What To Do With An Old (Dead) Site?

by Vogin

Posted: 14 years ago 10 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

Hi Warriors,
here's the thing. We started our first site more than a year ago and to follow the usual newbie's mistake, it was from the IM niche. We struggled with traffic, knew nothing about SEO and all that stuff.

Well, we're a lot smarter now, but the fact remains we are simply unable to drive traffic to this one and it's just sitting there with 10 visits per day.

However, there are a lot of assets:

average AdSense earnings are between 1 - 1.50 EUR per click (albeit there are like 2 per month due to extremely low traffic)
Domain Age 1 year, PR 3
a LOT of content, including several large articles (1200+ words)

When we decided to drop it, I put up a sign inviting guest bloggers and the truth is 3-4 came by over the few months, but still, the current status is utterly disappointing.

So, I was thinking about:

flipping the site (but I'm wondering whether the assets above would outweigh no traffic to speak of...?)
resuming the whole work again, spit out more posts and try to rank within an extremely competitive niche (I don't see why should I do it since it failed the first time)
---out of ideas---

The site is here.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

#dead #flipping #site

zoqy71

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Vogin

average AdSense earnings are between 1 - 1.50 EUR per click (albeit there are like 2 per month due to extremely low traffic)
Domain Age 1 year, PR 3
a LOT of content, including several large articles (1200+ words)

flipping the site (but I'm wondering whether the assets above would outweigh no traffic to speak of...?)
resuming the whole work again, spit out more posts and try to rank within an extremely competitive niche (I don't see why should I do it since it failed the first time)
---out of ideas---

The site is here.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I would say, if you are covering hostng costs, just leave it and recycle the content to a better SOE'd new sit, but do spread the link around now and then. A URL is an assert, so if no losing money, keep it.

Thanks
1 reply

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spirtx

14 years ago

Originally Posted by zoqy71

Exactly, and I think over the time the traffic will increase.BTW did you try with article marketing?Might worth trying

Thanks
1 reply

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highrank 14 years ago

With it's current statistics you might get $100 for the PR rank alone.

I'd suggest selling links (in the form of monthly subscriptions). people are always lookign for high PR links from niche websites and IM is pretty popular :p

Once you have a couple of monthly subscriptions you can flip the website for at least 5x more as it will have revenue.

You could autoblog it, or work on some articles if you want to try and squeeze some more traffic into the website.

try and get it to rank on Google page one for at least one keyword (even longtail).

Heck, if you do all that, I'll buy it lol
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- fluffythewondercat 14 years ago
  
  Why did you pick darthopia.com?
  
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  Vogin 14 years ago
  
  1. Our hosting is $5 per month for all sites we have, so I'd say it's pretty covered.
  
  2. Yes, Article Marketing came to mind, but I was too busy spamming social media in those days. I'm albeit reluctant since I've never really "marketed it", I just use submissions for one of my niche sites. But I guess I'll allocate one hour per day and give it a shot. But as I said, I'm reluctant to invest a huge amount of time into something that hasn't yielded any solid results during the long period of time we've worked on it...
  
  3. Those links are an excellent idea, thank you very much. Are there any special places I should look for customers or is it enough to Google around? Same question goes for pricing...
  
  Regarding the long tail keywords - that was exactly my thinking 14 days ago, the problem is I spent a lot of time in front of Market Samurai and couldn't really find anything which wouldn't be total crap / had strong competition. On the other hand, I might try to outsource the keyword research when I failed, hmmm...
  
  4. Oh, my colleague goes by nickname Darthdeus, so it's really a testament to his massive ego. Back then, we had no idea about something called "keyword optimized domain" and by the time we knew, it was way too late to change the name due to age/backlinks/whatever.
  
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luckyshah290 14 years ago

thats a average site... Flipping it would be a better option and sell it for some quick cash.
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RevSEO 14 years ago

A PR3 is a good start, especially when you already have preexisting content to work with and indexed pages (202 in Google).

I'd recommend expanding the website out, spend some time creating something that looks like it has value to the readers. Modify the theme and design a tad, work on making it a website that people want to regularly visit again. Identify your top pages that are already ranking well and bringing in traffic and perform some SEO on them and update them. That should increase those rankings and thus bring more traffic and users from the search engines.

Get an optin list going, no reason not to throw something on there right now and wait it out and begin getting your list going.
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- ColinChia 14 years ago
  
  AGREED!
  
  Either sell your links or flip the site...
  
  Could definitely get you some quick cash!
  
  Now, I was faced with a similar situation recently and ended up flipping a majority of them on Flippa, eBay and DNForum. Not bad for an afternoons work in November 2010 - just think of it as an investment and you're just cashing in on the one's that don't bring you in much income.
  
  As they say "one mans trash, is another mans treasure".
  
  Sell up and move on, there is plenty more money to be made online than sitting on a site you created over a year ago.
  
  Hope this helps, if you ever need any help in flipping your site then let me know
  
  Cheers,
  
  Colin
  
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tekman 14 years ago

I'm in a similar situation, but my 2 blogs are from 2006. I bought 8 domains recently and will be adding more. I'm about to buy thebestspinner, AMR and a subscription to a blog network. I plan to use these old blogs to shoot some links to my new sites. Does this sound like a good plan? I read a plan on here and basically will do what LMC has done.
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mijagi 14 years ago

Sell it, give it another go, or use it for backlinking to your new IM related websites.
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