Reaching more Web visitors using multiple sites
It is often impossible to make a website appealing to everyone with an interest in a particular topic. Each potential visitor to your website will have varying degrees of existing knowledge, requires different information and has different needs and expectations from your site.
For example, a law-related website would have different content depending on whether it is intended to provide advice to the general public as opposed to containing case and legislation information for lawyers.
Trying to make your site suitable for everyone is often not possible. Website authors therefore usually choose to target their site to a specific audience. However, this restricts the amount of visitors the site receives. Another approach sometimes used is to separate the website into different areas, but this has the potential to cause navigational and useability issues, particularly as the website grows.
An alternate and often very successful approach is to run two completely independent websites. Each site is targeted at a specific audience. Running two sites separately has several benefits:
- Increased visitors and profits: Over time, multiple websites usually result in greater visitor numbers and in turn more profits than a single website.
- Targeted branding and promotion: Each target audience will be receptive to different brand images and promotion. Having two sites means that you can target each audience specifically.
- Risk reduction: Web servers have potential for failure or down-time. Even if a server is offline for only a few hours, it can result in significant losses for a website owner. By hosting multiple sites on different servers, even if one website goes offline temporarily, the other website will continue to be generating revenue for you.
- Greater intellectual property assets: Successful websites and domain names are valuable. If you decide to sell your website in the future, you might receive a greater return if you sell two websites rather than just one. Alternatively, you can also decide to keep one site while selling the other.
If you have registered several domain names, but are not yet using all of them to host a site, some Web hosting providers will let you add them to your existing website.
For example, if you host your website with Multimedia Australia, you can add an unlimited number of additional domain names. You can even redirect them to another site on the Internet.
To add or redirect additional domain names on a Multimedia Australia Web hosting plan, log into your website's control panel and click the 'Addon Domains' link.
Related articles
- Advantages of adding multiple domain names to your website
- Learning about the interests of your website's visitors
- Geographically differentiating your website from others
