Diversification of website revenue versus specialization

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I’m starting to become a believer in specialization over diversification. This is after believing the opposite way for quite some time. It’s hard to argue with the idea of “putting your eggs in one basket”. On the other hand, if you have too many baskets, they can be tough to handle any way.

Why do most people in society choose specialization?

Most people end up specializing in a career because the learning curve is so steep. With webmastering, there’s no general barriers to entry the way there is in other industries, so people tend to enter into any number of competitive fields. Often they’ll do this with no competitive advantage. What does WikiPedia have to say about Specialization?

Specialization is an important way to generate propositional knowledge, by applying general knowledge, such as the theory of gravity, to specific instances, such as “when I release this apple, it will fall to the floor”. Specialization is the opposite of generalization.

The more specialized information you have in a field, the more likely it is to be productive, even on a commercial basis.

The biggest reason specialization can help a website owner is because it usually also indicates a great degree of focus on a subject. As your focus increases, so does your ability to be a craftsman at your job. If you spend every waking minute of every day devoted to one thing, you generally end up with a great degree of knowledge, that will make you an expert in your field. People seek out the experts naturally, and your job of “self-promotion” gets that much easier.

The downside to specialization is the obvious one: your eggs are definitely all in one basket. But should your basket fall, your expertise should be enough to prevent you entire web business from failing.

Do you specialize, or diversify?

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