Anyone make money with multiple small sites?

It used to be a lot easier, but Google has certainly made it a lot more difficult to get traffic to these smaller sites. I have around 150 small (under 20 pages) websites and find they just about pay for themselves.

I would personally build one big site and put your resources into that - although obviously you need a unique idea that is actually going to work, and the capabilities and time to make it so.

Remember that you need the ability to design, build and optimise the sites on your own - so photoshop skills, programming knowledge and at least a fundamental understanding of SEO are necessary.

When you say "pay for themselves" do you mean they cover the cost of hosting and registration for that site?

My experience has been the same as Sabre's. I'm letting a lot of domains drop, getting rid of shared servers and focusing on one or two larger sites on a fast VPS.

techgal128 said:

When you say "pay for themselves" do you mean they cover the cost of hosting and registration for that site?

Click to expand...

Whatever costs are incurred, both one-time and ongoing fees.

I personally pay 2 different parties to design, build and add content to all of my domains - so my costs include all of the above. If you can do everything yourself, it is a significantly slower process, but obviously a lot cheaper.

Ongoing fees are just hosting and domain renewals - it's important to use a high quality hosting provider or you are just shooting yourself in the foot in the long-term.

I've been testing small site networks for about 7 years now and found that my small 5 page+ sites vary in profitability based on the type of revenue model I had.

For instance:
* Sites that I just used for content + ppc (adsense / adrite / infolinks, etc) did great from 2005 to about 2010 and then lost 80% revenue with all the latest algorithm changes and keyword click value changes.

* Sites that used digital Products for revenue (Vector design templates / ebooks / scripts, etc.) took a similar decline in revenue of about 60% loss around 2009 / 2010. I ended up having to drop purchase rates substantially just to compete with all the FREE options that saturated the markets and made it hard to sell.

* Sites that are geared as lead generators for my primary services have remained unchanged since 2005 and still flourish. Basic sub-service / portal (5 page) sites that target long tail key word sub-niches with my primary service niches.

* Sites geared for services have also remained about the same generating their own leads + soaking up the leads from my small lead generator sites that feed them. (Granted, my main (Branded) service sites are 5k to 30k+ pages and not considered small).

That's just a brief overview of my experience anyways with small sites and how they can also aid ones larger sites.

Eric Lyon

I too use small, often 1 page, sites to get a foot in the door of certain markets -where curated content adds value. I don't use adsense, however, I offer services -mostly to others seeking too reach that market's audience.

How about sites that offer online tools such as converters and such? Are those still a good option?

Yes, we are making money using adsense!

I'm in the same boat as Sabre. I start about 1 new mini-site per quarter, dealing with a different small niche.

I try to find someone who has built up something strong - tons of content and passion - but no idea what they're doing! I wait till they've given up and buy those. Then I work on the link building, promotion and keeping them active. These pay for themselves and make extra money each month to add to my pockets, nothing too exciting though.

Most of my income comes from one big site that I put most of my effort into. The purpose of the various small sites is to be diverse in the event of a change in traffic or the fallout of a revenue model.

One avenue I have found surprising success in has been free Web 2.0 profiles that allow me to create a blog, diary or the like, without having to host or update a domain name. I start a few a month based on Amazon products I like or experiences I have had that might help others. Some only have a couple of pages, others have more than 20. These actually are starting to make consistent money, more than enough to offset my costs on the other projects.

for now i have small sites that i use to support the big website that i am planning to launch. and that means yes, i get money from that. not that much but i can use it to support my big plans while im still working on my day job.

I seem to have the best luck with bigger sites, relatively speaking. If you've got a decent crowd, try Project Wonderful for advertising. I can't make squat with AdSense; the payout is just too low. From what I can tell, Google pays well under 10%, and it seems to drop every year. I've ditched that nonsense.

I used to be able to slap together a quick website with a free template, merchant datafeed from CJ, and get some backlinks for quick indexing and make good money pretty quickly from the sites... but like someone else said, Google is making it tough to do that kind of thing now so the gravy train days are pretty much over.

You might have a website that gets indexed at first and get good rankings but it will be short lived.