The Reality of Managing Multiple Websites
A company starts out with one website. Sounds simple enough, right? Well to get that one website up that company had to create basic content, make sure that content was on the site in the correct place and make sure that the user experience was perfected before it could be launched. Ok, so not as simple as it first sounded but not terribly complicated either, right? Before the company could launch or market their site they had to make sure there was enough content on the site and enough in reserve so they could put up additional pieces of information and make sure their clients/customers would find the site valuable. The website had to be one of their most valuable assets.
Seems like a lot of pressure and a lot of work, but is still semi-manageable with a good team behind it. Well now comes the tough part: creating more content, SEO, promotion, building and tracking your traffic, and constantly monitoring your website. There can be no lag time between comments left by your clients/customers and your response, no delay in adding new and engaging content, and no delay in marketing new products, updating product specs or launching new services on the site. If any of these happened the value of the site diminishes.
So let’s say you have 100 affiliate websites, or more, careful management is a must in order to have success with each one. When we say management what exactly do we mean? Well if you are a webmaster you have some idea. Here are some of the simple ones:
- Keeping Your Content Current
The time it takes to get into each site and create a link to the new article on the main website, takes 5 minutes. Multiplying that 5 minutes times 100 microsites results in 500 minutes - the equivalent of over 8 hours - a full day's work. Let's be serious, if it takes that much effort, updates won't happen very often.
- Maintaining Accuracy
Each time an update is done, each microsite must be edited - or touched. This increases the chance inaccurate information - a typo for example - will be added eventually. Consider how many times repetitive action leads to mistakes. One clipboard cut and paste with an error - pasted dozens of times - means a lot of time spent on cleaning it up.
- Website Statistics
You have to constantly monitor your webpage statistics and make strategic changes depending on what you see. If the number of visitors decreases one month then you have to do something about it. What happened and how can you fix it? You have to make sure to remember to check bandwidth and space usage for every domain/website account. Checking subdomains and other stats might also be a good idea
- Login Details Maintenance
The more sites you have the more passwords and usernames that you will need to know, unless you use the same username and password for each one and you are asking for trouble. Making sure you keep track of the log in details helps when you want to access those websites via FTP.
- Back it Up
You must back up your website data. If you have an automatic backup in place that is great but to make sure and keep track of 100s of sites with or without auto backup can be a challenge. How will you know if one of your multiple sites is down unless you are checking each and every one every day.
- Email Management
You might be able to get by remembering login details but email addresses and mail is another story. They are constantly changing and if you fall behind it will be hard to catch up. I know that my email box isn’t very clean and that is one personal email. What if you don’t notice an email from a customer or client? If they don’t hear back they don’t come back. Sure you can forward all of your email but then your one box is overflowing.
Those 6 are just the tip of iceberg. Now imagine a new product is being launched by your company and you have to make sure the marketing pieces are on every site in the network and are exactly the same. That means manually going to all 100 sites to make sure the content appears correctly. Double checking that the location is correct, there are no typos, the correct images are being displayed, the links work, etc. You have to add the content to each site manually and this could easily take 1 hour or more on each site. So imagine having to do that 100 times every time you want to change even a word. Doesn’t seem very efficient does it?
So how can you effectively manage and market multiple sites without pulling your hair out while you miss your kid’s piano recital? ClickWrite
ClickWrite can help you do all of those things we discussed above plus more. It is a platform that can help you manage multiple sites more effectively and efficiently with less stress. ClickWrite makes managing multiple sites a simple process, allowing you to update content on one site and have that content syndicated to all of the other sites in the network. No more going from site to site fixing the exact same content. One update, multiple sites, one system: ClickWrite. It already sounds easier.
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