When Should You Stop Working On A Niche Site?

Niche Site Saturday: When To Stop Working On A Niche Site

Reader Ari asked a great question the other day:

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for the positive articles – I’m still in the process of making money from my first niche sites and haven’t found success yet. But my sites are getting indexed and I’m receiving the first visitors – so I’m happy.

I have two niche sites now (1-2 months old with each around 5-10 articles/reviews of 1000+ words) and I’m unsure how to continue. What do you recommend:
– Start more niche sites and check in a couple of months how my first ones are doing
– Or focus on these two until they start making money

Thanks,

Ari

I’ll spare you all the “it depends” caveats because you already know that. As always, the second caveat is “test it yourself” because I’m not a niche site god or anything.

With those said, it’s a good question and one I’ve thought about – and a lot of people have probably thought about it too.

When do you quit with a niche site? When should you leave it alone and work on another project? How do you tell when you’re wasting time and should be productive?

Hard Rules As Far As Niche Sites Go (According To Me)

When I start a new site – or project in general – my first and only real rule is that it should pay for itself within a decent time frame and in a line with its budget and general goals.

That’s a pretty expansive rule in general but here are the basics for a niche site project:

• Cost is domain (plus hosting but I have a couple of reseller accounts to put niche sites on so I don’t pay extra for domains) = $10 (give or take)
• Time frame is one year (the length of domain registration)

Those are the only two things that really matter but you could take into account some other things:

• Cost of buying stuff (If you’re going to review and photo it)
• Time commitment (This depends on whether you enjoy the niche – which we’ll come back to later)

Let’s say you create a “how to get fit at home” niche website, for instance. You pay the $10 domain fee, and you say, “I have a year for this to be profitable.” That’s your deadline and timeline, and you know if a site can’t make $10 in its first year, it’s a terrible niche or you’re doing something wrong (probably both, to be honest.)

You might also buy a set of weights, one of those power cages or a pullup station, because those are all in the Goldilocks zone for affiliate payouts ($10+ per sale and high interest items that are difficult to buy at the store.)

Moving On

You’re currently out $310 with those expenses.

(I won’t go into time commitment because I don’t really use this measurement – you put the hours in and you could potentially earn an astronomic hourly rate over the course of a year, or nothing.)

Within the year, you want to earn those back. How much do you have to write to get you to that goal? Do you need 100 visitors, 10,000 visitors or more based on your conversions and traffic?

Now, if you’ve got a new site, then you don’t have conversions and you don’t have traffic figures. So here are a couple of rules:

• Keep going until you get at least 500 views a month
• When you get to that number, you can get conversion figures

I say 500 because you can tell with reasonable accuracy whether you’re converting with that. If you have one sale on a page from 500 views, then your conversion rates are 0.2% – which is low.

With 500 visitors within a reasonable space of time, you can tell the following:

• Whether you’re getting sales (If no sales at 500 views, then something is wrong)
• How many visitors/sales you need to get that $300 investment back
• Whether the above is worth it based on time you’re spending on the project

Those are the hard facts and figures. Let’s talk about whether a project is “worth it.”

Is A Niche Site Worth It?

Using the above figures, you’ll get a reasonable idea of the amount of work you’ll have to do. If you average out your sales letters to earning $10 each at a conversion rate of 1%, then you need 100 visitors to your site per sale, and 31 sales total to make back your $310 at a total of around 3100 visitors.

Here’s where it gets subjective based on how much you value your time, whether you enjoy writing about the niche and how well your site does initially.

Some websites are going to get traffic whether you do anything special or not. I have one niche site that I haven’t touched since 2015 that still gets about 500 visitors a month. It has about 50 articles on it. Some other websites I have drop to tens of visitors a month if I don’t write regularly for them.

If you have a website that gets 100 views a month and you’ve only written two articles for it, congratulations. You’ve probably found a winner. Keep pushing until you get to a bigger figure and check your conversion rates and see.

On the other hand, if you’ve written fifty articles for a website and it’s not getting traction, then you should probably stop or change what you’re doing.

Generally, getting visitors = keyword research/targeting/size of market

Sales = conversion rates/copy/site quality.

Your website isn’t going to fit into a neat example like mine do above, but if you’re gaining visitors and/or sales with your current routine (and you don’t mind putting the work in) then keep going. If you’re stagnating, then either change or stop.

Rest Periods

I’ve written before (though can’t find where) that there’ll come a point where your website will sustain itself. It’s rare that you get a dud website that reverts to 0 views if you stop posting regularly. In fact, your sites will gain ground over time as you get indexed in the search engines and you stick around while other sites die off.

But you’re not going to get gains forever. If you have an “exercise at home” niche website, then there’s obviously a ceiling like any other niche; not everyone wants to work out at home and not everyone wants to read your website.

You’ll know you’ve hit this limit when you’re putting in the same effort and you stop making gains in traffic. So, you post once a week for six months and go from 0 visitors to 100 visitors to 200 up to 500. But in month 6 you get 510 and in month 7 you get 499 and traffic doesn’t grow.

At this point, take a week or two off and see what happens. If the traffic remains constant, then you can ease off and only post when you feel like it. If it dips, then you have to decide whether the regular schedule is too much for you.

It’s worth noting that at this point you can still improve your conversion rate, seek new target markets and do more keyword research and the like and see if you can push the ceiling up a little higher. It’s up to you.

Final Thoughts

A lot more can be said on this topic; questions to ask include:

• Where does your traffic come from?
• Can you “niche up” or “niche down?”
• Do you like writing about the subject?
• How many views are you likely to get based on keyword search volume?
• Is it better to increase conversions by 1% by writing better articles or should you go for more traffic?

If you like your topic, then keep writing for fun. In fact, you could easily write a few sales letters and then do nothing other than a “weekly update” of your progress. This’ll take you ten minutes or so to write, you can link to your sales letters and then you’ve got a steady stream of new updates.

If you don’t like your topic or you’re bored with the niche, weigh everything up: If you write one sales letter a week and it’ll pull in $100 a month from an affiliate link, then suck it up for an hour a week because in a year, you’ll have made $1200. On the other hand, if you’re writing ten articles a week, it is six months in and you still haven’t made the domain fee back, then you’ve worked 260 hours for $0.

With niche sites, there’s no real pressure though. It’s not like a daily blog that you have to update all the time. Taking a week or two off or starting a new project won’t kill your old one.

Caveat For That

If you get really bored of projects easily, I’d urge caution with the above. I say that as someone with a ridiculous number of barely developed websites; it’s easy to write a handful of articles, decide you’re bored and move on to the next shiny project.

By all means try it out, but when you look like you have a winner, use some discipline. It’s better to have a handful of sites that earn a return than dozens of sites that don’t.

Alright, I’ll leave it with that thought. Hopefully I’ve answered the question!

As always, comments, questions and the like are welcome. What do you guys think and how do you deal with knowing when to quit/keep going/take a break from a project?