Last week and this week has been rough. My Windows PC got a major trojan/virus, which I haven’t had in years. It was stupidity induced trying to help out a family member, but that’s how it goes. I’ve been needing a format for years though and when antivirus and spyware tools couldn’t identify or clean the infection it was time to format. I also happen to have just bought a Macbook Pro, which I love. So it’s time to ask:

What do you use for web development on your Mac and/or PC?

On my PC, I use Photoshop, FileZilla and Putty. I usually use UltraEdit and Homesite, but the versions I had were from a previous job (I bought the pc when I left) so now I have to re-buy them myself. I’m 99% sure I’m going to buy UltraEdit for the search and replace alone. It’s fairly cheap and has a ton of great features. Homesite is a little pricey, but I haven’t found anything that feels as good. I’m toying with Alleycode, which is free. If I have to pay for it I’m going to buy Homesite. But if you guys have a great tool that’s free, I’d love to hear about it.

On my Mac I’m using Transmit, Coda, Terminal and Textmate. I’m not as proficient with the Mac a I am with the PC yet so I’m not sure I could just abandon the PC all together, but it’s very tempting at this point. The Macbook Pro is about as solid as you could hope for. You can pry it from my cold dead hands!

So, what are you using? I’d love to try out some new stuff. I have 30 day bets for Homesite and UltraEdit so I have some time before I have to buy. I’d rather spend money on advertising or PPC rather than buying more software.

As I go through my list of sites trying to rebuild my network from the ground up I keep asking myself: Should I build a lot of sites and try to make a little bit of money off each? Should I try to build a handful of sites and make a decent amount of each? Or should I put all my energy into one site and try to make as much as possible off that one site?

The answer will be different for everybody, especially depending on what you are trying to do. But if you are trying make money publishing web sites my advice would be to do as many sites as you can do well. That number will vary depending on your skills and resources but I think it’s a good idea to diversify your income. You can do that even if you own one site and I highly recommend it. Building one site and trying to take it to it’s full potential has a lot of appeal, but for me one of the problems is that even when I love something I lose interest if it’s all I do. So for me I have two reasons to build more than one site: Diversify my income and Multiple Topics of Interest.

Having one site has certain risks, especially if the site is new. What if your main source of income for the site went away? What if your competition draws away a large portion of your visitors? What if the search engines don’t love your site anymore? On the plus side though, having one site usually lets you stay on top of issues like this. By devoting all your energy to the one site you can have the best content, cultivate strong relationships with other sites and know when your market is shifting and take action accordingly.

My plan, however, is to do 5-10 medium - strong sites. Mainly to try a few new things and see what works and what doesn’t. As I see which sites rise to the top in terms of earnings I’ll focus more on those and either apply what I’ve learned from those sites to my others or if their just niches that don’t perform start culling the heard. My plan is to get to a handful of really strong properties over the next year and only adding new ones when the timing is right or a new niche just can’t be ignored any longer. Of course I’ll probably create 25-50 sites over the next year to try and see what works before I narrow it down to the strongest, but that’s part of the fun.

The hardest part for me is deciding which site to do next. To help I looked at my ideas for new sites and my existing sites. I may end up Refreshing my old sites before I launch new ones. One in particular gets pretty good traffic and just needs some TLC: We Heart Pets. It’s always been well liked and linked to and needs to be updated to my new theme style and fresh content and have a look at how I want to monetize it. I’m still pouring over my notes and I’ll have a plan in place by this weekend so I can get crackin.

The hardest part of diving back into my own projects is where to start and where to go next. With only so many hours in the date how do I decide what I should be working on. I want to do things that’ll bring me closer to my goals but also be a lot of fun. I don’t want to create a ton of sites that never get updated. I want to work on a small group of projects and make them great.

I do want to try my hand at some affiliate sites. While any site can sell a product, I’m talking about building a site around a product. I know people out there doing it but most people don’t post examples. If you’ve every done any amount of research into affiliate marketing you’ll no doubt end up at Clickbank. I know a lot of people swear by it but if I see one more “make money at insert keyword here” ebook I may be sick. The worst part about affiliate marketing is all the people trying to fleece new people by selling affiliate marketing itself! If you can sell them, more power to you. I’ll tell you what you need to know about affiliate marking right now. Find a great product that people want and sell it. It’s not magical, it’s not mystical and it’s not hard. The hard part is the same thing that’s hard about any site - getting visitors to it and getting them to take the desired action. I’m not sure I’ve found the right product to start my first real affiliate site, but I accidentally sold a big screen TV through amazon for a $49 commission and so LCD/HDTV’s are sounding pretty good! I know it’s way to late to think about affiliate marketing for this holiday season, but I’m already thinking about next year.

Aside from affiliate marketing, I’ve got ideas for sites like TV Forums and a re-launch of Readers Unbound. Both would be forum/community driven sites and RU would eventually have some cool features like your own book collections, reviews, etc. When deciding what to do I have to ask myself: “Is what I’m doing adding moving me towards my goal?” The answer is often no. I love doing cool little projects, helping just about anyone who asks and doing any number of things that don’t really move me towards my goal. While some of these ideas could help in some ways (link strategy, raising my visibility, etc.) the bottom line is building traffic and monetizing that traffic. So, with that in mind it’s time to decide what project is next up on my list. I’m leaning towards two product/deal type sites. One for gadgets, tech etc. and the other for women which my wife Aeryn would be writing. There is a ton of potential even if these markets are competitive. I just want to see if they work at all and learn from them and apply the concept to tighter, less saturated niches.

Within the next week or two I should be ready to launch one or both of these and I’ll make sure to point them out. During the downtime today I need to go through Azoogle and check out some of their offers. I’ve been seeing really good stuff from them.