Many Internet Marketing beginners have no idea about how to create a website that is going to bring them profit. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, from picking the wrong keywords (or not picking them at all), to lack of understanding of how a website should be promoted.

For the sake of this conversation, let’s all agree that a small niche website is a website that has up to 20-25 pages, and a large website is a website that has more than 20-25 pages. Although, to be perfectly honest, a website falls in the category of a small niche website if it targets a small niche (obviously), even if it has 100 pages. This is what defines it the most and puts it in the aforementioned category.

Anyway, which one of these 2 types of websites should you create? Many connoisseurs will tell you to go for small niche websites. My personal opinion is: go for both! They both have their advantages and disadvantages, and hey… if you are going to build an online empire, you need to diversify everything starting with the types of websites you own and ending with the income streams.

Advantages of small niche websites

1. They are easier to build
Everything from keyword research, to content creation and site development can be done faster. I personally have 2 customized Wordpress themes and 2 customized static html themes that I use on my niche websites. I like to diversify this aspect also, because in the case of a niche website, making it html will not give you so many headaches. Although Google loves the WordPress platform, I don’t like to produce everything in exactly the same way.

2. You need fewer links in order to rank
Since link building is the single most important factor in any website’s development, this is the aspect you should focus on the most once you are done with content creation. Supposing that you chose a proper subject for your niche website, which basically means that you chose a subject that you can actually take to top 5 of Google, link building will take far less time than in the case of an authority website. Also, on a niche website you can generally get away with more crappy links (links from social bookmarking sites, article directories, link directories). I follow one simple rule: the easier the niche is to dominate, the more crappy links you can get away with (OK, now don’t overdo it). On a niche website, I would generally do 4 or 5 article submission runs, some blog commenting, and social bookmarking on the major bookmarking sites. Of course, if you manage to get some related links, it gets even better. Although, generally, getting authority links for a small niche website is very difficult.

3. If something happens to one of the sites, you have many more lying around
I can’t stress this enough, diversification is the key. I know it sounds like a cliché, but this is very true: do not put your eggs in one basket. If something happens to one of your niche sites and it stops receiving Google traffic, it’s not a tragedy.

Advantages of big authority sites

1. They develop massive authority in time
Owning a few powerful authority sites can be an incredible asset. These must be the mammoths of your online business, the sites which make most of your money. Do not make the mistake of developing crappy content for these ones (although I don’t really advocate crappy content, you can generally get away with it far easier in the case of niche websites). Build them as an authority in the field and provide excellent information because good content is what will make these authority websites develop a natural link profile. They will receive citations naturally, and this is what Google loves the most.

2.  You will be able to get much better links
Don’t get me wrong, you still need to work on getting links to these websites, and a lot more than on a niche website. However, authority sites have an incredible advantage. You can much easier get authority links from related websites pointing to them. This in turn build the authority we talked about earlier.

3. You will be able to rank for a wide array of terms
If you work enough to establish good link authority, you will rank naturally for many phrases that would be suitable for a niche website for example, simply by creating a good enough content structure inside your website. You see, the high authority homepage will pass authority to all its subpages and so on, making it easy for you to rank simply by means of internal linking. This is actually the beauty of a big authority website: its ranking power will far exceed the ranking power of a network of sites which, put together, have the same link equity as a single big authority site. In other words, if you passed the same link equity to 10 small niche websites rather than to one big authority site, they would never yield as much traffic as the big authority site.