There comes a time when every webmaster has to think about expanding their reach. When I first started out I ran a few videogame related websites. Down the road as I became involved with other things I ended up having opportunities to expand to other markets. There are some webmasters who prefer to focus in one one niche and just build build build. I’ve had some experience doing this back when I had just one site, but, as my interest grew I found it very hard to keep the one site focused while also trying to branch out. Eventually the site was becoming cluttered due to unrelated sections that I added. The only reason I did this was because I wanted to save some time by not having to set up a new site. I quickly found out that I had lost my niche traffic and had replaced it with untargetted traffic.

My advice to anyone considering expanding into new areas of interest is to carefully plan your “new construction”. First of all, if you can, it’s really smart to expand into markets that are related or similar to what you already have going. Why is this? Well, think about it. If you have a videogame website, for example, expanding into a movie review site would be a positive step because chances are that most of your videogame site visitors will also be interested in movies. You can use your videogame site as a launch pad to help get your new movies site off the ground. What if you go from videogames to a home and garden site? Sure there is a market for home and garden sites, BUT, you’ll have to start from scratch. Chances are MOST of the people on your videogame site are not going to care about home and garden things. Launching a home and garden site after your movie review site picks up could be a much better alternative. Everybody likes movies. You’ll be targeting your home and garden site to a much better audience that way.

Just think about the order you launch your sites. Another thing to be careful is competing with yourself. This actually happened to me. I started a new website once and used one of my other websites as a launching pad. Everybody liked the new site a lot better and ironically that site is thriving to this day while the other site in question is struggling. I lost my own members to my other site. You might consider that a win win situation, but, in reality it’s only a single win. I now have to go back and rebuild the interest for my other site. It’s not as bad as losing all my traffic for BOTH sites, but, even so it’s annoying.

Just be careful when expanding your network. Keep your site topics similar but not too close, and make sure your launch plan includes more than just targeting to your current users on other sites. The best way to grow your network is to bring in new users who are unfamiliar with your other sites. That way you will still be able to cross promote, but you won’t be stretching your member-base too thin.