Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, Vol. 7, No. 11, April 2004

Years ago, I started with one all-purpose website. FrugalFun.com had info about having fun cheaply, but also about marketing copywriting, books on marketing, and a bunch of other stuff. It became unwieldy, and I split off the marketing content onto FrugalMarketing.com.

This was a smart move, and I now have quite a number of sites.

The most important reasons to have more than one website:
1) Better search engine optimization because pages have specific focus
2) Better search engine positioning because your sites will link to each other, and search engines look at inbound links (discarding "mirror" sites with identical content)
3) Better reader/visitor understanding of the purpose of each site

4) Easy differentiation when you have more than one product specialty

The most important reasons to have just one with multiple domains:

1) Laziness

2) No clear differentiation

I do both. I have four principal sites operating:
http://www.frugalmarketing.com - books and other resources for marketers and entrepreneurs (the closest thing to a publisher site that I have)
http://www.principledprofits.com - set up specifically to promote one book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First
http://www.frugalfun.com - my original site that used to contain all the diversified info, before I split off the biz stuff to frugalmarketing several years ago
http://www.accuratewriting.com - a low-use site in case people are looking for my business name (Accurate Writing & More)

Then I also have shelhorowitz.com, which is merely a paragraph about each of the other sites - and principledprofit.com, which redirects to principledprofits and has no content on its on. That's because I accidentally registered the plural form, so I went and grabbed the singular as well. And because it's a sitesell site, it was easier to develop the site with the s at the end, and redirect the singular. Otherwise, I'd have had to start over with a lot of unnecessary explaining.

The first extra domain I bought was frugalfund.com, because I did a lot of radio and was aware of a few people who mis-heard the frugalfun domain as frugalfund. But when I looked at the traffic stats, I saw that was a minuscule number of people, and let it expire when I couldn't sell it. I own/have owned a number of other domains that I never developed, some of which had to do with titles I thought I'd be using for Principled Profit and later discarded. Two I picked up just two months ago in the hopes of selling an info product related to a conference I attended (but with which I've run into some permissions obstacles). I am thinking now about what else I could put there--I bought two precisely so I could cross-link them.

Domains are really cheap--starting around $8 a year from Godaddy.com and some of the other registrars.

Thank you reading this back issue of Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tips, published every month since May, 1997; please click here to view the complete archives, grouped by subject. Shel is an internationally known copywriter and marketing consultant, author of Grassroots Marketing Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and several other books, and creator of the Frugal Marketing web site. Please click here to contact Shel.