How Are My Sites Doing? What Should I Focus On?
I've come to a point again where I feel like I need to reassess things and think about the best way forward. I'm just thinking aloud here, so don't worry if you don't have any clear answers.
I've been at WA since January 2015, and I'm still earning nowhere near enough money. I have other part-time work, so I'm not destitute. I definitely need to bump up my earnings in the next year or two, though.
So I thought it would be good to take a look at my websites and how they are doing.
My Websites
Earn Money with Marcus
- Created: January 2015
- Posts: 275
- Monthly Visitors: 2,941 (average of past 12 months)
- Monthly Earnings: $184 (Just WA, not including small amount from ClickBank)
- Type of Site: full niche site full of product reviews, tips, advice, etc.
Synths and Software
- Created: December 2015
- Posts: 96
- Monthly visitors: 2,174
- Monthly Earnings: $18 (based on past 4 months)
- Type of Site: full niche site
Best Buy Tablets Under 100
- Created: June 2016
- Posts: 24
- Monthly Visitors: 38
- Monthly Earnings: $13
- Type of Site: mini niche site
Top Laptops Under 900
- Created: June 2016
- Posts: 13
- Monthly Visitors: 0
- Monthly Earnings: $0
- Type of Site: mini niche site
Plus I have a personal website for my creative stuff, and two additional mini websites I set up when following the Cash in with Bing guide. I've not included these 3 websites here because they are irrelevant.
More About My Websites
What have I done with them? What do they mean to me? Are they worth pursuing?
Top Laptops Under 900
I never put as much time into this mini niche site as I did with the tablets one. This is because I came to the end of my case study video series and concluded it was not worth pursuing.
Best Buy Tablets Under 100
I enjoyed working on this when doing my mini niche site case study series. It still earns money for me each month even though I haven't done anything to it for several months.
I've sometimes wondered whether I could revisit the mini niche site idea and set up a whole bunch of these to collectively earn some good money. But looking at the numbers convinces me that would be a bad idea.
Think about it. $13 per month. Even with 10 of these that would still only be $130. With 20 it would only be $260, and then I would be near my limit on the number of websites I can have at WA. Pursuing the mini niche approach would be a bad business decision.
Synths and Software
I was originally very excited about this website when I first set it up in December 2015, but over time I lost interest in it.
Why?
Partly because it just didn't earn me any money, partly because I got tired of writing reviews for expensive music products I would probably never buy or even get to play with, and partly because I just ran out of things to say. I occasionally like dabbling with music creation, but I don't really have enough to say on the topic, and so I just got bored eventually.
I did start to make some more sales once I transformed the appearance of it to look more like my tablet mini niche site, but only $18 per month for over 2,000 visitors and 96 post. This website was a shocking waste of time and energy.
Earn Money with Marcus
This is my main website and the one I have put the most time and energy into. Out of the websites I currently have, it's the one I am most interested in continuing with, . But there is definitely room for improvement.
Roughly speaking, my approach to this website has gone through the following changes:
- 2015: I wrote reviews of various well-known "make money online" products. I called most of them scams because I had a more simplified view of things back then. I said WA was the #1.
- 2016: I abandoned the site for a while so I could focus on Synths and Software. When I returned to the site later in the year, I went full steam ahead with writing product reviews. I churned out review after review of anything that was being released. I called most of them scams and recommended WA as the #1 alternative. Gradually my views started to change, though, and I started taking a more balanced approach in my reviews.
- 2017: I restructured key parts of my website, as I explained in Please Give Me a Round of Applause. My approach has dramatically changed. I edited my WA review to make it totally honest, and I'm now only interested in writing reviews about products I've actually bought; but I refuse to buy expensive upsells, so my reviews are based on the main products which I feel should stand up on their own.
So, What's My Plan Now?
I'm not quite sure, which is why I am writing this.
Clearly, Earn Money with Marcus is my most successful website, and the one I am most interested in continuing with. I am genuinely interested in trying out various money making products and then reporting my findings. But I don't have much money to spare to buy them, so I have to be very choosy about which ones I buy to review.
Things I am NOT interested in doing:
- Creating mini niche sites.
- Putting more work into my Synths and Software site.
- Wasting time with things that don't have much money-making potential.
What I AM interested in doing:
- Carefully picking out some MMO products that I like the look of, writing honest reviews of them, and writing related posts.
- Possibly starting another website or two in another niche. I would need to research it thoroughly first, though, so as to minimise the risk of wasting my time again.
What I NEED to improve on:
- Social media: I need to get to grips with this and find a way of effectively using it to push my business forwards.
- Videos: I need to do more of these. One for each main post.
- Email Marketing: I need to keep an eye on my new campaign and look for ways to improve it.
What does all this mean?
Now that my focus has changed, this potentially makes things very interesting. Now that I'm no longer saying WA is definitely the #1 without question, and now that I am buying products and reviewing them honestly, this possibly opens up a new doorway.
Why?
Because it means I am now open to other possibilities. It means I could potentially go in any direction, although I do need to be careful not to try to go in ALL directions.
But it means that I may one day leave WA, or at least that my focus my be less here than it is right now. Now that I am open to reviewing other MMO opportunites honestly, this leaves me open to the possibility that I might actually find an alternative path.
Please don't misunderstand me. I still think WA great. It's just that the path I am now taking with my website is that of a 100% honest investigator of MMO opportunities. It just means I now have my eyes wide open.
That means that as Kyle and Carson come out with these awesome updates to WA, I can post about those on my website with genuine enthusiasm. But it also means that if I come across another MMO product that I genuinely think is good, I am going to say so.
Thank you for reading, if you got this far, which of course you did, otherwise how would you be reading this sentence? Unless you skipped down to find out what the ending was, in which case I recommend you go back an read the bits in between.
Let's end with a random photo of a giraffe, followed by a video of David Hasselhoff dancing with some cheerleaders.
David Hasselhoff Revenges The Cheerleaders (With Special Appearance By David Hasselhoff!)
Sorry about the random bullet points below. I can't get rid of them. I don't know why. this post editor has gone a bit weird.
Recent Comments
39
My advice would be to stick to one thing. Stick to one site. That is what I have learned. My main money making site has been active for 3 years, it has 397 posts, 37 pages, and 1409 comments. I make over $2000 a month (just to give you some numbers). There are times I am bored, times I want to do something else, but I tell myself to just stick it out. It takes a ton of work and time to build an authority site.
I also have a mini niche site that I am trying out, but I am using paid content. When I first started with affiliate marketing, I had a handful of sites, and they stretched me too thin and never made more than a few dollars. I found if I was consistent with one site, I would see the most results.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for sharing your insights! Just curious how long it took you to get to the $2000 a month mark? Also, how many hours a week do you spend on the site (writing, promoting, learning, etc.)?
it took me 3 years to get there. I spend about 20 - 30 hours a week on it. I also have a partner, so that helps.
Thanks for the info. I spend about 20-25 hrs a week (it's just me) on my site which is now 2 years old. I would love to get to even the $1000 a month mark.
I'm going to keep working at it till I get there. I know if I doubled the time I spent on my site my income would increase faster but that's not something I can commit to right now.
Great post Marcus... Have you tried contacting product owners for a free or discounted review copy of their offers? This would allow you to expand your product reviews while limiting your costs for purchasing said products. Your balanced and honest approach to doing reviews and growing traffic should make this a viable option for continued growth for makingmoneywithmarcus.com
Keep grinding brother, I think you're about to take it to the next level. Much success to you.
Yes, I have tried contacting product owners for review copies, but the vast majority of them say no unless you are already an established affiliate with a track record of making sales. They don't want people to write honest reviews, they only want people to say it's great.
Hi Marcus,
Another interesting post and also a very honest post. I am starting out right about where you are at now. I have been doing alot of research on this topic. I know that Kyle says not to worry too much about getting it right or perfect in the beginning of setting up your website, you can always add or change things at a later date. I have been doing research and learning so much of what to do and what not to do , that I now feel that I have a better knowledge base to start with. I think that what you are doing right now is a step you need to take as only you know what has been working for you and what hasn't. You will get there as shall I. I was just indexed by Google the orher day, which I am happy about. Keep up the good work and thanks for sharing your journey......Donna
Well, I was going to reply that I think it's worth spending time really analysing a niche to make sure it's going to work. The problem is, that's what I did with my Synths and Software site and it still failed.
It's possible that the way I did it was the problem, though.
Marion, oh Marion. Marion, oh Marion, oh oh.
(A song I wrote just for you. It doesn't have many lyrics.)
:-)
:-)
:-)
:-)
Marion Black
She's got the knack
Of helping folks
And having jokes
'Bout anything
That makes us sing
'Bout this and that
And everything
You took the words right out of my mouth. I feel exactly like you do at this point. I started WA in March 2015. But I only have one website. I started another one but never got past the "start here" post. I don't think it would ever make much money unless I had 100,000+ monthly views.
I work on my site about 20-25 hours a week and it brings in about the same as your site (between $150-$200, could have been hire if Amazon didn't change the commission structure). Although it made close to $1000 in November and December 2016. Then plummeted in January 2017 and hasn't gone up much since.
I feel like my site has the potential to become an authority site. I am getting about 8800 sessions a month (10,000 page views) but clearly it needs to be more than that to bring in more sales.
I have been focusing a lot on social media over the last few months, particularly Pinterest. I keep reading about brand new websites (less than 6 months old) getting 50,000 monthly views as a result of focusing on Pinterest.
I would like to start another site as well and have some ideas but I feel that if I want my current site to become a real "authority" I can't devote less time to it.
I also don't want to spend more hours "working" as the reason I am doing this is so I can be around for my family/kids. And so far we can afford me not bringing in any money. But that may change at any time.
Sorry for hijacking your thoughts and not really providing you with any kind of answer. But the timing of your post couldn't have been any better!
Hopefully we will both figure things out. I think you are headed in the right direction by being open minded and being honest with your readers!
If you are looking for some MMO products to try I have a few I have read about that I would love your opinion on!
I find this very interesting, Taja especially how we all can be leveraging Pinterest. Some people have old me this would be a great social media tool,if we can only figure it out.
No problem, Tanja. It's interesting to read your thoughts.
I think if you have stuck at that one website for this long, and it is bringing in some money, it would be worth sticking at it and seeing how you can improve it. Now would be the time to look into what you can do improve things.
I suppose it's really all about traffic and then what you do with that traffic. This is why I think I need to get to grips with social media. If I can manage to significantly increase my website traffic through social media, that could be a big step up. Then it's a case of refining and improving the traffic flow once they arrive on my site, e.g. signups to my email list and all that kind of thing.
If you have some MMO products you think I would be interested to take a look at, send them my way.
The more I am reading about Pinterest the more obvious it is becoming that it's so much more than a social media network. Since drastically changing their algorithm a few years ago it has become a visual search engine.
And there are quite a few articles with good stats showing that it is also the platform most people turn to when they are looking to buy something!
I have tweaked so many of my top posts hoping it would lead to more sales but so far that doesn't seem to be the case.
I have spent hours revising a large portion of my images to make them more social media friendly.
If I had closer to 100,000 views/visitors a month I am confident I would be bringing in $1000+ a month. Right now I would be very happy with that.
One thing I haven't done that I feel might help is guest posting and networking with some authorities in my niche. I have read that this is another way some of the big guys out there made it big!
DomW from WA is one person who says this is a very important piece to focus on.
I think it might be worth your time to learn more about Pinterest, but it is time consuming. Some of the most viral pins are in the MMO niche. But like building a website you're not very likely to end up with viral pins and thousands of followers in your first few months.
And there are so many different opinions on how to use pinterest properly. Kind of like SEO.
That's really interesting about Pinterest. I had also heard that people are more into buying things when they are on Pinterest. I can't understand why that is, but if it's true then it's worth looking into.
Dom seems to know what he's talking about.
But it sounds like you have done a lot of great things already. I took a look at your website and it looks great. It sounds like if you can get those extra visitors it could really make all the difference.
It makes sense to put the most attention to the site that brings in the best money. It seems like your WA promo site can move forward promoting other products too. MKearns posted this link today which you might want to look at:
https://www.dailyblogtips.com/the-20-most-profitable-niches-online/
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"if you got this far, which of course you did, otherwise how would you be reading this sentence?" Lolzzzz.
On a serious note, I liked your post which gave us insights. You've really put in the time & efforts in all of your sites. And the way you analyzed all these with a well-structured approach gave me an idea on how should I deal when deciding on my sites.
BTW, liked your "will give ONLY Honest reviews". :) Good luck
Thanks.