Stuart McHenry - My Internet World

People are always asking *how many websites are too many?* The answer to the question is a it depends. I often feel many webmasters bite off more than they can chew. You can see evidence of this everyday on the forums… people selling off sites and/or trying to rank for the top keywords on a limited budget. Again… here are the reasons people are not successful with their online adventures:

1) lack of money to market their site(s)

4) lack of man power - creating a successful site *often* takes resources from several people (designers, programmers, etc.)

So… back to the question… how many websites is too many??? Well… for most people 2-3 successful sites are hard to archive…. provided you can get over # 2, # 3, & # 4 you are still faced with the money issue. This is listed as number one for a reason…. people often don’t really have a good idea what the cost involved will be.

Most recently I spoke with someone about a mortgage website and what it would cost to get it to rank for some geo-targeted keywords. Now if done right… the cost just for links (market value) could easily be $10K++ for the first year… sound expensive? Maybe not when you are selling $500K mortgages BUT… point being most people/companies don’t set aside enough budget to set themselves up for success.

So for *most* people 2-3 successful sites are a reality. (unless your a blackhat)

California Snow… yeah it happened and not just in the mountains… here in SoCal.

Well… I got woken up today by my daughter screaming “Dad… it’s snowing… it’s snowing!” The news said that the snow level would drop but you really never know. So as you can see we got a little bit of snow… even enough for it to stick a bit.

Backyard Completed

A little over a month ago I posted some pictures of our new house and now I want to add the backyard and custom cabinets. The backyard is good size for a California new home and is actually one of the reason why we liked the place so much. Most new homes in SoCal have small yards nowadays… this is due to the fact that land got so expensive over the past 5 years.

Anyway… here are some before and after PICs of the backyard and the custom cabinets we had installed.

Backyard Before: here, and here

Backyard During: here and here

Backyard After: here, here, here, here, here and my daughter’s teather ball. (removable)

Cabinet Before: here (no cabinet)

Cabinet After: here

*I forgot to take a PIC of the upstairs cabinet… so I will add it later.

Well 2007 is off to a good start for my company Site Sift Media, Inc. but I wanted to take a little time to reflect on 2006. One of our goals this last year was to diversify our income and I would have to say we did a great job in doing so.

Here is how 2006 broke down for us:

Sales/Services - 47%
Contextual Advertising - 10%
Affiliate Income - 43%

In 2005 the numbers were like this:

Sales/Services - 92%
Contextual Advertising - 8%
Affiliate Income - 0%

I’m very pleased in the direction we have grown and 2007 is off to a great start already. One of our main goals for 2007 is to increase brand awareness for our three main sites.