get a site to make enough in a year to pay for its hosting, so if you can't do that then you shouldn't be buying so many.

In reality - it's easier to make money with more sites than less because it's more weight to throw behind every new site.

If YOU can't imagine that you are organised enough to manage a lot of sites and you don't want to outsource it - then yes 100 is too many, but that's a personal thing, for some of us 100 sites is nothing.

There are a lot of ways to make money with sites that do not involve filling them with auto-generated content and running Adsense so if you're new to IM and thinking that's all there is please don't get misled into not thinking big.

Andy

Doesn't that depend on how you manage them????

There are lots of ways to centrally manage a lot of sites so that things like WP updates, template changes, adding content etc.. are just a few mouse clicks.

If you have a good supply of new fresh content then uploading that is the main activity once the sites are set up and that's only a few clicks and a copy and paste a few times a day.

Even if you updated 500 sites every day and you had writers supplying you with 500 articles a day then it would still only take a having a script that checked a folder for new content and posted it if there was some there and it would take zero time to update them.

I don't know why people keep talking like updating lots of sites means spending ages and using crap content or scraping.

This stuff is not rocket science.

I can only imagine that it must be that the people commenting are trying to do everything themselves and are not familiar with getting scripts made to repeat common tasks, so they think that getting lots of content must mean scraping and looking after a lot of sites can't be done.

If you want lots of sites then it's not hard to sit down and work out how to create them so that you can manage them.

Even tools like Firepow will let you create 1000 blogs in a few minutes just the same as if you installed them yourself and set up templates and plugins. The longest part is giving it all your ftp details and you could outsource that for about $20. Content is just as easy to outsource, there are thousands of writers looking for work.

So unless you're trying to do everything yourself and don't have any money to invest in your business, making a lot of sites is easy, and that's not using scraped content - that's even easier and can be done on auto-pilot and take no effort so surely a little thought, a little effort and some money is not really that extreme a solution that people just don't consider it?

Absolutely!

But if you mean overnight, essentially, then you're asking for a management nightmare, even if you outsource everything.

Take bites you can chew. As you grow in your knowledge of the game, your capacity to create and manage opportunities makes 100 websites a mole hill out of what used to be a mountain

g/l

I'm with balric on this. We have a portfolio of just over 300 niche sites and while researching and building them is easy, portfolio management ultimately becomes a problem. Also, with Google's current focus on authority sites you're going to constantly find yourself in the crosshairs - it's hard to convince the big G that a 7 page nice site has authority, and if yo manage to do it now... it will continue to become harder in the future. Build yourself 5 authority sites with deep pages that target longtail keywords if you want to go this route.

Glad to see your post on this. I was reading through them hoping to find someone saying (and warning) just that.

This type of approach almost always implies auto-posted content which almost always implies low quality and/or duplicate content - both of which have been decimated by Google's Panda update and will continue to get hammered even more in the future.

The fact is that Google really doesn't like the little guys - just look at their PPC model that has become all but impossible to do well with unless you're spending $10k or more a month. About 80% of their PPC income comes from clients spending $10k or more a month and yet 80% of their customers spend $100 or less a month. No coincidence that they keep making it harder and harder for the little guys.

The times are changing and while there are many that are still doing okay from this model, the numbers are definitely on the downswing and I know several marketers using this model that watched $20k a month incomes drop to $1500 a month. We had a network of several hundred sites a few years back, but made the switch away from it and towards bigger authority sites a couple years ago and the income around those is much better and long-lasting because you're creating something of value that Google wants to see.

Trying to stay one step ahead of Google creating 100's of mini-sites while it may be a fun ride, is not what I would advise anyone starting out consider - maybe three or four years ago, but not today.

Instead focus on larger sites with 100+ pages of high quality content and work to build authority within your niche. You can make much more working within the system than trying to outguess it. Working on efficiency, systems, products for a larger authority site rather than trying to create 100 $100 a month sites is much easier and more sustainable long term.

Hi Ramone_Johnny,

I built them all from scratch.

Hehe - that makes it sound complicated but they're mostly all on CMS's (WP, Joomla and Drupal).

I used to build static sites but since the CMS's have got so good I usually use them for most things now.

I don't buy other people's sites as a rule because they won't have been built for the reason I build them or in the way I build them.

Andy

Good pointer on that one. You're right about the website name being completely of lesser value....which sucks because I still have a few sites that are keyword related lol and they're ranked nowhere near the top where I'd hope for them to be. It just shows how Google's algorithm changes in the blink of an eye.

Why don't you create 100 sites with 100 articles each? If you look at this as a long term plan that goal shouldn't be too far-fetched, especially with the use of outsourcing.

And I know someone is going to say that doesn't make sense because of the large monetary investment needed. But that is like saying that opening a WalMart store is not a feasible business model because of the large monetary investment and need for management skills... Don't tell me WalMart isn't making money

Plus WalMart didn't get as big as it is overnight. If you do it gradually and expand as your profits allow you to - looking at it the same way you would any other kind of business - I don't see why even 100 AUTHORITY sites isn't a possible longterm goal. There is absolutely no reason to assume that everyone that has hundreds of sites put up 4 pages of spam(though I agree many have, we can't assume they all did).

"Whether you believe you can do a thing or not,
you are right." - Henry Ford.

There are so many elements to getting a project
done. Especially one as seemingly complex as
managing 100 sites.

So those who believe it isn't possible will look
for reasons to fail.

Those who believe it is possible will go out, seek
solutions that work, and try, stumble, fall, get up,
persist, improve, modify, test, fail for a while -
and then succeed.

And when they come to a public forum to tell others
that it can be done, depending upon whether those
reading it believe it can be done or not, we'll see
reactions like the ones on this thread.

It's a CLASSIC example of the mindset Henry Ford
described in that quote.

For perspective, there are folks I know who manage
portfolios of 1,500+ websites (not all of them one-
page brochures)... and they are folks I found while
researching the best way to build my project.

Seek - and you'll find!

All success
Dr.Mani

Lots of practical advice and personal views in this thread but one area that has not been discussed are the drivers for wanting to make 100 niche sites.

Obviously the money at the end of the day but I think it's more complicated than that.

Many are saying “yes you can, but I did and you shouldn't”. So clearly it is a progression path at the very least. More importantly it has the lure of “fast cash” and that can be very powerful especially if you are a new starter or have not yet made any money online.

It is also a big plan but separated into easily doable chunks, i.e. each small site.

On the other hand an authority site takes time to make money, takes a lot of structure and planning in one site and can seem like an enormous task for a newbie.

So you could look at it like this. Maybe building a few authority sites is the way to create a well established, long term, profitable online income but if you never get to build one site then you will never make living.

On the other hand if you can make a bucketful of small blogs you will achieve something (even if shorter term), you will see early success, you will learn the foundation skills and the confidence you need to progress

For some people, (a lot of people) the need to take the baby steps to build up skill and confidence is essential to their online success. I see this all the time in my students. After hand holding many through their first blog to making their first dollar you see a marked increase in confidence and output. I know many of those would never have stayed the course if they had tried to create authority sites as their first projects.

I wholly concur. It's going to be a lot of work, any way you slice it. You're going to have to be consistent and disciplined about building and maintaining those sites on a daily basis if you're ever going to have those 100 sites up and functioning properly.

What you could do is develop an easily duplicable system that is broken down into discrete and easily accomplished tasks (you should be able to do this after setting up 3-5 of these sites), and create the documentation and videos that clearly outline how to perform each and every step within your system.

Then, you should be able to hand off the system to outsourced workers and have them do the dirty and monotonous work of building, setting up and maintaining these sites.

Paul

Not long ago I put up about 500 sites full of content - the hardest part was uploading the stuff It took looong minutes... the most important part would be getting the backlinks... but I'm not too much worried. The sites already started to earn...it's not that much so far... but it's a profit.

Marian

Doable...but you have to think about

a) Managing

b) Promotion


IMHO, much better if you concentrate on a few authority sites.

It all depends on how much money you want to make and what kind of keywords your shooting for.

Low comp keywords it would be fairly easy.

Be crazy like me with 40 sites spread across 4 niche's using the highest comp keywords and then it gets a little difficult but if you write down a good schedule and stick to it you can after a period of time make some serious coin.