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Guest Blog Post By Andy Ruzicho*


Creative Commons License photo credit: helmet13

I used to be of the opinion that I should start at least a hundred websites with the goal of making a buck or two a day from each one. That would gross me a hundie or two hundie a day which would be nice. And, of course, I was caught up in the adsense goldrush (I’m going to claim credit for coining that phrase) and thought I could make all my coin through adsense alone. A year or so later, I’ve settled on the opposite approach with maybe one caveat. You are better off focusing on a just a few websites and scrapping plans for the 97 others.

A friend and I started www.ohiolandlordtenant.com back in late 1999 or early 2000. I wish we had started a couple more at that time. Actually, I also used to own ohioemploymentlaw.com but gave up that domain. Stupid move! Anyways, with some work over the next several years, we get some very decent traffic stats. It’s no espn.com or cnn.com by any means, but for a two man show, ’tain’t bad!

With the relatively recent success of that site, we thought we could translate that success into several other sites. Not so fast, skippy! For the most part, website development is a lot like investing in the stock market. Invest for the long term and you’ll be better off. Some people have the more immediate winners but most of us need a good long run before we see more than just chump change. Now, if you want to invest several grand into marketing your site, you might be able to quickly parlay that into a fat profit. But most people who blog want to pan for adsense gold in the river and not invest in the heavy mining equipment.

Now you might say that if website development is like the stock market then why not diversify with several sites. Here’s why I wouldn’t:

  1. Most of you have real day jobs. So you are left blogging in your rare spare. Good luck trying to continually update 8 dozen sites.
  2. Quality content is a large factor in the success of your blog. You will be lucky to generate QC for a few blogs let alone scores more.
  3. We are only passionate about so much in life. Stick to what you are passionate about and you will eventually find success.
  4. This may be the biggest point - The math is against you. You may think that it’s easy to generate a buck or so from each site each day but it’s much harder than you think.

Let’s say you average 5 cents a click from google adsense. And let’s say you have a pretty decent CTR (Click-Thru-Rate) of 10% of your visitors. You need 20 clicks a day to get a buck. And you would need 200 unique visitors a day to get those clicks from because only 20 or 10% of them are clicking on your google ads. 200 visitors a day is small potatoes in the world of web traffic, but, if you are trying to generate all 200 from no cost providers (i.e., search engines, incoming links, bookmarks, word of mouth), you’re in for a surprise. Add in the fact that your website is brand new and will find itself in the Google Sandbox for a good year or so and you’ll start to understand why this is a long term venture. Now you see why I wish I had a couple other domains that were a decade or so old.

I think you are far better off focusing on your three most successful sites rather than trying to keep several dozen on life support when it comes to making money on the web. And, for that matter, don’t put all your eggs in the adsense basket either. What was my one caveat? Sometimes in starting several websites you accidentally stumble onto a niche that is still wide open for the taking. If you happen to find such a niche, focus your efforts there.

* Andy runs a profitable online empire with a mix of legal, foodie and web business sites. Notably, Andy runs Ohio Landlord Tenant, the FMLA Law Reporter, Fine Repast and e-Book Now.

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