The thing about this business of ours (internet marketing and making money online) is that building our own websites is like having children. Our websites and blogs are like children in that every website we build deserves to have a top ranking in Google (In our own eyes at least…) even though it may be ugly as hell and only has five pages of mediocre content… Regardless of how flawed or unappealing it may be, the site still has the potential to be the next Facebook in our eyes and that’s when internet marketing can get pretty challenging…
Personally I’ve been dumping a lot of websites lately. Call it the economy, call it the Pareto principle in effect… you can pretty much call it whatever you want but here’s something I’ve noticed in say the last six months of my making money online adventures.
It’s getting harder and harder to rank websites. The Google algorithm in particular seems to be looking at a lot more then links these days. Obviously there’s over 200 factors the Google algo takes into consideration but what I’m saying is some of these other things have risen in the amount of weight the Google algo gives to them. Basically what I’m saying is it’s taking a lot more links to rank well these days. And when you take that into consideration, you have to figure that it’s costing you a lot more in time to develop websites that make money.
Back in the day I used to develop domains in batches of 10 and hope that 2 or 3 of them would pan out and make some money. I rarely did much of any keyword or competitive research as the plan was always to develop 10 sites and then see which ones would rank easily with some automated links. I would then continue to focus on those but I don’t believe that’s a very feasible plan anymore.
The shotgun approach is definitely a lot harder today then it was a couple of years back so now I think it’s a much better idea to do a ton of research before you go into a niche.
Something else I’ve noticed lately is myself going back to websites and adding content to them and improving their design whenever possible. All this to keep these websites in the good graces of Google. Not only do your websites have to look the part these days but we also have to worry about “over-optimizing” our websites for fear of getting them sandboxed.
So when I look at this information I figure the right approach is to focus on fewer websites and to focus on quality. And that’s another big reason I’m getting rid of a lot of websites that no longer interest me or I have no interest in developing. Personally I’m just at a point where I no longer care to develop websites that I have no interest in… I’ve determined that to stay motivated it’s best to work on websites that you actually have an interest in.
This business (the business of making money online) is an ever-evolving business particularly if you focus on search engine traffic. The search engines are constantly evolving to control spam and we have to continue to evolve with them. There was a time when you could develop a ton of sites and focus on making a few bucks per site but I think those days aren’t necessarily over but they’re definitely going by the way of the dinosaur for peeps that don’t have programming skills.
And that’s why you have to know when to fold ‘em.
Not every website you develop is going to make money particularly if you develop a lot of domains. Those are just the facts. You can either continue to swim up stream or you can swim with the current.
