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I Really Want Affiliate Marketing To Work For Me - Should I Develop One Site Or Many?

It’s a great question, and one that I have answered and struggled with over the years.

Early on, I had only a handful of websites.

Actually just three, and they were on the topic of cell phones, satellite tv and credit cards.

I cut my teeth on these sites. I learned how to use FrontPage, how to FTP, how to write content, how to add links, how to add images, how to add affiliates links, how to work with merchants, how to measure conversion rates and so on.

As these skills developed and my income increased it seemed logical to add more and more sites.

Today, I have around 100 online.

Some of these sites are relatively new, while others have been around for years.

Some make money, some do not.

I refer to most of these sites as my “wave one” websites, and although they have made me a great deal of money, if I was starting today as a newbie, and knowing what I now know, I would build just two. Yes, just two sites.

I would use my first site to learn the ropes.

It would make money, not huge money, but it could very realistically earn $1000-$2000 a month when it was finished.

The site would be focused tightly on a small niche. I would focus on developing a great site, and I would cover off the topic thoroughly. It would be every bit as tightly focused as Tie-a-Tie.net, an absolutely wonderful example of a smaller niche style how-to website that that I saw referenced recently on CNN.

It would be every bit as tightly focused as Tie-a-Tie.net, an absolutely wonderful example of a smaller niche style how-to website that that I saw referenced recently on CNN.

I would think, if I was a newbie again, that it would take me four to six months to complete the site, doing what I needed to do, plus giving ample time to let the search engines do their thing.

I would use this small niche site as my schooling to learn what I needed to know.

I would use my second site to hit a home run.

Once I had most of the base learning out of the way, I would then focus on finding a topic for a larger niche site, one that I would enjoy working on everyday. It might be organized and structured in a similar fashion to the extremely popular how-to site AskTheBuilder.com developed by Tim Carter, who was recently quoted in the April 2007 edition of Newsweek to the site “pulling in more than $1 million a year”.

It might be organized and structured in a similar fashion to the extremely popular how-to site AskTheBuilder.com developed by Tim Carter, who was recently quoted in the April 2007 edition of Newsweek to the site “pulling in more than $1 million a year”.

I would focus all of my time and effort continuously expanding and improving upon this site so that within a couple of years it would be an absolutely sought after resource.

And by staying focused on one site, and not diluting my efforts over many sites, I could: