One common question, especially among those new to creating websites, is how many websites should a person have? Well you have to look at many factors. If you have a huge advertising budget and are creating a online commercial store, then probably one or 2 should be fine. If you’re creating content driven sites such as blogs, directories, forums, then you probably want to create quite a few. The more websites you create the more income in the long run you can make. The most a reasonable person could handle is probably around 5 to 15, depending on how many hours you want to work and how frequently you want to update the content.

The internet is getting more saturated and you have to remember that a lot of webmasters, who started back in the 90’s, have now finished those sites and are working on new ones. So here you are in 2008 thinking 5 websites is a lot, whereas some already have 5 under their belt by the year 2000. So the only way to keep up with those people and get a equal piece of the traffic, is to work two or three times as hard to make up for your late start.

Another reason why it’s a good idea to create a bunch of websites is stability. If your depending on 2 or 3 content driven websites, a search engine algorithm change could shift your ranking and cause a huge dent in your salary. That is why I don’t suggest anyone quit their day job, until they have a really nice stable income, preferably across multiple websites. I think it should be more than three, across at least 2 very different topics.

If your just starting off as a webmaster, you shouldn’t worry about creating a bunch of websites, until you at least learned the ropes for a few months. There is a lot of things you learn about web design, search engine optimization, affiliate earnings, and other important and complicated things that take time to analyze and figure out on your own. If you make a bunch of websites, you will never really see it in depth, as if you had just concentrated all your energy on one website. Once you get the first site going and learn a lot, then you want to branch out. As you branch out and create new websites, you can replicate some of the things you found successful and avoid the things you didn’t. The first 6 months to one year should probably be your learning state and then after that you can go full steam ahead and create a website network.