When To Abandon A Niche Site

I had a fascinating chat with a fellow Australian marketer last Friday afternoon.

His name’s Robert, and he’s one of the minds behind the yearly 30 Day Challenge that we hear as being associated to Ed Dale.

We had a great chat about SEO, site structures, affiliate marketing and more.

I thought I’d share with you just one of the little snippets that were mentioned because it contains a great lesson…

As I mentioned in my last niche research post, it’s generally the nature of our beast that some sites you create are winners while many are losers.

One of the keys to success then is being able to quickly abort the losers and identify the winners.

While I’ve never been one for stringent rules, and generally just used my own judgment to decide when it was time to move on with a site, Robert reminded me of the proper way to go about this.

Put simply, he goes about things like this:

1. He picks some longtail keywords in a certain niche, that gets extremely low competition, but decent search volume.

2. He sets up his site, optimizes for those keywords, and tries to get quick rankings for the very long tail term.

3. He doesn’t do anything else, doesn’t start building links or submitting articles, just waits while the little bit of SE traffic trickles in.

4. He waits until the main money page of his site has had 200 visits. If it’s had at least 1 sale in 200 visits, he decides the site is worth pursuing. If not, he either a) tries another affiliate program or b) slaps up some Adsense and moves on to another site.

If it does convert at over half a percent, he knows its a site that will be able to make some money. After that, he starts building links to obtain long term rankings, expands to other key phrases in his niche, and so on.

Here’s what’s great about this strategy:

First, he doesn’t put any more effort into any site than he needs to. He waits to see if the site will be profitable BEFORE committing to any long term effort on it.

Next, he knows that when he DOES commit effort, it will pay off – because he knows prior to doing so that the affiliate program converts for that keyword and it can only make more money with more traffic.

Finally, his decision about what to do with a site is based solely on information, not emotion. It’s like trading stocks, and knowing when to buy or sell – it doesn’t matter that you’ve spent months developing a site (that’s BEFORE reading this post) and you feel emotional attachment to it… if the information is showing that it’s not going to convert and make you money, abandon that thing – “churn and burn baby!”  (it’s been a while since I heard those words in a positive light!)

I know that this post both arouses as well as answers many questions, but hey, we’ve got time!