Why have more than one website for your Internet business? Well, there are several advantages, even if you have only a single product or service. The more different streams of income you have, the more advantageous the multiple-website strategy becomes.

Consider the simplest case first. Suppose I just sell widgets. Surely, my widget site has everything anyone needs to know about my widgets and how to buy them. Why would I need any other sites? Well first, if your single site doesn’t come up #1 in the search engines for the term ‘widget’ you are probably missing sales. Multiple sites help you achieve that #1 spot — and if you really work at, perhaps you can get #2 and #3 spots with your other widget sites.

Of course it does nobody any good if you just copy the information from your existing site to a new one. That is duplicate content, and it won’t show in the search results at all. What you need is another site that compares the different types of widgets. And another site on the history of widgets. And another site with pictures of the all the different types of widgets ever made. Etc., etc.

Some people try to put all that on one website, thinking they will then have the best widget website, so everyone will find it when looking for widgets. And to some extent, that works. But once on your site, what do people do? Oh look at the interesting widget history. Ah, I never thought there were so many types of widgets. And look at these pretty widget pictures … They get distracted by all the information and never get around to actually buying your widgets.

On the other hand, suppose you have multiple widget sites. Only people already interested in the history of widgets will go to your widget-history site, and there they find your sales site recommended for when they want to actually buy widgets. The same for each of your other sub-topic sites — they all funnel traffic (and web-link ‘credit’ for search engine ranking) into your sales site. Your sales site does not link back to your sub-topic sites. When someone finds your sales site, all they should see is information relevant to making the sale — no distractions!

Now suppose you have multiple streams of income — selling advertising space, affiliate links, your own products. A network of sites provides more ‘property’ for placing ads and affiliate links, while still funneling those persons interested in buying your product to your sales site or sites (one site per product usually works best, unless you have a product-line of related items).

In future posts we will look at how you produce, manage and optimize multiple web sites, so that your Internet business grows into your own Web Empire.