When starting your career as a serious webmaster one question that comes to mind is: Should I just create one website and focus all my energy into it for the next few months or should I create a bunch of websites?

I think the best thing to do in the very beginning, is create one website and just focus on it exclusively for the first few months. Creating multiple websites in the first few months will get you distracted. You can learn so much about traffic building, design, and promotion, when you just focus on building up one site in the beginning.

During this time, I would recommend you buy some other domains for any possible other website projects you want to do in the future. I would recommend you get them hosted and put on a doorway page with a couple backlinks to get them, so they get indexed into Google. You want to get any future sites in Google index as fast as possible, even if you don’t plan on using them right away. Letting them mature in the index, will allow them to get out of the “sandbox” quicker.

In the meantime, you should focus on one website and learn all the ropes of design, programming, networking, SEO, etc for the first few months. During this time you should be testing ways to maximize your revenue with affiliate programs and advertising neworks. You should also write down your traffic patterns and study how they compare from month to month. It’s best to learn it well in the beginning, so you won’t have to worry about it later. Concentrating on one website will also give you time to study and learn SEO optimization,CSS, HTML and PHP during this time.

Once you learn the ropes after a few months, you can then start building multiple websites using the same principles you used on the first site. Dollars Blog was my very first real website. Once I learned many of the ropes on Dollars Blog, then I started to use the same exact techniques on other sites. While months later, I still was learning a lot of new things on Dollars Blog while creating the new websites, I really needed those initial few months to build a basic understanding of how things work.

When you finally decide to move to paid web hosting, I highly recommend Hostgator . I host all 13 of my active domains at Hostgator on one single account. The great thing about Hostgator, is you can host unlimited active and parked domains under one account for a small monthly fee. What this means is that as you expand your website network to more domains, you won’t have to pay more money everytime you create a new site. I also like the fact they have Fantastico (most hosts don’t), which makes installing and upgrading multiple websites software at once more convenient.