I’ve been writing more now than ever and wouldn’t you know it, my own site gets left behind.
I’m always trying to work out a good balance on how many sites to operate. It’s not always easy and being a serial entrepeneur I’m always coming up with new ideas. Often I take steps towards implementing then then realize that I’m spreading myself to thin and end up culling a few. Going back a couple years I had a Lot of websites and found that I was missing some focus. I was like a meandering stream. I made the decision that I was going to only focus on 2 sites, the Bookshop Blog and The Hockey Writers and the rest I would cull, all of them except for here as I wanted to keep one space for more personal stuff. So I took out the big virtual machete and hacked away. The 2 aforementioned blogs have since regained direction and grown by leaps and bounds. They’ve become so strong that I now envision a day where they will be able to support me working on the full time. So that’s the lesson, stay lean, stay focused and if you’re trying to run 10 sites get out the hatchet, pick your two best and Bang – cut the others loose.
Other items…on the Hockey site we’ve decided to double the amount of writers participating on the site. Thankfully Rick Gethin has agreed to do more. I don’t think I could manage the whole thing on my own, it’s getting too big. That will hopefully put us at 70 writers by the time the season starts. Should be a big year for us and since we are starting a CPM advertising model for the first time it could be lucrative as well. I’m still not sure what percentage of ad space inventory we’ll be able to fill (or rather the agency will fill) or what type of payout we can expect. I think this format will suit our site better than Click Through as sports readers don’t tend to be to click happy.
We’ve also done a writers push on the Bookshop blog trying to add more writers but even though we pay per post I still find it harder to have them stick around. Funny the guys working for free on the hockey site stick for a year or more but the guys being paid on the book site typically leave after a couple months. Maybe starting the payouts wasn’t the best idea.
One other challenge that I am currently participating in is The Keyword Academy Summer Push. We’ve all split off into groups of 10 to 20 members and selected a Publishing target. I’m part of the 500K group meaning that we have pledged to publish 500 000 words on our various sites over a three month period. These words will count against that so I may just babble on all day. Ideally the posts should be keyword targeted (as taught in the academy) but you also get untargeted long tail hits as well. I’ve mentioned before on this site that I’m very much enjoying being a part of the Keyword Academy. I think it has brought a lot of focus to my websites, helped me create goals and draw up a clearer picture of not only where I want my sites to go but how to get there, how long it will take and most importantly, how to do it. With my sites currently experiencing a monthly revenue increase of 5% I can feel that, although it won’t happen overnight, it will happen. By happening I mean my working on websites full time and leaving the nine to five behind. Like many guys I’ve always craved freedom and associate personal happiness with personal liberty. Taking deliberate steps in that direction is cathartic.
I picked up Thesis to play around with. I think I should start sprucing up this place.
