Here is one of my main mistakes I feel I made as a webmaster. Sometimes it feels better and easier to rank a bunch of smaller websites instead of having one website and trying to rank your inner pages. I have worked on both methods and it has always seemed that I had a much easier time ranking my smaller websites. Or being able to spam the web with low quality sites that really added nothing to the internet was the way forward. I have designed bots and automated the process of setting up such sites and I brought my income to levels I never imaged. I also spent a lot of time getting things to work correctly.
All this money lasted about 6 months and then things just dried up. Spamming the web with your websites may sound like a easy way to make a living but there is nothing long term about it. Now I am looking at over $14,000 in domain renewals and I am not going to do it. Plus with changing my server you know what a pain it would be to move all these sites over to my new home?! It would take hours if not days to make sure everything was working correctly.
I really think the way forward to making a living on the internet is to own 1 – 10 properties and make these sites huge. You do not need EMDs to rank. I am able to rank the inner pages of my websites just fine and pass up other people that own the EMD easily. You should build something you are proud of. Something that you feel you can show off to your friends and family and not be disappointed about it. Build yourself something that will sustain the test of time.
Sure it seems easier to just throw up your long tail emd write a few articles on it and produce a site. Sure you can easily get it to bank $x – $xxx a month with the correct keywords. You know though to maintain that rank requires constant work or else it will slowly start to slip away. If you have a few main projects you can just keep working on them and every time you work on ranking an inner page you are really building the authority of the full site at the same time.
For example I have an eCommerce website I have over 100 articles up that are related to the products we sell. I have not built a single link to any of these articles. I do actively build links to pages I want to rank though for our main keywords. By building links to these pages I have been able to rank my other inner pages just by domain authority alone. Sure these terms were not high competition but the high competition ones are the ones I want to rank. You do not want to forget about the rest of your traffic either. If you are not focusing on low volume low competition keywords also you are not fighting for every bit of traffic you can.
Lets do a little math on this. Your low competition low volume keywords bring you an extra 1000 visitors a month. Now say we have a conversion rate of 2%. So we make 20 sales off these visitors. Now our average order total is $50 so that is $1000 in additional sales. How much money does it cost to outsource articles like these? Not much at all. In essence what you are doing is widening your net on the web so you can catch more fish. These long tail low competition keywords are also going to make you that additional revenue month after month! So really you do not have anything to loose but the cost of content and a lot to gain.
I am not saying you need to give up on link building. I still build links every single day of the week for our high competition and mid competition keywords. When you are building those links though you will be building authority for your domain and your other inner pages will naturally start ranking higher. So if you are focusing on just a few keywords on for your site you really are doing it wrong and missing out on a bunch of long tail traffic.
I am going to tell you to take some action and give it a try. Find 100 low competition keywords. Build some new pages on your site. Continue your link building for your primary keywords you are trying to rank and watch your traffic gradually increase as all your other pages rank also. Give it a try and see for yourself. It can be very rewarding.