The Debate – Large Site vs Small Site

I have had several email questions asking my recommendation on whether to build a large content driven blog using PhpBay Pro or building a lot of smaller, niche driven sites.

The only way to answer is that it really depends on your chosen niche and the business model you choose. Is it a fad or is it a topic that is constantly growing and developing? Do you see yourself blogging about it a year or two from now or do you not know enough about the product or topic to provide that much content? Will you lose passion for the subject or are you out to make a quick buck?

There are pros and cons to each type of site and only you can determine what will work best for your business model.

If you do not really know anything about the product or niche you have chosen, are looking to create some quick money and do not want to spend a lot of time on content, then go for building a lot of small sites.

What you will have to remember when doing these is that you will have to build links to all of them and provide at least a page of content or two on them each month (preferably weekly). This can become time consuming when you have 50, 100 or 200+ domains. Of course, these are things you can outsource once you have begun earning money.

On the flip side, if you are looking to build an authority site in a very general niche (like the one I am building in my Site Build series), have a passion for it and will still be blogging about it for years to come, then by all means go with a larger site. You can end up doing just as well with only 5 or 6 of these type of sites vs 100 small sites.

With the larger sites, you have a few choices. You can build it as a regular blog with auctions in your posts or keep your posts free of auctions and build Pages with eBay listings instead. You can even do a combo of both.

The bottom line is that there is no right or wrong way to do it. It all depends on your vision for the site, how much time you want to spend on it, how specific or general you want it to be, how profitable the niche is and so on.

I will talk about determining niche profitability in a future post, but let's look at a couple of more things before I end this post.

If you look at the site I built in the series: http://gorgeousforless.com You can see by the domain name that this is a HUGE topic and nearly anything can be covered there. I will be talking about hair care, skin care, nails, some nutrition, health problems that can affect all topics, wellness issues related to all topics, etc.

My vision for that site is to develop a readership and community centered around beauty and all topics related to it. Since it is built on WordPress, the site will end up ranking well for thousands of keywords over time. As well, with proper promotion, the readers will come. I'm not looking for a quick buck there. Though the money will end up coming as it builds authority.

However, if I were out for some fast cash, I might build a phpBay site geared toward a certain line of skin care products, etc.

Another thing worth mentioning and considering when deciding on the size of your site is that some SEO authorities are beginning to believe that Google is going to add how long a visitor remains on your site as a factor in determining its rankings in their engine.

Supposedly, the longer they remain on your site, they figure the visitor found what they were searching for and therefore will rank it better in the results.

I do not know how much truth there is to this, but those are the whispers among the SEO community. Just food for thought.

So what is your take on all of this? Please feel free to leave a comment or contact me. Would love to hear your thoughts.