April is A Reorganization Month for Me!
Many of you have noticed that I have been slowly turning off features on this site… From the top 100 bans blogs, to many of the services and templates, I have steadily been planning to kill off several things that have been hurting my own progress over the past 3 months, so I can focus on what works more!
This is not my first personal inventory and reorganization… but it will be the biggest! If I had to summarize my choice to downsize in one sentence… it would be:
“I am tired of ONLY being Good at alot of things, and Prefer to be the BEST at only a Few! ”
Why Am I Reorganizing?
The choice to reboot my entire business is purely due to what I see myself doing, or should I say… NOT doing! The MOST profitable sites I manage are the ones that I update regularly and when I say regularly, I mean several times a week!
So… I am going to eliminate ALL but a small handful of projects, so I can focus more of my attention to those sites! How many do I plan on eliminating? ALL but about 6-10 sites, including this one!
Some of you will recall that several weeks ago I mentioned a cool little plugin for Firefox called Morning Coffee, and how it was AWESOME for helping me stay focused every day! That still holds true for the most part, but I’ve found that I added so much crap to my every day schedule, it is becoming useless! I MUST trim off some of the fat from daily schedule…
From April 1st forward, I will limit myself to only 3 sites per day to work on! This will provide me enough time for my distractions, and assure me that I will update all my important sites on a regular basis! Yes, I am going to micro-manage my own days! :-)
Choosing the Sites to Keep
The domains or sites I choose to keep are going to be based on very few things…
- The amount of time I feel the site requires to maintain a professional image! (Some sites, like link & article directories, only take 1 hour / week to do everything)
- The historical or potential earnings.
- My own interest in the niche or website.
Sites I will DEFINITELY Keep
I DO have a small list of sites I will absolutely keep… and figure out how to make the REST of them fit into the new schedule!
- This Site – The Niche Store Builder
- My JV Site with Rochelle and Jeff, Script Critics
- My own Website Design Business site
- Only 2-3 of my ePN sites!
- A small subset of passive income sites that continue to earn monthly revenue, with little to no updates.
EVERY OTHER SITE is on the table to be closed, sold, or cut off by the end of the month!
What Will I Do with the Rest of The Sites?
Kim and I have slowly pared our inventory down to 309 domains! Of those, I would estimate that 35-40 of them are domains for either personal use, our Kids, other family members, or website accounts we manage for others. That means we have more than 250 very hard choices to make in the next 30 days and we are sure to have some winners and losers… Not ALL of them have websites on them, but many do!
Tell me… if you had to eliminate several sites from your portfolio, many of which are earning small amounts of steady income, how would you do it?
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- PageRank Update In Progress – April 2010 – Happy Easter!
- I Almost Quit You Last Month!
- 4 Things You Should Do on The First Day of the Month
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
If I had to eliminate money making sites… I would GIVE at least 5 or 10 of them to the TOP commentator on my blog for 3/31/09 hahaha
It’ll be interesting to see how you handle the BANS sites, if any are involved! If you will strip them and sell the domains or sell the store’s “as is”.
Mark-
Wow. Quitting smoking, exercising, and making a significant change in your business. You are definitely on the move now!
A couple of things about getting rid or your sites, and believe me I’m a novice…are the sites that you want to get rid of or discontinue making more money than they cost you in registration and hosting fees? If so, just leave them alone and let them continue to make a small revenue stream until it is near time for domain renewal. At that time, sell them in logical groups or one by one. If some of these sites are BANS sites you might see if you could sell some to existing BANS users.
Great Post Mark!
I have a VASTLY lower number of projects than you do.
But even I find it hard to take my small number of sites and disconnect myself from the ones that do not produce.
I need to teach myself this way of thinking as well.
Congrats in dedicating yourself to success!
Mark,
I too have found even with a pared down group of sites that I’m still not finishing my tasks each day.
As you and I have discussed, all of 2009 is going to be my reorganization. I’m keeping 2 of my passion sites, up to 3 who’ve made money and ALL OF THE REST will be gone. I’ve already completely closed a site this month that I have no idea why I started. I’m telling you, each one of those you set free puts a little more spring in your step.
I will continually be monitoring my work vs income stats and make adjustments as I go.
At the end of 2009, I will be where I want to be.
PERIOD.
Jeff
How very timely! I just DID get rid of more than half my sites just last week.
What I did was logged into my GoDaddy account and deleted the domains from my account (even if they were not nearing their renewal dates), then I deleted the domains from my hosting account by deleting them, as well as making sure all files and folders were also deleted and no longer taking up valuable resources.
It was like ripping a band-aid off a wound. It was quick, slightly painful at the time (because of the time and money I had invested in them), but feels great now! I can’t tell you how much better I feel now that I have rid myself of those sites.
Most likely, I will prune a bit further in the upcoming weeks. I currently have a site coming up for renewal that makes me about $40-$60/month in AdSense revenues. I have not yet decided if this small amount is worth the effort, which really isn’t that much, but still is some effort.
Rochelle
@ Jake –
LOL – I like the way you think!
In all likelihood though, you may be VERY close to one of the things I am considering! :-)
A nice little commenting contest may just be in order!
I cannot give away the content on the sites though, unless the person who wins has licenses for the software on the backend. A simple site like diyreviews.net, has 6 commercial applications, plugins, etc running… so the licensing is tricky.
@ Kelly –
Busy month for sure, with all going on!! LOL
I actually HAVE considered leaving many of them as-is and just taking the small revenue as a bonus, and may do that on some of the spammy domain names.
On domains that are sell worthy though, I don’t want to take the risk of a deindex or penalty in search, as it may hurt the resale value of the domain itself.
@ Tyler –
By the end of the month… I plan on having just 2-3 sites I update every day… and less than 10-15 in TOTAL!
M
Mark: Do you recommend having “Adsense only” type sites of any kind?
Just getting some original SEO oriented content on a very narrow niche and trying to get some organic searches and monetize with Adsense?
Or is that by and large a dying trend?
I have heard of some people operating on the “5 dollar formula”. Trying to build X number of sites that earn (on avg.) $5 per day in Adsense… If you do enough of them it starts getting lucrative.
I have always wondered how viable this model is?
I have been planning to re-organize my network but have put it off for months, probably as long as a year by now.. It’s so hard for me to just let go, even when I know it needs to be done.
Maybe it comes from my childhood where I had nothing and any thing I did get I kept just so I could say I had something. In the case of my network I have about a dozen sites that just aren’t making the cut at this time, but I just keep saying I am going to update them with more and better content. There is only one of me and I run out of time all the time.
I am currently at 37 bogs and want to do more which means something really must go.
My wife still has a couple of years before she retires. It would be so nice if she had an interest in blogging. :)
If I was you, I would “sub let” them to someone else.
Take a cut of the profits, allow them to manage the sites with a view to buying them in a years time or something like that.
It gets round the licencing issue (initially) and still allows you to keep the domains and sites active, whilst someone else builds them up for you.
If that person then quits after a year or so, you still have the site to fall back on.
After all – what is the cost of a domain renewal now…?
Keep em’ rolling…
If they are making more the the hosting costs i would keep them until they don’t or sell them off for a healthy profit.
I’d probably throw all of those still-performing sites on Sitepoint auctions. People seem to buy anything on there :)
Thanks for the suggestions everyone!
I took the day off and ran to Kims sisters house for the day… and we think we have a pretty good idea of which sites to liquidate!
In total, we really only have about 35-40 that are developed and worth selling or using for prizes in contests (hint) … the remainder are domains that we have picked up for future projects that never got taken care of!
The plan… is going to involve slimming down to a manageable number of sites in 3-4 days of the week, use the 4th day for brainstorming on existing sites, or promoting the large pool we want to dump off… and the 5th day… will be the day we plan the next week!
M
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