One of the more common emails we receive is from people with multiple sites who aren’t making much money from them. Only this morning, we received another email from someone who has around 100 sites…he had come to the conclusion that the multiple site model just isn’t working for him. He’s one of the lucky ones since he actually realized this before moving on to building even more sites. Not many people stop to see if something is working for them or not and keep going until they are totally burned out and they have little to show for all their work.

It’s hard work maintaining 100 sites. I can’t even imagine the work involved – we have 20 sites and when we were working on them all at once it was tough going. We don’t ever want to go back to that again.

Now we’re not saying having multiple sites doesn’t work. I’m sure there are people out there with hundreds of sites that are making money but this model has a number of drawbacks mostly the amount of work that is needed to keep the sites updated and maintained. Plus, we have seen so many people using this multiple site model that are really struggling and adding more sites makes no real difference to their income….instead it just creates even more work.

So what do you do if you have multiple sites and aren’t making much money from them?

Step 1

The first step is to stop, right now, creating any new websites. There is no point creating anything new if you aren’t making money from the sites you already have. If you are doing something that isn’t working, why repeat the process? So make a conscious decision to not create any new websites.

Step 2

Take a break from your websites. Take two days or even a week if you can and don’t go anywhere near your websites. The reason we suggest this is that most people who are in the process of trying to make money online are usually in what I call ‘frantic mode’. They have one thing on their mind and that is to make money so they frantically build more sites and frantically add more content and frantically look for backlinks. They never take a break and are constantly going from one thing to the next in the hope that the next thing they spot will work for them.

Taking a break clears the head and gets you into the right frame of mind to start afresh. You want to be in ‘relaxed mode’ not ‘frantic mode’ and taking time out will get you there.

Step 3

The next few steps involve getting some stats together. Hopefully you will have Google Analytics installed on each of your sites as this will help with your analysis. If not, you can use the stats provided by your hosting company.

Go to Google Analytics and find the top 5 pages on your sites that are getting the most traffic. This doesn’t mean finding the top 5 pages from each individual site – it means the top 5 pages overall. Just make a list of these pages so you can easily refer to them as you go through your analysis – you can use Word, Notepad or Excel for this.

Step 4

Take the first page in your list and go back to Google Analytics and look at the keywords that people are using to get to that page. This is how we do that:

1. Click on Content from the left menu in Google Analytics.
2. Click Top Content.
3. Click the actual url from the results that appear on the right hand side of the screen.
4. On the page that appears, click Entrance Keywords under Landing Page Optimization section.

This will provide you with a list of keywords that people are typing into Google to get to your page.

Add these keywords to your list – you only need to add the first 10 keywords or so.

Step 5

Now head over to Google and see where you are ranking for each of those keywords. Add those rankings to your list.

Step 6

Open up the free Google Keyword Tool and type in each of your keywords to see how much traffic each gets – (we use the ‘Exact’ option and look at Local Monthly Searches). Add that to your list as well.

Step 7

Now we are ready to analyze the data we have put together to see whether that page is worth working on. At this point, your list might look something like this for your first page (note that I made up the figures, so don’t waste your time going to Google to test these figures):

Now open up the actual page and take a look at the content on that page. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the content on the page match the keywords I am ranking for? In other words, if people are typing in ‘diamond ring’, ‘classic diamond ring’, ‘best diamond ring’ and so on to get to your page and your page is about ‘emerald diamond rings’ then something is wrong. All you are going to get is people clicking the back button to find another site with diamond rings. If this is the case then simply change the content on your page to match the keywords people are using to get to your site.
• Is the content on the page helpful? – I can almost guarantee that if your page has less than 300 words on it, then it is not very helpful. You might think that creating a short snappy review will get people to click through to the merchant but I can tell you from experience we haven’t found this to be the case. Make your reviews long and helpful….around 1000 words.
• Are there a lot of distractions on the page? – If you are promoting a particular product on that page then that’s all you should do. Don’t go adding Google Adsense and other pop-ups and widgets and flashing ads.
• Is the product worth promoting? – We’ve said this many times and we will probably say it many more times…there is no point promoting a product that isn’t worth promoting. Don’t just pick a product because you will get a healthy commission for it – choose products that people love. In other words, look at the reviews for the product and see what people are saying. If you choose a quality product to begin with then you will be streets ahead of  those who randomly select products to write about.
• Will I get enough traffic to this page? – Since we asked you to find your top 5 pages, you are already getting traffic to this page but you will also want to see if you have the potential to get even more traffic. So check your list and see how many people are searching for those keywords. If I were already getting traffic for the keyword ’diamond ring’ I would be working hard to get that page to the number 1 spot.
• Can I improve my ranking for those keywords? – The answer to this is always ‘yes’. Unless you are in the number 1 spot already, there is always the potential to increase your ranking and get even more traffic. This might involve checking out the competition to see how difficult it might be but in general for product type keywords, it is often quite easy to move up in the rankings by getting good quality backlinks.
• Will I get a decent commission? – We tend to avoid products that are under $150 – at least for Amazon products. If you are going to promote a product that is worth $20 and your commission is 8% you are going to have to sell a lot of them to make any decent money. If you are going with Amazon products try and stick with products over $150, or at the very least $100. If you using Clickbank products then you can obviously go with products that are cheaper since the commission rate is often much higher.

Do you see what we are doing here? We are focusing right in on just one single solitary page. Those with multiple sites very rarely have the time to do this. They create a short page of content that is often copied or is poorly written and then move on to the next page. That first page never gets the attention it deserves and never will. It’s simply forgotten and lost in the multitude of pages that get added to their sites.

You need to be doing the above steps for each of your top 5 pages to find those that are worth working on. If only two of those pages are worth working on based on your analysis then add them to a separate list. Now go back to Google Analytics and find the next 5 pages and go through the same process again.

What you want to end up with is five pages that you can focus your attention on for the next three months. They are pages that have the potential to get enough traffic, have products worth promoting, have products where you will get a decent commission and so on.

So your next three months might include the following tasks:

1. Reworking each of the five pages until the reviews are around 1000 words and are helpful to the reader. Think about what you would like to see in a review if you were about to buy a particular product.

2. Backlinking, backlinking, backlinking – spend the next 3 months getting as many GOOD QUALITY backlinks to those five pages as you possibly can.

That’s all you need to do.