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.