As a company that offers support for affiliate marketers through coaching calls, our team here at BrandBuilders can say that we have our “ear to the ground” when it comes to the challenges people face when they start making money online.
We can say with confidence that one of the most common questions we see is whether it is a good idea to start multiple affiliate websites.
This could be because affiliate marketers are a resourceful, feisty bunch who are always looking for a new way to make a buck.
OR
It could be due to the proliferation of content being shared online about how different affiliate marketing pros are boosting their income. This leads to a pretty strong sense of FOMO.
We also admit that we hear a lot of great ideas that our customers have for niche sites once they are midway through building out their original idea.
So, what is the right answer to the question: “How many sites should I have for affiliate marketing?”
Let’s go in-depth about this to find the best answer for you. Trust us – the right decision here can save you a LOT of time and money!
Why People Start Multiple Niche Sites
There are many great arguments out there for why people should build multiple affiliate marketing websites. We find that these generally fit into three key categories: the revenue argument, diversification, and outsourcing.
- Revenue Argument: Past online marketing wisdom says that you need to create a portfolio of affiliate marketing websites to fully replace the income from your day job.
- Diversification: Ensuring that your income comes from several different sources is important for sustainable business.
- Outsourcing: If the main barrier to your success with affiliate websites is how you manage your time, why not just pay others to handle day-to-day tasks for multiple websites if you have the money to do so?
These are much better reasons for pursuing this strategy than simply starting something new because you had an epiphany about a missed niche opportunity, or because you read about someone else’s success in a different industry online. Do your best to resist “shiny object syndrome.”
With all that said, we recommend avoiding thinking seriously about this decision until you are further down the road in your affiliate marketing journey.
If you have started your first affiliate site within the past six months, this question probably doesn’t apply to you yet – but it’s still worth thinking about for later on.
If you have an affiliate site with steady monthly traffic of 10,000 page views and growing, you still might want to focus on diversifying your on-site income.
But if you are an authority site veteran with strong search engine rankings, multiple income streams on your site, and confidence in your processes, then multiple sites could be an option for you.
But before we go into how this can work, it’s time to talk about why your goal should be building a single high-performing authority site!
An Argument For Single-Site Focus
For the average affiliate marketer, we recommend building a niche site to authority site status.
You may be wondering, how do I know if my affiliate site counts as an authority website? We recently published an article on building an authority site, where we explained that an authority site is a highly reputable website in terms of search ranking and user trust, with a large amount of content and multiple revenue streams.
It’s tough to know exactly when a niche site can be considered an authority site, but for the purpose of this article, we can refer to it as a site that has 20+ top 5 Google rankings and at least 10,000 monthly pageviews.
So, why should you try to work towards an authority site instead of multiple niche sites?
There is a search engine optimization argument behind this, but one of the most important aspects for us is how we typically see people fail at affiliate marketing. As a business based on educating and supporting all levels of affiliate marketing enthusiasts, we see this firsthand!
The number one reason that affiliate marketers fail isn’t because they aren’t skilled, devoted, or resourceful enough. It is because they take on too much all at once themselves, and run out of time to be able to do all the things that they set in motion for themselves to reach their affiliate site goals.
So, we consider it our responsibility to keep people on track and avoid going down rabbit holes that monopolize their time and budgets.
And if that isn’t enough of a reason, Google makes it pretty difficult too.
SEO Implications
One of the greatest reasons to stick with a single site comes from how Google’s algorithm is currently set up, and the way that many online marketers and search engine optimization experts believe things will be trending in the future.
This all has to do with a relatively new SEO concept called “E-A-T” that has come into vogue in SEO and marketing circles since Google’s second most recent algorithm update, the August 2018 “Medic Update” (which received its nickname because it initially affected a lot of sites offering health and medical services).
The Medic Update affected these sites because the algorithm change was meant to ensure that sites that were being recommended on SERP’s were trustworthy. In a niche such as health and fitness, this was important because a random website doling out questionable medical advice could end up causing more damage than whatever you might find on WebMD.
E-A-T
The new algorithm gives an advantage to websites that display a higher level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. This is where we get our mysterious E-A-T acronym from, and this has a profound impact when you are building a niche affiliate marketing website from the ground up.
Since Google Medic, sites have tried to crack the code on what it really means to have expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Since Google doesn’t say exactly what changes they have made, this is mostly speculative.
However, after plenty of marketing and SEO pros have conducted their own research and testing, we can be pretty confident that this is how things work.
Trustworthiness and authority are the easy ones to explain: authority comes from a strong backlink profile and domain authority, and shares on social media. Trustworthiness can mean good ratings on review centers like Google My Business, including a physical address on your website, and having an SSL certificate for your website.
Expertise is a bit of a tougher nut to crack, but generally, the SEO world says that including rich media (audio, video, infographics) in your content helps, as does having content pieces be tightly related to each other and connected with internal linking.
Affiliate E-A-Ts
The implications of Google’s EAT policy can be boiled down to one simple statement:
No. More. Shortcuts.
This change made it very difficult for affiliate marketing websites to rocket up the Google search rankings by using strategies like aggressive link building. Google tried to make marketing your business more about human relationships, and less about how savvy your SEO team is.
All of these things take time, effort, and in a lot of instances, money (unless you are interested in creating an entire website’s worth of content all on your own).
This is all about building trust from actual humans, and search engines. Trust takes time to build, and it means investing in real-world engagement with your site visitors, not just hiring a virtual assistant to plug your website in the comments of a Quora question.
So if you have three great niche ideas that you are hoping to build from scratch, you probably want to take some time to think about how you will be able to effectively manage growth for different verticals all at the same time, knowing that it could take at least 6-8 months before you start seeing your first signs of revenue.
Playing the Long Game With Domain Authority
Above all else, if you need a reality check for how taxing it can be to build a niche site to a top 10 ranking on Google, here is something to keep in mind.
In Brady from BrandBuilder’s tutorial video on introductory keyword research using Ahrefs, he shows viewers how to find niches with keywords that have at least two websites on Google’s top 10 that have domain authority rankings under 25.
This implies that if you can boost your site to a domain rating of at least 25, and shove aside these other niche sites to find a spot in the top 10, you can start making organic one of your top traffic sources.
To get a Domain Authority of 25, we can conservatively say that you will need at least 5-6 months of content creation, link building, social profile engagement, and anything else that you think will build trust and authority in your niche.
If you want to do one of these things (let’s say content creation) the right way, you are probably looking at a $1,000+ monthly content outsourcing budget with a site like Upwork, plus the time it takes to properly filter good writing talent and maintain strong editorial standards for a single website. Doing this for two, three, or more at the same time could get a little hairy.
If you have that much money saved up to spend on bootstrapping, you might as well buy a pre-made site with a content creation package from BrandBuilders and save yourself some trouble. Seriously.
But, we aren’t here to try to convince you that buying our product is the only alternative (even if we do think it is pretty sweet). Because why would you buy anything from us unless you trust us?
That’s what this SEO game really boils down to: Trust.
Build Trust: Build Your Site
You will have more success in affiliate marketing if you are able to put more time and energy into building the trust that is bundled into your website.
Unfortunately, there is no easy metric to determine how much trust your visitors have in your affiliate marketing website (okay, maybe SEM Rush has a “Trust Score”, but not everyone has this platform).
Trust is built by creating a base of returning site visitors who engage with your content on comments or social media, and eventually buy products through your affiliate links.
This is the same trust that can earn your website the title of being an Authority Website instead of just a niche site.
So, as you are building your affiliate marketing website, try to set meaningful goals that can measure trust.
This could mean something like keeping an eye on your returning users metric in Google Analytics and trying to make sure that it is always a certain percentage of total users.
Or, you can check whether your affiliate partner program measures how many purchases are made by repeat customers. Try to continually grow this number as you add more affiliate products to your site.
Exceptions to the Rule
Now that we have spent time trying to convince you not to go down the road of building multiple niche sites, we can’t avoid addressing the fact that not all people do this!
When you research affiliate marketing, you will start to notice that it seems like very few of the bloggers giving out advice have a single affiliate marketing business venture.
Many affiliate marketing pros will refer to their “portfolio” of authority sites which bring in money through a variety of different income streams.
They usually talk about the benefits of diversification. Heck, we even use this example frequently in our educational blog posts. “You should diversify your authority websites, just like you should diversify a stock portfolio” is a common adage that makes sense to anyone trying to get paid.
However, there is a reason that these marketers do this. And it’s not because they possess some god-given talent, or work harder than everyone else.
When One Site Isn’t Enough
We recently released a great interview video on the BrandBuilders YouTube channel, where Brady interviews online affiliate/income maestro Jon Gillham.
[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’1′ hide_logo=’1′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’0′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEmNgKtM6sg[/responsive_video]
In this video, Brady asks Jon a question:
[pullquote align=”normal”]”Most of the time when people are getting started, they focus their efforts into one business. Would you say that you have different advice? Because it seems like you have had a different experience.” [/pullquote]
For those unfamiliar with Jon’s work, he is heavily involved with many online business ventures, including building authority and Amazon FBA websites, managing affiliate marketing campaigns, and much more. He blogs about his projects and learnings on his website Authority Website Income, which we strongly suggest you check out.
Jon’s response is somewhat self-deprecating and very useful for any aspiring affiliate marketer to hear.
The 5%
“I do it wrong, I know I do it wrong…but I have come to grips with it in terms of building a team of entrepreneurs with the organizational capacity to launch projects.”
This response comes from an experienced affiliate marketing business pro, who has spent a long time optimizing his processes and finding good people to help him accomplish his goals.
But what does he say about our multi-project (or affiliate website) debate?
[pullquote align=”normal”]”You should focus on one, 95% of people will achieve more success focusing on one. I’m not saying I’m one of the five, I would probably also achieve more success focusing on one. But it’s also fun to launch stuff.” [/pullquote]
So what if you find yourself inching towards one of the 5%?
What if you hear about a brand new online income stream or untouched niche that seems too good to pass up?
What if you have extra money in the bank, and a strong team of freelancers who you know can write killer copy for your new content site idea?
If you see yourself ticking off at least one of these boxes, you could make an argument for killing it with more than one niche site. Here’s how this can be possible.
Building Multiple Affiliate Niche Sites
Managing Your Goals
First things first. It goes without saying that you should validate that an existing niche site or blog is profitable before you get too carried away with another idea. What does this look like exactly?
You should aim for at least six months of breaking even with your existing website before you start to plan to start from scratch again. This means that your combined income streams need to exceed the amount of money it takes to keep your site growing, and your income should be growing monthly too.
The purpose of being patient is to make sure that you are accounting for possible seasonality in your niche.
It is also important to experience the typical roadblocks that affiliate marketers face, like losing a highly coveted Google ranking or dealing with poorly-optimized d