Depending on where you want to take your business, a multiple niche website can be an excellent platform with which to expand your business and cover a larger market. It could also be a good choice for you if your interests and expertise vary greatly. However, you also have a choice to just focus all your energies on building one site and staking your reputation on it. So will a multiple niche website be a good choice or will one big authority site increase your chances of success? Let's take a look at the benefits and limitations of each option:

Multiple Niche Websites:

A multiple niche website offers you an opportunity to reach several different segments of the market all at once, allowing you to cover as much ground as you can using just one or a few sites.

Advantages

A multiple niche website lets you communicate to multiple groups of potential customers and possibly close a business transaction from there. It also helps maximize your initial website building efforts, particularly because you only need to build each site around a single design concept.

Multiple niche websites can also showcase your flexibility and comprehensiveness of services that you offer. It's like having a multi-specialty site that attracts clients and customers from several different market segments and then doing business with them. Once your site has been around for sometime, it could easily pick up a minimum of 1,000 to 3,000 hits per day - even more when you've gained enough reputation and recognizability in the business.

Disadvantages

The disadvantage of a multiple niche website rests mainly on its design. Since you will be promoting different products and/or services from a single site, imagine how it would look like to a visitor. One site = hundreds of related links. And we're not just talking about internal links either.

A multiple niche website is essentially your store from which you'll be running your business. Once you're actively participating in the industry, it shouldn't be long until you find external links that you might want to refer to your visitors. Now imagine the chaos - dozens of links, banners, buttons, ads, graphics, pages upon pages, all coming from just one direction, each one crying out for attention.

If you can't manage it well, a multiple niche website can grow to be a multi-headed monster, each one heading for a different direction and demanding a different type of approach. In the end, there is a danger that you could be competing with no one else but yourself.

Build multiple niche websites if...

- You have the expertise and the experience in the specific niches you want to focus on.

- You have the skills, time or manpower to devote for the development of each niche.

- You have the resources to spend for the demands that a multiple niche site will require.

- You have established an organized and well-designed business processing system to handle transactions such as sales, discounting, customer service, subscription, etc.

- You have the patience of a saint and the eye for detail of an IRS auditor.

Single Authority Site

The single authority site is just that - one site offering excellent products or services pertaining to a single niche or industry.

Advantages

One big authority site is perfect for people who want to build their expertise in only one field or niche. If there's one thing you can do well and you want to make it your business, take this route. It's easy to set up, doesn't require a lot of resources and is relatively cheaper to run. You could also concentrate all your efforts here and become a respected guru in a specific field instead of being the internet marketer who juggles with multiple industries and never quite achieving expert status.

Disadvantages

If you made a mistake in your choice of niche, a single authority site can fizzle out like a short matchstick. When it goes, it goes and there's nowhere else you can turn to or fall back on, unlike a multiple niche website where there are other things going on for you.

You could also miss the opportunity of providing products and services for a wider market segment, thus limiting your income potential. If the niche you chose has a limited market, your site's traffic counter will reflect that in the number of hits it receives.

Build one big authority site if...

- Your expertise is limited to only one area and you are confident you can comfortably grow in it.

- You want to become a known authority in that niche.

- You have limited knowledge or training.

- You want to focus all your time, effort and money developing one big authority site versus a multiple niche website.

Every website has a reason for existing in the Internet. There's a purpose behind every one of them. Whether it's to sell something or to tell the world about something that person thinks is important enough to share, every website has a point to get across. When you think about the rise in the last decade of the internet as an ecommerce tool, it becomes clear that people doing business on the internet need a way to distinguish their goods or service. They need to make clear what it is they want the person clicking onto their site to do. They need what's referred to as a call to action.

Consider the statistic that states the average person only stays on one site for an average of nine seconds before they click away if they don't see something that interests them. That means all merchants who ply their wares in cyberspace need to be direct and tell the prospective client what they want them to do. Typically that means buy something.

The call to action comes in various forms but once you've seen a few of them they become easily recognizable. The most effective of these calls use short phrases that are not unlike the spoken word. Some examples include: 'Call Now', 'For A Short Time Only', 'Act Now - Offer Expires Soon'.

There's something that you'll need to remember about the content of these messages as well. Find a balance in the wording and try not to go too far one way or the other. A call to action that's too conservative will not be effective and you don't want to sound too cheesy either and turn the client off.

When to use these calls to action is another consideration to look into. Most of the experts feel they can be used effectively at two different points through a website. The first is at the end of every topic through the content. Here, it's also a good idea if you have an eye to keyword phrases that you know your desired contacts use frequently. So, if you sell marketing software, a good call to action at the bottom of the page might read: 'Why Not Contact Us For Our Free Trial of Marketing Software Today?'

There are other considerations where the experts think it's best to use the call to action. One of these is throughout the text in various locations as subtle prompts to get the visitor to convert to customer. There is also a caution against the kind of pop up advertising most of us have seen on the internet. Most of the professionals in the marketing field see them as a rude interruption in the flow for the reader and prospective customer.

The call to action is a necessary part of any web marketing campaign. It is a clear concise way of telling the visitor exactly what you want them to do and how you want them to make the transition from visitor to customer.

Web design for a competitive business isn't easy, especially when you add e-commerce (the buzzword for buying and selling online) to the mix. Thankfully, many service providers have basic web hosting templates available to their customers at little to no cost depending on your package. More complex templates can be quite expensive. Companies that provide hosting with templates make setting up and maintaining an e-commerce website possible for people without the expertise to do it themselves and without the money to hire a professional to design their site from the ground up.

When purchased separately from your web hosting package, a template can run anywhere from $20 for a basic, simple web template and well into the hundreds of dollars for a more complex, custom design. For the majority of small business owners, basic templates designed for businesses are usually a safe bet.

An e-commerce template may include basic pages, search and navigation tools such as a virtual shopping cart, but it will be up to you to find your own online payment processing - most often through a third party provider such as PayPal. A web search for "online payment processing" will provide you with several options.

As an alternative, you might want to consider a turnkey solution such as eBay Stores or Yahoo! The designs of sites like these make e-commerce solutions for small business accessible to everyone. Be sure to read the find print about transaction fees and other costs before you decide.

Questions to Ask about Functionality

1. Does the shopping cart accept debit cards and online checks?
2. Is there a limit to the number of products, services or categories you can set up?
3. Does the site offer automatic notification of orders and transactions?

Questions to Ask about Cost

1. What are the basic monthly fees?
2. Are fees charged on a per transaction basis?
3. Is there a setup fee? If so, what is it?
4. How are taxes handled?

Talk to other business owners about their choices and do your homework. The right solution is out there for you, you just have to be willing to do what it takes to find it!