Google Volatility - The Reason To Have Multiple Websites

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People use the phrase “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” quite a bit, especially when it relates to owning a website. And the advice cannot be ignored. If you put all your eggs in one basket, and you drop that basket, well, your eggs are pretty much ruined. So the keys is to spread a few eggs into other baskets for the moment when your original basket is not yielding up to par. When Google gets extremely volatile, they break enough eggs to make many omelets.

When your eggs break, you hurt

No matter how long you’ve been dealing with Google, it still sucks to see any of your websites “drop” in the rankings. With Google the fall from glory is painful, and obvious. Since Google referrals count for as much as 90% of the new traffic to any website, you can believe that it’s always a shock to watch your entire revenue stream evaporate. If you’re lucky, or if you’ve planned for just such an inevitability, then the pain can be reduced substantially.

Don’t stay scrambled for long

Today I noticed 2 of my websites have been “hit” by something. Luckily for me this is the first type of occurrence in many months, and the two sites that were affected are relatively minor. It still sucks, though, because they are sites I work on every day, and I still love seeing traffic to any of my projects. Being set back to ground zero is bound to make you wonder. But I’m almost completely sure that there is no logical reason for the fall, so in the end, I just can’t spend any time worrying about it.

This is the exact reason I have 35+ websites. It makes managing them harder, but in the end, I probably couldn’t sleep at night with only a few websites that made the bulk of my money. I have to have diversification because I pay my bills with my website revenue and just can’t run the risk of losing huge amounts of revenue. So even when a small shuffle happens that kills two websites, I’m relatively isolated from the event.

How many eggs do you have in one basket? What do you do to diversify your online efforts?

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