How To Manage A Large Portfolio Of Niche Websites

There comes a point in time when running a single site isn’t enough to produce the income levels you’re trying to hit, but when you think about running more than one site you find yourself getting bogged down in the details.

This is especially true when you find yourself running more than a few different sites and are ready to start scaling them all at the same time.

Many niche marketers are fine when they’re working on one project at a time, but that isn’t conducive to really scaling your income. When you really want to grow your income and do it without losing your mind, there’s one thing you’re going to need...

You Need Systems In Place.

If there’s one guaranteed way to ensure that you get frustrated as you start to manage more than one site, it’s to try and reinvent the wheel every time you get back to work and try moving forward.

Without having systems in place, and repeatable processes, you’re going to spend more time trying to get organized than you will spend on actually growing the traffic and revenue.

If you’re not familiar with the types of systems you can use to grow your site’s traffic and revenue, we’re going to help you figure it out.

There is a fair amount of work involved up front, but once you document the processes you use on a regular basis and eliminate extra work that isn’t necessarily required, you’re going to spend less time growing your business in the long run.

Having documented processes in place will also make it easier for you to hire people to help you grow your business and be able to hand off training manuals so they can get up to speed quickly.

Since hiring people is one of the biggest causes of frustration for business owners, it only makes sense that the less time you spend getting people acclimated with how you operate, and figuring out what you expect from them, the better and less stressful your life is going to be.

To get started, there’re 5 types of systems you need to implement into your business if you expect to scale your income and traffic without having the scale the amount of hours you’re devoting to the process.

Here’s how to start growing your business, quickly and effectively.

Step #1: Build a System For Building Out New Sites

When you’re starting a new site, there are certain steps you’re going to take that can be easily repeated and outsourced -- if you document what’s required.

Stop and think about what you typically do when thinking about building out a new site.

You’re going to research keywords to find out if the niche is worth getting into. You’re also going to use the keywords you’ve found to start planning a content foundation and category structure of the site.

Then, you’re going to purchase a domain for the site, and install WordPress on your hosting account. Once WordPress is installed, you’ll need to change the theme and install the plugins you’re going to be using.

The site is then going to need a quick redesign, a header or logo image, your plugins and theme options configured, and email account created.

After all of that has been completed, you will need to tie the site into your Analytics account and Webmaster Tools dashboard.

Fairly straightforward, right? This process gets repeated on nearly every site you’ll build out.

Now, you may have certain steps that you add into your own process, or even steps that we’ve outlined here that you might not go through when you’re building out a site that aren’t going to end up in your system.

Regardless what steps you take while you’re building out a new site, you will want to document the process so that you can either create to do lists that allow you to quickly and effectively work through building out a new site without having to think too much about it.

How To Document The Process

There’s two ways you can go about it, depending on whether you are going to continue doing the work yourself or if you’re going to work with freelancers to help scale your business.

You can either write down what you do into a Word document that can be printed and checked off as you work through it whenever you want to start a new site, or you can record videos that help your freelancers figure out what you expect from them while they’re building out the site for you.

If you’re going to record videos that you can use to hire freelancers to help with the setup process, you can use desktop recording software like Jing or CamStudio. Both make it easy to record training videos.

If you prefer avoiding the camera and microphone, you can also document your entire process in a Word document.

Include each step you take, no matter how small you think it may be.

Getting the minor details down into the Word doc will make it easier for you to build new sites out yourself, while also ensuring that you have the processes ready to go if you do happen to hire someone down the road or outsource the process to a freelancer.

Once the site is built out, you’re going to need to start working on filling it with content.

Step #2: Build a System For a Steady Flow of Content

As you’re performing keyword research in the previous step, you should be preparing to lay the foundation of content that’s going to get your site off the ground.

You can do this by grouping keywords together, visiting the SERPs for each keyword you intend to target, and figuring out the types of content that Google wants to see. You can expand on this content to make your site the authority on the subject.

Since you should already have successful sites under your belt, you should have a general idea of the types of content that your visitors are going to want to see. This content can be put into templates that are easy to pick up and repurpose into other niches.

If you don’t already have templates for your content, here are a few different types that work great for driving traffic (and links) to your sites.

Template Type #1 - Infographics

If there’s one type of content you should be creating for every site you own, it’s an infographic.

In case you’re not familiar with what infographics are, take a look at this blog post.

At the top of the page, you’ll see a huge graphic full of information -- hence the name, infographic. The info included in it is short and easy to consume, which makes it simple for people to skim through and pick up some quick tips.

Infographics also get linked to from other sites quite often.

They’re one of the easiest ways to automatically generate new links to your site, and easy use in your outreach strategy.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create a new infographic, either. In fact, you can have a designer put together a basic template that you can reuse for each new site you build.

With a templated infographic, you can insert new icons, add some text and tips, and publish it to your blog so it’s ready to be used in your promotional strategies.

With more and more people using infographics, though, you’re going to need to make sure that you’re providing unique, quality information that isn’t readily available everywhere else.

The more time you put into your infographic upfront, the better it’s going to perform over time.

Upwork is a great platform for finding a graphic designer that can help you

Template Type #2 - “Best Of” Posts

“Best Of” style posts work great for just about every type of site, but they really work well for sites based on Amazon’s Associates affiliate platform.

You can use WordPress plugins like TablePress to build out lists of recommended products and give your visitors the ability to sort the list by certain metrics, to help them find the best product for the problem that they’re having.

You don’t necessarily have to promote products inside of your Best Of posts, either.

Creating content around the best of the best in the niche that you’re targeting, without actually promoting products inside of the content, is a great way to generate new links.

Template Type #3 - Product Reviews

If you want to make money from your sites, you’re going to need product reviews.

They’re one of the easiest ways to uncover new, low competition keywords and tend to have the highest conversion rates out of any other type of content you can create.

Creating a template for product review style content is simple when you look back and realize that most of the reviews you’ve written in the past probably all follow the same similar layout.

In case you don’t already have a template, here’s a quick and dirty one you can use either for your own records, or to help freelance writers figure out exactly what you’re looking for:

Every product under the sun can be reviewed using that basic formula. Using it will also keep your content consistent across the entire site.

Template Type #4 - Rants & Raves

Nothing generates links quite like a rant or rave that resonates with people in your audience.

Unfortunately, because rant & rave style posts require original thoughts, you can’t really create a template that can be reused over, and over again.

Instead, you’re going to need to rely on your own experience and intuition to create this type of content. If you’re hiring a freelance writer, you are going to need to make sure that they’re experienced in the topic and can produce their own original thoughts.

Opinion based pieces like rants and raves are good fodder for your link builder to promote, and they have a high rate of going viral if the opinions included inside resonate with your audience or tap into their heart strings in some way.

Template Type #5 - How To’s & Tutorials

Another great way to create content that gets links is to actually purchase the products that you’re going to be promoting and create content around them.

Creating how to’s and tutorials allows you to take unique photos of the products, and figure out problems that your visitors may have, or unique ways for them to use the products that they may not have already thought about.

This type of content does require you to make an extra investment into your site when you’re building out a new one, but will instantly set you apart from your competition if they’re relying on stock photos and pictures from Amazon’s product pages.

The goal with your content strategy is to make it easy for you to build links and keep your visitors on your site when they land there from the search results pages.

Learning how to create each type of content yourself will pay off dividends, and even though most of them can’t be templated, once you create each type a couple different times, and have a list of the different types of content you can create, your job will get substantially easier.

It will also make it that much easier for you to walk a freelance writer through the process of creating the content for you, and help the understand exactly what you’re trying to achieve.

If you have examples on other sites you own, you can show them to the writer to give them an even better idea, and make it that much easier for them to produce the specific type of content you’re looking for.

Putting together a foundation on your site when you have each of these types of posts can be repeated for each additional site that you start in the future. They can also be used when you need to scale an existing site and are coming up short for content ideas.

Steps #3 & 4: Build a System For Generating Links

Once the foundation has been laid, you’re going to need new links.

Both as a brand new site, and a way to generate new links automatically as your site ages.

Building new links manually is a tedious, time consuming process, but links are a requirement if you want to grow your income. They help you both rank higher in the search engines, and the right links can deliver referral traffic to your site on their own.

There are three types of links that are great for getting your site moving up the search rankings, and delivering traffic on their own:

1. Guest posts
2. Blog comments
3. Social profiles

Guest Posts

We’ve put together a great post that shows you how to nail your guest posting campaigns and get a higher return on your time investment. You can view that post by clicking here.

It also goes into deep detail, and includes a template you can use during your outreach process so if you’re not already having huge success with the emails you send out, or you’re looking to hire someone to help complete the process for you, you have a starting point to work off of.

If you’ve created infographics as a part of your content foundation, you can also begin promoting it. Once it starts gaining traction, other sites will begin to borrow it, publish it to their own site, and link to it on their own.

Blog Comments

You’re also going to need to get involved in your community.

For most niches, this may not be possible, however, when the niche you’re targeting has an active community, generating new links to your site is easy.

Begin by searching Google for blogs surrounding your topic. You can open the door with the blog owners by leaving helpful, relevant comments on their posts.

These comments are going to give you trickle amounts of traffic, and give you an opportunity to give to the blog owner before you start working out ways to get links from them or get them to help promote your content.

Social Profiles

Each site that you build can also use the same set of social profiles to help boost your domain’s trust. SERPWoo put together a post that shows you 35 different sites you can use to increase your domain ranking.

Creating a system around building links can be somewhat difficult, but if you set yourself a target to hit and then work through the same targets for each site you build, you will have a solid foundation that you can build off later as the site begins to age.

And that’s the key with building systems and scaling your sites -- creating foundations that you know will get you to a point where you can move onto the next site, and then revisit the previous site after is has aged for a few more months and you can see the results of your previous efforts.

Here’s how to create a system for building your foundation of links:

Once you have the sites built, redesigned, plugins installed, content created, and your initial set of links built, you can start letting the site age. Then, after a certain period of time, say 3 months, you can revisit the site to figure out where you need to focus your efforts next.

Step #5: Build a System For Optimizing Content as The Sites Age

When it’s time to revisit your site, you’re going to need to dig through your Analytics and Webmaster Tools data to determine where you’re currently ranking, what content can be improved to rank higher, and new opportunities that you didn’t intend to rank for that you can create new content around.

Unfortunately, unless you have enough money to hire a professional SEO agency, you’re going to need to do this work yourself.

Thankfully, though, you can take the data that you gather and work it back through systems you’ve already created, so you already have an idea of the types of content you need to create, and the pages that are doing well enough to deserve having a fresh set of links thrown at them.

There are three ways you can optimize your sites, once they have a few months of age.

First, you can target content ranking on the first page of Google’s search results with new links.

Then, you can find content that you have ranking on the 2nd and 3rd page of Google and include new keywords, optimize the keywords you’re already trying to rank for, and then send fresh links at those pages to help push them closer to the 1st page of the search results.

Finally, you can uncover new keywords that you are appearing for but didn’t intend to target when you first started building the site, and create new content around those keywords.

Showing up in the search results without actively targeting the keywords is a good indication that the keywords themselves are extremely low competition, so creating a new blog post on your site targeting them should be guaranteed easy wins.

Then, you need to hire people to help.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it wasn’t built by a single person.

Thousands (millions?) of people all put in effort to grow the Roman Empire, and it took them lifetimes.

Now, your business doesn’t need to take a lifetime to grow, but if you’re not reaching out and bringing people on (using the systems we’ve just laid out for you), you’re going to feel like you’ve been working for a lifetime without getting the results that you could have achieved.

If you intend on managing more than 2-3 sites at a time, you are going to need to get help.

You can do it yourself, but you’re not going to get nearly as much accomplished as you can if you are reinvesting some of your profits back into getting help with the process.

To help you get started hiring your first freelancer, we’ve created a blog post that teaches FBA sellers how to outsource their entire business model. You can view the post by clicking here.

Inside of that post are templates you can use to find a writer, and find a link builder.

Then, when you find a qualified candidate, you can revert back to the instructions we’ve given you earlier in this post, coupled with the systems you’ve created specific to your own business to train them to help scale your websites.

There is a learning curve associated with managing multiple sites, especially as they grow and become more successful.

However, if you learn how to properly implement systems into your business that can be easily replicated whether you’re actively involved in the process, or not, and reinvest some of the profits you’re earning back into your business, scaling and managing a large portfolio of websites becomes that much easier.

The topic of the day is systems, and if you create one for each different aspect of your business, your life will become far less stressful than if you’re forced to reinvent the wheel every time you want to start a new site.