What to do with old abandoned sites? Sell them? Let them expire? Hoard?

milktea

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What do you do with all your failed sites, ones that you got bored with, junk you collected over the years?

I have a bunch of domains/sites that I haven't looked at in 1-2 years, at least. I can't bring myself to just let them disappear into the void, but I don't think they are worth anything, either. Some have DA/PA 20's or 30's but little/no traffic, and zero dollars. I also have a couple sites that make from like 1-20 dollars a month. Basically, junk.

Are these even useful as PBNs? They are all over the place topic-wise. Wish I could trade them for similar junk that is at least topically relevant to some of my current interests.

I already let a couple worthless domains expire, and now some squatter is sitting on one of them for a thousand or two, which I'm positive no one is dumb enough to pay.

Do you guys just sit on your old sites, paying 10-20 a year for renewal forever? Or is this the start of the shittiest PBN in the world?
 
Thats a great question and a conundrum that I have as well.

I have quite a few websites that I started working on and for one reason or another I moved on to something else and they have been sitting there for years, a couple of them 5 years.

Now I just focus on the money makers.

It's a tough decision to make as I know the sites are nicely branded and have great potential but there is still only 24 hours in the day and I cant multi task like an Octopus

I guess I'll keep paying the domain and hosting on them until further notice :cool:

I'm sure there are plenty of others on BS that are in the same position.
 
This is the sunk cost fallacy.

The solution is to delete them all. You see what you are doing is hoarding. Hoarding opportunity in the fantasy that one day you might work on them. You won’t. If they were worth a damn you would have already developed them.

What you are doing is the equivalent of putting money in a junk car. Sounds not like much but 10-20 domains + hosting is easy $100 to $2k in waste a year. The thing is though you KNOW that eventually you’ll just get rid of the junk car anyways.

By deleting them you clear your mind of the past and let go of the mental baggage. You tried something and failed. Learn your lesson and move on.

By going back to even waste time looking at what a domain squatter is doing with “your domain” means you are holding to some hope. Hope of what? If you tried harder you would have won at that domain or within that niche? But you didn’t - cause you didn’t believe in it.

You have to fully let go, so delete the domains and hosting. Put that money into a project you are focused on.

I remember about 4 years ago I had about 400 domains all over the place. I just started deleting them in chunks as they came up for renewal and am now down to 12 domains. There is no way I was going to work on 400 projects, nor did I care enough to sell the domains.

What about the money over the years spent in renewal fees and hosting? This is called the “sunk cost fallacy.”

The sunk-cost fallacy describes our tendency to throw good money after bad. Just because you've already spent money on something doesn't mean you should continue spending money on it. Sometimes the opposite is true. Psychologically, the more you spend on something, the less you're willing to let it go.​

You see how Domain Registrars stay in business?

“Maybe next year.”

Realistically if the project was a good idea you would have hustled hard and worked nights and weekends to get it off the ground. But by keeping it around you are keeping around mental clutter.

Here is the reality- if you delete them, it is permanent and final. You close multiple doors, which means you are mentally clear and ready for a focused challenge when it does come.

This is part of the “Burn your Boat” philosophy. When you land on a shore with your army you burn your boats. There is no turning back. Either conquer the land or die.

“if we are going home, we are going home in their ships.” - Cortez

All those domains and hosted websites are failed boats you are keeping around. Burn them all. It will hurt at first but once done your mind will be free and clear for the next journey.

Even the projects making you $10-20 a month. You can make that finding change on the ground in a month, they aren’t worth a damn. Delete it all! Then you can move on to a singular focus.

”Focus on the few not the many.” - Dan Peña​
 
Sell them on Flippa for $200 - $1,500 each. I say that range because I recently sold an old affiliate site with $0 earnings for $200 and one with $25/mo earnings for $1,500.
 
If you feel like you absolutely must get something out of them, you have some options:

1) sell them to someone that sells the cruddiest PBN links out there.
2) sell them to someone that wants to put in the effort with a headstart
3) spam the hell out of them and hope to get something from it
4) go back and optimize the posts for keywords you might actually rank for

The problem is, if you didn't do solid keyword research and on-page from the get-go, it's going to cost a lot of time or a lot of money to re-do all of that. And your mind is probably already soured on them.

I've let 50 complete sites all expire and die in the span of a year for this same reason. I built up a ton of decent micro-niche sites when I was still early in this career and when it came time to actually ranking, I realized there was no time to build that many links. So I turned to spam which derailed me for years. I did make some money out of them for a window of time but they all ended up penalized anyways.

Better to shortcut all of that nonsense and let the sites either die or put them in the hands of someone else that can make use of them as linking assets or something.
 
Put Adsense on them, deeplink to your own site, let it sit.
 
You can also try to lower the hosting cost by turning wordpress into a static site. (make a backup of the database and save it in case you need to go back to wordpress)
 
Would quickly rate each domain on a scale of 1-5 on the following dimensions:
  • How easy it is to make a profit in the website's niche
  • Likelihood of you actually working on them in the next 1-3 years
If you aren't even interested in thinking about those two, would just get rid of em all. clearly not worth your time
 
Personally I hoard. But I have hundreds of domains and many aren't producing. For me one sale a year covers the costs to carry the others.
 
Oh I know that feeling all too well. You're not alone. A few years back I had close to 100 sites gathering dust. Well more like eating money while I slept. They were the left overs from the time when PBNs were the hottest thing on the market.

I hoarded them for 2 years. You know the saying that you shouldn't own anything that eats while you sleep? Here's the updated version don't own anything that burns through money while you have fantasies about them.

I agree with CCarter. Dump it as fast as possible. Or make a bundle and sell it on Flippa.
 
I personally hoard them. Every couple of months I'll throw an article at them and see if it does well. It was one of these sites that suddenly started to get some traffic and make around $90/month. Now it's my focus for 2020. The rest will just "simmer" until I get around to them. They're on shared hosting that's $25/month with about 25 sites on the one account so it's not like it's costing me much more than the domain renewal.

The major caveat here is that I only keep the ones that I still believe in but just don't have the time to work on. I try and focus on 1-2 per year only. I've let 30 expire in the past 2 years because I lost hope in them.

Not sure if that helps, but it's my own experience.
 
I vote hoard, but only for sites with actual content.


Scrap assets market thread with asking prices isnt a bad idea.

It would need some rules on discounting over time or something to incentivize actual transactions.
 
Hire a freelancer writer who would take any of the sites and work on it to produce Adsense income. You can do it for all the sites. I would be interested to review your sites.
 
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