The weather has been outstanding here lately, and I’m so pumped for school to end and Summer to start. The last few weeks for me have been pretty lazy as I’ve worked a little and hung out a lot. There’s a dam near my school that has a lake and a small beach, and the past two weekends my friends and I have made it out there to get some sun, relax, and drink some beer.

I find it really hard to work when it’s nice out, but I don’t really care at the moment. I’m having a lot of fun, and I’ve outsourced a lot of stuff recently so I still get work done. Tommy from PAL has been doing a little vBulletin work for my first real forum, and he’s done an outstanding job. And obviously Eduardo is doing excellent work on the design side of things.

Alright, now I’ll talk a little business. My focus for this summer is going to be almost exclusively on my two major sites. I read a post a while back that discussed the topic of operating many websites versus operating just one. The author of the post took the stand that having many sites is better because you are more diversified, always have projects to work on, and are protected from Google penalties wiping out your whole income.

I however believe that focusing on one or two sites at a time is much better. Personally I can get much more into a project if I know I’m trying to turn it into an industry leader, as opposed to just trying to make it a $X,XXX/month site. Also, I think if you’re trying to make 15 or 20 sites doing high three figures/low four figures a month, you’re really leaving a lot on the table. Each of those sites are about to hit their “boom”, where traffic and revenue increase rapidly, but since you have so many sites you probably don’t have enough time to take each one to that point.

My favorite part about any site I’ve ever worked on is when you get over the initial hump, see your rankings soar, and start getting serious traffic. I think if you’re working on a ton of sites at once, you really never get to that point because your focus is spread across so many projects. Unless of course you have a bunch of people working for you, and that’s a different story.

My plan is to work hard on these two sites for 6-12 months, then see where they’re at. I assume each one will be making great money by then, and I’ll have to evaluate if there’s any more potential left or if I’ve maxed the niches out. If there is more potential, I’ll continue working. If not, I’ll start new projects.

The best part about it is that once you hit the boom of the project and max out the potential, it’s most likely doing $XX,XXX/month. From there, you can easily hire people to maintain all aspects of the site (content creation, link building, community management) for a couple thousand a month, which doesn’t eat too much of your profit up, but still totally frees you from the project. Then, you can start over and try to tackle new niches while still maintaining that passive income.

This is all my opinion obviously, and isn’t necessarily right or wrong. A lot of it is personal preference. I’d much rather create industry leading, valuable, and brand-able sites, as opposed to a bunch of smaller sites that all get a little bit of traffic. However, some people surely prefer the opposite, and they’re doing just fine as well.

On another topic, I’ve been thinking about getting into real estate investing lately. Does anyone have any decent resources I could check out? I’m clueless on the topic and haven’t been able to find much valuable information online…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Business, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.