How long before you scrap a niche site?

You should ask How can I let my site grow up faster.

Marcus

How much time are you willing to spend on a strategy that simply isn't working?

I had 12 niche sites and 8 were running great until EMD hit them. I just scrapped 8 and only 4 are running fine now. Started an authority site last week with a totally different approach and so far it is ranking fast. Not EMD and content are not less than 1000 words with loads of photos and videos....

Those sites I scrapped were more than a year old and some are 2 years.

6-8 months.

This is not easy to answer because it really depends on two things:

1. How much market research you put into it before you launched your niche websites.

2. How much time and money you're willing to invest to find a winning marketing funnel to make it profitable.

For example, one of the my first websites was in the dating niche. I sent PPC traffic to an opt-in form which I changed about 50 times because I wanted to maximize my conversions. So during my first month I lost $800 buckaroos.

My sales page sucked my left eyebrow, so I kepted testing out different titles and must have changed the first 3 paragraphs about a dozen times. My second month I lost over a grand. It was painful. But each time I made a sale I was using a tracking program back then that allowed me to see which keyword was making me the most money.

I started out with a couple thousand keywords and after all this testing I found out that it was a handful of keywords that were making me money. So I got rid of all the keywords that were NOT converting and boom, I started making money to the tune a few hundred dollars a month.

If I had given up during the 2nd month I would have never made it to that 3rd month of profitabillity. And this is one of the main reasons why people fail. They don't invest enough time to educate themselves so they know how to test their campaigns and then they're not willing to put in enough time and money to test them out.

So how much time before you scrape your site? That's really up to you.

RoD

I get bored with projects if I'm not seeing any results within 6 months, so I tend to drop them. At least by the time the domain renewal comes around ... it's toast if a site isn't doing anything.

My primary model is review sites. Once I have 50 product reviews published, I judge the traffic and conversions. If the site is productive and worth the effort, I'll continue building it out. Otherwise, I save the content and let it drop.

I would never scrap it just forget about and hopefully it builds up a bit of page rank and possible sell some guest posts and let others pay you to do the site for you.

I had dozens of niche adsense sites from 2006-07 onwards. I kept renewing those sites every year without any results. Finally it took many years for me to realize that these sites are taking away my precious time and taking me nowhere. This year I intentionally left many domains to expire and am now entirely focused on my one blog which I always wanted to focus on. I am getting more results than I used to get since 2006.

Lesson, keep your eyes fixed on one thing and you'll get faster and better results...

Dr.Spencer Jones

It really depends on how competitive your niche is. Let's suppose you're working on an ultra competitive keyword for about 8 months, and it's slowly moving up page two. Once the sites get to page 1, then to spot 3, then 2, then 1, your income doubles and triples. So if you're in a competitive niche, and you have a solid strategy, then it's definitely worth the time and investment.

Sell them and make some money. They can bring in a pretty penny. Also, they have use as content sites for link building, but people will need a high PR to pay you. People also want a track record so do use GA to track your traffic and sales, as this will increase your final selling price.

I tend to set a 6-8 month time limit for initial profit. If nothing substantial is happening, I put the site(s) up for sale, unless I have other uses for the domain. For existing sites that lose their standing, I don't have a hard and fast rule. Sometimes, I let them hang on for a year. In other cases, I feel I have "milked the cow" and should let them die when the domain comes up for renewal.

Increasingly, I am getting rid of EMDs in favor of domains that are more suitable for authority sites.

If I'm driving traffic with PPC, forum marketing, blog commenting etc, then I'll give it a few months.

If I'm relying on SEO traffic, then I won't want to wait much more than six months to see results (either good opt-in figures or cold hard cash in my bank account)

I've been giving them 1 year. If they pay for their domain, or almost do, then I will keep them.

For a niche site you should be getting it to rank fairly quickly (assuming you're targeting niches with low-med competition).

Once I have a niche site ranking, if it doesn't cover its own costs (hosting, content, links), then I scrap it and move on.

You've got to know when to cut your losses.

'Till you know when enough is enough'