Why not? I certainly do and I feel sure others have too.

As I understand it, multiple sites in niche ok, duplicate content not ok.
Some might ask why you need multiple sites for one niche?

Some might ask why you need multiple sites for one niche?

Regional/national/international/retail/trade/project demands.

They all require a different focal point of veiw for the purchaser/specifier/contractor.

Oh...and that's for my sites!

Good reply Huskypup

Why would you do that? I mean, I would concentrate my effort rather than spreading them into smaller sites that might even compete among each other.

Why would you do that?

Insofar as my businesses are concerned our primary production facilities are in Brazil, China, India, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Turkey plus we also purchase from about another 50 different countries.

We also export our raw widgets from the above countries to each other because the market demand in that country requires that product which is not available from anywhere else because these are not man-made products, they are natural products.

Consequently in each country we have our own office set-up that specialises in the products from that country and deals direct with the trade purchaser. These people are on the ground and know precisely what is happening, they are not a call centre that read off a pre-prepared Q&A sheet, they are very knowledgable trade products people with vast amounts of experience.

The trade purchaser can then be confident that they are dealing direct with people who know precisely what is happening and can build a good rapport with the management and production teams. This is extremely important when supplying large projects, the specifiers need to know and have dedicated, immediately contactable people.

Do they compete with each? In actual fact sometimes they do however that is very healthy for the business since it keeps everyone on their toes:-)

Obviously our sites are very trade focussed to the larger purchaser in container loads however we have many visitors from smaller retailers and the public and through the main sites we direct these buyers towards our country-specific sites, such as co.uk, .de etc, and onwards towards our stockists in those countries.

AdSense is actually a wonderful business model for us since it allows trade retailers to advertise on our sites giving a win-win situation.

This is the real hard-nosed end of actual production and not simply sourcing it from a manufacturers catalogue or shipping it from an anonymous warehouse. Thousands of people are involved in a very complex operation built up over many, many generations, my family's expertise in this can go back to the 1840s, we're not too sure where they were before then!

Hope that helps.