I’ve always been the type to start a new project purely on impulse. Sometimes I’ll find a really lucrative keyword while I’m digging through Ahrefs’ keyword explorer tool and I’ll think how easy it would be to rank for such a keyword. The problem, usually, is that I don’t have a website in that niche. It wouldn’t make sense for me to target that keyword on any of my existing sites.
This leads to me creating a new site in a niche that can target a set of keywords that would make sense. I’ll quickly go buy a domain, change the nameservers, install WordPress, and configure it all to my standards. Within the hour, I’m staring at (yet another) website that I’ll regretfully neglect in the coming months.
This behaviour leaves me with a dozen or two websites that have very little to no content. I simply didn’t follow through on what I thought I’d do, and I never learn my lesson.
So how many websites is too many?
Honestly, I found that you should really only focus on one website at a time. You can put out a lot more content, rank for a lot more keywords, and start to see results much sooner.
But what if you’re like me and you already have a lot of sites that you want to keep? You need to make some tough decisions. Ask yourself some hard questions.
- Can I write at least 1 post per week for each website?
- Can I commission at least 1 post per week for each website?
- Can I upload and optimize 1 post per week for each website?
- What is a good goal for each website?
- Post count?
- Traffic to the site?
- Monthly revenue?
If you’re starting each website from scratch, its going to take some time. In my own experience, it takes months to start seeing any kind of traffic to start coming to your site organically. If you want to talk about healthy traffic, it would take at least a year. If you have the patience and the drive, then all the power to you. Manage as many website as you can.
How many website am I working on?
I’m just one person. I can only do so much in a day. Not to mention, content websites and client SEO are only something that I enjoy doing on the side. If I’m lucky, I can get a few posts out every week. In my portfolio of websites, I have at least 20 website that are live and taking up server space. Only a few of them actually get traffic while the rest remain neglected.
I’ve tried working out several processes to change this. I’ve committed to 1 post per week, 4 posts per week, 1 post per month, and even hiring a VA to help with all the content commissioning and uploading.
It starts to weigh on you, and it happens faster than you think.
Do your own writing or hire writers?
I’ve found, in my experience, that it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing the writing or commissioning articles for writers to produce content for you… You will be exhausted. It is hard work no matter how you frame it. There are lots of pieces that need to be put together to make the big picture work for you.
- Topic research
- Keyword research
- Content structure/brief
- Writing/commissioning
- Proofreading + editing
- Optimizing (url, title, meta, images, headers)
This starts to become a lot of work if you’re managing more than active website. This is especially true if you’re managing client’s websites as well. It’s one thing to miss a few posts for your own sites, but to miss your client’s posts is unacceptable.