The Little Site That Roared

Or 'An Old Site Refuses to Die'

This is another of those posts that shows patience is a virtue. And not to expect immediate success. Making money takes time for most people.

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Sometimes you give up on a site and pretty much forget about it. Which is what happened to one I made just over 2 years ago. And around year ago, I gave up on as I didn't think it'd do anything.

So, no content has been added for well over a year. No backlinking was done.

The domain renewed automatically ( I remember cursing myself for not setting it to manual. ). But I updated Wordpress and plugins every 3-4 months but that was about the only time I even looked at the site.

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I had an affiliate program on it but had forgotten about it - as it hadn't really made any money.

So I only looked at the site a couple of days ago because I got an email from the affiliate program asking if I wanted paying or not.

Turns out I had $178.34 in commission due to me.

Which was a nice surprise. But not really enough to get me too excited and dreaming of a buying a new car or booking an exotic holiday.

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The thing that did get me excited was that 80% of the commissions came in the last 3 months.

( For the first 23+ months of the site's life - including the first 6 months when I added a total of about 50 posts, that works out at just over $1 / month in income. And there was a big fat Zero / Nil / $0 for the first year. )

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So I decided to look at the keyword tracker and see what the reason was for this . . .

93 Keywords in the Top 10. Which also surprised me.

These are all long tail ( low hanging fruit ) keywords. The type WA training tells you to target.

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The thing is, it can take some time for them to bear fruit.

And that's what happened in this case. Around 100 KWs have been bobbling around the bottom of Page 1 for the past couple of months. With a handful in the Top 3.

But it looks like that's their limit for now.

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Therefore, I need to give it a shove to get them up into the Top 3. So I'll try adding content and see if that does the trick.

Because now, instead of thinking what a waste of time and effort making the site was, I'm thinking about if the fact that if I can get $50-60 / month with just a few KWs in the Top 3. Then imagine what having another 50 or more up there could do for the earnings.

:-)

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If you're in a similar situation, you've made a site, written what you think is good, unique content and yet don't seem to be seeing any results. Give it time.

Stop working on it by all means. But don't kill the site.

Leaving it online costs virtually nothing & whilst not all sites will turn out to be profitable, yours might.

That's worth betting a $12 domain name renewal on.

( And if you are thinking of killing it, let me know. I might buy it off you. )