Out With The Old,In With The New
I have had success since joining WA over 2 years ago (success being a couple of thousand dollars a year and nothing more) yes, not much but better than nothing, and most of that came from Halloween niche and a couple of other niches I should never have even entered.
I have near 20 mini Halloween sites that do ok all year round and bring in a few hundred at Halloween and after. They are all Exact Match Domains and though I love the Halloween niche and it has made me some extra cash, I need advice in what I am thinking of doing next.
Basically, I am contemplating in the next few days, buying a new domain, slowly building an authority Halloween site, and closing down all the other mini sites and moving all the content to the new authority site which will have extra features such a recipes, Halloween news, articles, video and so on.
My reasons are, managing over 20 sites I just do not have the time. Working on backlinks for so many sites I do not have the time, plus now with the new Google updates, Exact Match Domain especially for Halloween costumes etc. is a waste of time since preference has now been given to the bigger companies such Amazon etc.
I intend to close all sites and cancel domain packages rather than try sell domains. I would like to know what my fellow WA’rs think, any advice would be much appreciated, am I doing the right thing, is it the right move?
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The direction that you are contemplating is a very good one. You are only ONE person and trying to manage 20 different sites spreads your efforts (and your content) very thin. What you want to do is have ONE authority site with 100's of pages on it. The more pages you have, the more reach you will get. There are always people looking for costumes too, so you could have some categories and sections dedicated to non-Halloween costumes as well. Come October 31, 2012 it would be great if you could have this new direction in full effect and really see a huge bump in your earnings.
When it comes to managing a handful of sites vs one really GREAT site, you are always better to focus on keeping your content in one place. You will rank better to as your single domain will gain popularity in Google once you start updating content regularly.
I agree 100% with this direction!
Thank you Carson, time to move on, Bit nervous especially when you read you need thousands of mini sites to make good money (Aidan Booth apparently had 1200 sites) but as I'm not after big money, the one site is for me.
Anyone who tells you to build 1200 sites is out of their mind! One of those techniques that most likely was never put into place, but made sense. 1200 mini sites.. lol That would mean 5000-6000 pages with content. Where the heck could you get that amount of UNIQUE content written because you certainly couldn't do it yourself. Sounds like spinning would be involved and that means crap content that Google won't touch with a 10 foot pole.
1200 mini sites requires a $12,000 investment for the domains alone, plus the hosting. At $5 per page for content you're looking at about $30,000 for 6000 pages. Ridiculous that anyone would even suggest this. This is the kind of crap that is out there and what we've been battling for years to teach people to stay away from.
You're one person that can only manage so much :)
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Pinterest would be a great place to drive traffic to your Halloween site. I love viewing all the different costumes on Pinterest.
Yep I use pinterest alot, great for traffic especially for my literature site.