Made some money, but now what?

[Spuzzum]

Hi everyone,

Like a lot of you, I'm relativity new to the world of Internet marketing. About 5 months ago I decided to dip my toe into the world of Niche websites and adsense. I've got a full time job, a wife and a 15 month old child, so my time is limited, but I wanted to give it a shot and see what happens. Also, I've taken this as an opertunity to learn about SEO, something that will help me in my day job.

As a rookie, I didn't spend a lot of time researching my keyword, but I was able to find an exact match domain in a topic that I has at least some experience in.

I decided to outsource the content writing to a very nice lady in Kenya through oDesk. 25 articles for $25. So all in, I've spend about $30 for this site (articles + Domain name, which was a .info, btw...)

To give you a little bit of of an idea of what my niche looks like, here are some basic stats:

Exact Monthly Searches: 600
CPC: Approx $1

The site doesn't see massive traffic, but here is what I've seen the past couple months:

May
Visits: 78
Pageviews: 137
Bounce Rate: 66.67%
Average Time On Site: 0:42
Adsense Earnings: $1.54

June
Visits: 108
Pageviews: 190
Bounce Rate: 79.63%
Average Time On Site: 1:28
Adsense Earnings: $0.97

July
Visits: 96
Pageviews: 165
Bounce Rate: 64.58%
Average Time On Site: 1:29
Adsense Earnings: $4.45

August
Visits: 191
Pageviews: 338
Bounce Rate: 68.59%
Average Time On Site: 1:26
Adsense Earnings: $12.51

Sept (so far..)
Visits: 248
Pageviews: 523
Bounce Rate: 66.94%
Average Time On Site: 1:36
Adsense Earnings: $10.44

Now, as you can see, the traffic and earnings have gone up a bit since August, which makes sense, because that's when I made it to spot #7 on the first page of Google for my keyword. It's nothing earth shattering, but it's at this point at least broke even. I haven't really done any backlinking as of yet (it currently has 25 back links, most are likely nofollow as I was playing around with Yahoo answers a while back)

The question I have is, what's next? Should I sit on it as it is and let it slowly bring in some money while I work on my next project? Should I reinvest the revenue I have made and have even more articles added to the site? Should I sell the site on Flippa?

What would you do?

[helfgott]

Obviously not, you should keep adding content or improving the site, remember that content is the King and you have advantage if there isn't another site as yours.

Think if it gets rentable, some other guy will copy the idea, make content and SEO and your site will appear in 2nd, 3rd, 4th place...

Try to keep it up to date and learn SEO to maintain or gain a better position in PR.

[sonic74]

I think you're doing well so far, since it's your first niche site !

If you'll build more backlinks you can even reach high rankings and get more visitors and income.

Keep this site as a guide and build more sites in the future !

[J smith]

What to do depends on your goals.
You could build backlinks, get it ranked higher (assuming your traffic comes from search engines and mostly from 1 keyword) to get it to it's "full potential" and then either keep it as passive income or sell it and invest into something else.

Or you could sell it now, and invest the money into something else (although if people sell it for 10-20x monthly earning you are looking at $300 max)
Or you could keep it as is and just go do something else.

The question isn't really what you can do, or even should do, but rather what will doing something enable you to do. If you don't need $100-300 in order to start working on a dif project, than there is no point in selling it. If you feel you can improve rankings and make more money with this site easier/faster than getting results with a new project, than it makes sense to focus on doing this first before you move on.

[james1986]

yes it is great you earning well even bounce rate is not so high as well. so you are getting targeted traffic for your site.

[36burrows]

This is a great start, but you'll want to expand your adsense empire onto new sites which are getting more searches/month.

600 Exact searches is nothing

[JMartin]

Since you're #7, I'd focus on doing some linking to get it up to at least #4 (#1-#3 is preferable). What you want to get a gauge of is your average earnings cap for the KWP. So even a day or two in the upper-part of the page can give you an idea.

More content on the site isn't recommend at this point (IMHO), because that's not going to solve your issue of being #7 for a lower searched KWP with probably low competition. You need links.

For all you know, this site is going to hit a cap of $20 - $30 per month in Adsense, so it's not going to be worth sinking much more into it. You'd just let it run or sell it. And if you do decide to sell it, you want another few spots in the rank as that could bump your earnings up a little more, which would yield a higher selling price of course.

[TEC]

I would keep it. Keep doing what you are doing. If you want to keep moving up the list in Google, your going to have to create more backlinks to your site.

Congrats though, I know it's great when you first make a profit online