When a site just don't love you back

bernard

bernard

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Lets talk about sites that don't give back the money, to what you put in effort wise.

My first secondary site I created was a typical "best fitness machine" blog. I see now that was a mistake. This niche is incredibly saturated, because so many younger people are in to working out and doing stuff online.

I do make some money from this site and think I am close to the "ketchup effect", but man oh man, does this site pull out my hair. I have good EPC though, so it's not that the niche isn't worth going after. It's just that convincing Google of choosing your site over the competition is just sooooooo painstakingly difficult in saturated niches.

I listened to Income School yesterday talking about their approach to SEO (trust and branding) and I think fitness is such a case. In very saturated niches, you're going to have to do some real convincing to get ahead.

Lesson learned, it's worth thinking a bit more about niche, if you want to go into a saturated niche. Like instead of fitness, go for senior fitness at least.

I'll keep the site around of course, as a slow growing asset. My plan has been to get content up there for all serious keywords, and just let it sit.
 
@bernard, it sounds to me like (and please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to put words in your mouth) that you started what kind of amounts to the old, smaller, exact match domain (even if not on an EMD or a PMD) style of site. What we used to call MFA sites (made for advertising).

In my experience in the past year, I see some old ones still kicking around ranking and banking but they're still higher quality than the average of that style. They're still surviving on the merit of being old and not being complete trash.

But more importantly, they don't appear to exist for the sole sake of selling the product. One I saw recently was about kettlebells (not actually that, I can't remember what it was).

The entire thing exists to funnel people to the "best kettlebells" page or whatever, but it's full of information about the history of kettlebells, picture tutorials for each possible exercise using them, other ideas with them like running up and down hills while carrying them. "Should I wear gloves with them." All of that crap. The entire site exists to mask the fact that the whole point is to have the money making page online and ranking.

And what they don't have is 100 posts like "FitnessX Kettlebell 5 pound rubberized review." They have the one "best kettlebells" and are happy to dominate that.

Regarding the topic of the thread, I've let a lot of projects expire. Hell, there's one I tossed a couple thousand bucks at recently just because I had the old and juicy domain lying around. But it's possibly in the top 5 most competitive niches on the internet. It's not going to get any traction and I don't intend on throwing any more money at it. I think I'll sell it "at cost" to someone wanting a PBN site to sling links on or that wants to get into the niche.

There's always duds or you lose interest or the competition is stiffer than expected. In my mind, it's best to close that loop quickly rather than keeping them around eating up your mental RAM and taking any time away from your winners. Best to get rid of them, in my opinion.
 
@Ryuzaki

No, it's not an EMD quite the opposite, it is a too broad, Fitness site, which looking in hindsight was madness to attempt, due to the extreme topic depth and competition.

I should just have sticked to rowing machines, which I have experience in. I do slowly, slowly inch up the rankings though.

It's just that I only make like $500 a month and I would like to get to $1500 a month asap. I've spent a lot of time on it, but the competition is fierce. I've used my usual method of niching down and going for lesser keywords, but it just isn't adding that much. Seems like this particular vertical is just tough to compete in, consumers being smart about their purchases, more than in other fields. I also think much of this niche is SoMe driven, not so much search. It's about fads and feelings, not rational choice.

I'm sort of shutting it down now, by having done a content push, with a bunch of articles and pages and then I am not going to touch it and see what happens around December this year. If it doesn't hit $1500 around then, then I am selling.
 
This site took a huge jump in traffic with the corona-crisis, making 5x what it used to do, but what is more important, I just had massive jumps up in Google.

Which is either because I got some more links and crossed a trust tier or, and I think more likely, I have really good user metrics and the increased corono traffic gave Google enough data to push me up.
 
bernard said:
This site took a huge jump in traffic with the corona-crisis, making 5x what it used to do, but what is more important, I just had massive jumps up in Google.

Which is either because I got some more links and crossed a trust tier or, and I think more likely, I have really good user metrics and the increased corono traffic gave Google enough data to push me up.
Click to expand...

Google's been doing some shifting weekly for me. It's more dynamic certainly now.

Awesome you're getting 5x the earnings. Hopefully it continues to stck for you.

Having Tier 2s and Tier 3s involved helps sites tremendously in my opinion.
 
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