If you’re anything like me, you’ve had some great ideas for new sites and maybe you couldn’t even resist starting yet another one.
Well, this led me to where I am now. Ok, don’t judge, with 22 sites in my portfolio.
I used to think I needed to diversify by creating more sites, but that’s not actually diversifying. The money all still came from Amazon, but a year ago I decided to move more towards display ads and started ramping up my info content.
That’s when a lot of these sites I started just sat there. And that’s not good.
This is the first time I’ve done this, but I’m going to share more of my successes and failures with you guys.
I’m going to share my blogging revenue with you, and why I’m cutting my portfolio of sites significantly.
So, I’ll be expecting a decline in the coming months from ad revenue, but that’s all in the name of investing in what I believe in.
Last month’s revenue was 5,248 dollars from Ezoic ads (read my full review here) and 6,668 dollars from affiliate revenue. That’s mainly amazon but I use bol.com as well, that’s a dutch e-commerce platform like amazon and it does way better in The Netherlands than Amazon does.
So I’m already a bit diversified :)
So we are almost coming up on a 50/50 display and affiliate here.
This came from the 22 sites in my portfolio but I’ve spent the last month selling my sites and sold 7 of them and I’m redirecting a few sites more because they are in similar niches and building out larger sites instead of niche ones.
I’ve read so much about having focus, how important it is, and why you should have it in your life. After being on the road in Asia for 7 months I’ve learned traveling without all the clutter at home frees up so much brain space, and I think that’s the same with having all of these sites. They’re there, in the back of your mind eating up your thoughts and weighing you down.
Just seeing them in analytics is reminding me of how they’re not helpful to my overall business strategy.
So I’ve decided to get rid of all of these sites I’ve started over the years but are now sitting idly in my portfolio.
I haven’t written anything for them in over a year and that results in no growth. It even causes a slow decline, even if you have a lot of info content.
Plus, with new google updates, I should upgrade them to new standards. But I can’t even find the resources to get into that.
And some of these are my darlings, I’ve built one up and written the content myself when my son had just been born and he and my wife were upstairs a lot breastfeeding and sleeping. That was my first real start in creating a lot of content and starting this as a side-hustle.
But you have to sometimes kill your darlings to move forward.
So with the amount of money, I sold all of the sites for, a great chunk of change for me 40,047 dollars, I’ll invest that back into my dream of having a few authority sites on the topics I’m really interested in at the moment.
I’ve even posted a message to my Trello board for all to see, the direction we’re moving in, and the three principles I believe will grow the sites beyond what any small niche site could:
1) [GOOGLE: SEARCH INTENT] help the reader as best we can with the answer they’re looking for so they can easily understand and quickly use it
2) [GOOGLE: INFORMATION GAIN] provide as much information as possible with as few words as possible – so for this one we really need to make some changes in how we write our content
3) [GOOGLE: AUTHORITY] cover topics fully as a knowledge base and become the expert
And as the content analytics guy, a former data scientist, and a full-time blogger, I’ll be telling my story through my test and analytics of the sites, so you can understand more about your blogging business as well.
If you want to eventually sell your sites for a good multiple as well, you should get a good ad provider. I use Ezoic for all of my sites and the site speed boost and revenue boosts are really worth the time to set it up.
Joost Nusselder is The Content Decoder, a content marketer, dad and loves trying out new tools en tactics. He's been working on a portfolio of niche sites since 2010. Now since 2016 he creates in-depth blog articles together with his team to help loyal readers earn from their own succesful sites.
