When is it time to move on and build a new site

[cctek]

I have a question for some experienced Internet Marketers out there. I have one site I have developed that is an affiliate site, using Mark Lings Affilorama style. It is an article site with about 30 articles geared at specific keywords and has product reviews. I have been getting sales not a lot but probably $200 – $300 a month for a few months now. I was really focusing on marketing the site with ezinearticles, squidoo, blogger, rss aggregators, pingoat, amautomation, etc. I have noticed my keywords climbing in google, yahoo and msn.

My goal is in the next couple years to be able to concentrate on just this to make a living. So I want to make money but I guess I realize it isn’t going to be fast and I want to build a business for the long haul!

What I am wondering is do you think it would be best to accept what the site is currently making and back off a little on time I spend marketing it? Just do a few articles a month and maybe some blogging and of course pinging new stuff and adding rss feeds for it, but moving on and concentrating on duplicating the process with a new niche site or should I be continuing to focus on the original site until I get it upto $300 - $500 a week before “moving on”?

I am not currently doing PPC, I want to let the sites age a while and I just don’t have the time to focus on that right now, I’d rather build a handful of good sites first.

I know it depends on the niche but generally speaking in semi-competitive niches how long does a website need to be up before it will consistently generate enough traffic to make $300-$500 a week in sales? Provided it was initially marketed pretty well and then still marketed to a little bit each month.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Thanks A lot!!

[LegitBlogger]

Originally Posted by cctek

I know it depends on the niche but generally speaking in semi-competitive niches how long does a website need to be up before it will consistently generate enough traffic to make $300-$500 a week in sales? Provided it was initially marketed pretty well and then still marketed to a little bit each month.

I agree that AGE plays a factor in helping to make
a site rank better, but NOT entirely. If you carry
out MASS-control type of article marketing,
video marketing, etc, the site can make much more
than that, regardless of the age.

Even if you are talking of traffic from search engines,
it's still possible to get a new site to start receiving
tons of search engine visits - it all depends MORE
on the keyword the site is targeting, whether it's
highly searched and how many competing sites there
are for it, how much backlinking effort you make,
with the keyword in the anchor texts, etc.

So - it all depends on these and more factors.
.

[ramone_johnny]

I could be way off with my advice here...but perhaps it might be enough to get you thinking....

Im in a similiar position to you, in that I am focusing my time and energies on ONE site. My reason for doing so, is that I need to get more of a "feel" for what I am doing, learning what works and what doesnt. Once I am confident that I am on the right path, and my sales show progress, I plan on duplicating this process across hundreds of sites.

In saying this however, I look at it this way.

If you were to open a book store and sell only ONE book, how many sales do you think you'd make? How much money do you think you'd make in a day, a week, a month, or a year?

Probably what youre making now, with many customers walking in, and out again.

What Im getting at is this - sell as many products as possible across various sites, thus increasing your earnings potential.

Just my 0.02c

Hope this helps.

[cctek]

Thank you LegitBlogger for your reply.

I have been doing article marketing and blogging, social bookmarking, rss submission, and using a service that puts my articles on subscribers blogs (these us spinning so they are all unique). I have not done any video marketing, just haven't researched this one yet.

I know it is a personal preference but I guess I am thinking I may be better off to build 5 - 10 sites, do a little marketing blast for 30 days on each and then move on to the next site. This will give the sites time to get recognized in the search engines.

Then once I have 5 - 10 sites then I would stop building sites for a while and focus on marketing them with articles and social media, etc.

Does this philosophy seem wrong? Think it would be best to build them and market them one at a time, until they are making several hundred dollars a week OR building a bunch, allowing some aging and then focusing efforts on marketing them.

[LegitBlogger]

Originally Posted by cctek

Thank you LegitBlogger for your reply.

I have been doing article marketing and blogging, social bookmarking, rss submission, and using a service that puts my articles on subscribers blogs (these us spinning so they are all unique). I have not done any video marketing, just haven't researched this one yet.

I know it is a personal preference but I guess I am thinking I may be better off to build 5 - 10 sites, do a little marketing blast for 30 days on each and then move on to the next site. This will give the sites time to get recognized in the search engines.

Then once I have 5 - 10 sites then I would stop building sites for a while and focus on marketing them with articles and social media, etc.

Does this philosophy seem wrong? Think it would be best to build them and market them one at a time, until they are making several hundred dollars a week OR building a bunch, allowing some aging and then focusing efforts on marketing them.

No, this philosophy is NOT wrong. In short, I use it
myself, only on a highly level because I have tons of
writers, editors, etc to help out.
.

[jayveen]

Thats a question I'm wondering about myself, but since I'm just learning I'm mostly focusing on _one_ review blog. Later, I'll think about what to do but one idea is to split the blog into several review blogs, one blog for each category. Right now I've got everything from biz ops to free gift cards to amazon electronics on one blog, and I'm experimenting with subdomains but I think later on it might be better to have one blog per niche.

I'm impressed that you are getting $300 a month though with no PPC. I too don't use PPC and I haven't made a single sale so far, but then I've only been live a few days. I take it you are getting traffic directly from your resource box in your articles, or are you getting it from your site's ranking in the search engines?

Good luck,

Jay

[cctek]

Originally Posted by ramone_johnny

I could be way off with my advice here...but perhaps it might be enough to get you thinking....

Im in a similiar position to you, in that I am focusing my time and energies on ONE site. My reason for doing so, is that I need to get more of a "feel" for what I am doing, learning what works and what doesnt. Once I am confident that I am on the right path, and my sales show progress, I plan on duplicating this process across hundreds of sites.

ramone_johnny,

Thanks for your feedback. I agree because I did duplicate some mistakes across sites. I outsourced a bunch of article rewrites and posted them on my sites. The issue is that the quality wasn't good enough to be on mysite. I guess if I would sacrifice quality I would be more apt to do that for ezine article than for ones posted on my site. So I do have some rework to do before i really start marketing my other site/s.

[quantikev]

Originally Posted by cctek

What I am wondering is do you think it would be best to accept what the site is currently making and back off a little on time I spend marketing it? Just do a few articles a month and maybe some blogging and of course pinging new stuff and adding rss feeds for it, but moving on and concentrating on duplicating the process with a new niche site or should I be continuing to focus on the original site until I get it upto $300 - $500 a week before “moving on”?

Hi cctek. Generally speaking, this is a matter of preference. Many full time IM'ers have multiple sites. However, an argument for focusing your time on a single site is that you will create a longer term resource. With more content, a larger fan base, and more value, the site will be more likely to produce income long into the future.

Many large success stories create a single site and focus their energies on this. If the topic is large enough to support it, this may be the way to go. Think StevePavlina.com or bobistheoilguy.com.

Originally Posted by cctek

I know it depends on the niche but generally speaking in semi-competitive niches how long does a website need to be up before it will consistently generate enough traffic to make $300-$500 a week in sales? Provided it was initially marketed pretty well and then still marketed to a little bit each month.

Time by itself probably isn't the most reliable factor in your website's income. Instead it depends upon the topic itself, how large you build the site, and how well your site converts visitors into buyers. Hence a large part of your strategy should include making relationships with your visitors. Do this by creating an email newsletter, comments, forums, and other community tools. Then you won't have to rely so much on search engines - which often take around 3 months to reflect major changes.

Hope that helps!
Kevin

[cctek]

Thanks jayveen for your reply

Originally Posted by jayveen

Thats a question I'm wondering about myself, but since I'm just learning I'm mostly focusing on _one_ review blog. Later, I'll think about what to do but one idea is to split the blog into several review blogs, one blog for each category. Right now I've got everything from biz ops to free gift cards to amazon electronics on one blog, and I'm experimenting with subdomains but I think later on it might be better to have one blog per niche.

I don't want to pretend to be an "expert" but I can tell you that everything I've learned would lead me to separate those into one blog per niche. Domains are cheap and you can get reseller hosting packages for $20 or less so you can host as many domains as you can fit.

Originally Posted by jayveen

I'm impressed that you are getting $300 a month though with no PPC. I too don't use PPC and I haven't made a single sale so far, but then I've only been live a few days. I take it you are getting traffic directly from your resource box in your articles, or are you getting it from your site's ranking in the search engines?

I have gotten a fair amount of traffic from resource boxes but most of it is now from search engines. I'm getting 60 - 100 visits a day, probably 50% of that would be visitors that found my site using key phrases I did not focus on. So they are not buying keywords. Now i am trying to think of ways to change my articles that traffic is directed to so that maybe I can convert some of them.