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+1 (800) 765-2158This article is guest posted by Shaun Connell.
This is part two in a two-part series on ending your blog. This part is about the principles to keep in mind before you actually stop blogging. Click here for part one.
You’ve made your decision, and you think it’s the right thing to do. You’ll probably be starting another blog soon, but either way you simply don’t have the time for your current blog project. So you decide to shut it down.
Bad call. It’s nearly always a bad decision to shut down a website/blog. Remember, most hosts allow you to set up more than one domain/website/blog on your account, meaning the real cost of your website now is about 10 bucks a year for the domain. If you make a nickel a day, you’ve paid for the site. Regardless of how poorly your site has done, you should be able to make money blogging more than that.
So it shouldn’t cost anything, but should be netting you at least a little. But why keep it? Simple. You can reorganize all of the information already provided in a way that keeps the would be visitors on your website, and even start generating significant revenue. Websites are all about what you do with traffic.
Consider these five ways you can transform your would-be-dead blog into a machine that can make money:
1. Home Remodel
Remodel your home page so that all of your best articles are linked to, so a first-time visitor can read your best work. If you are a wordpress user, just make a page that does this, and turn it into your home.
Write your home page like a 4-5 paragraph article that summarizes your entire website. This will prick the interest of your visitors, leading to them clicking through the site more. Each visitor is more likely to click an ad or buy something now.
2. Sales Pages
Write a full blown sales page for high-paying affiliate programs in your niche. These are now the focus of your website. Note: high paying. If you’ll be getting little traffic, you’ll need it to go a long way to make the site worth-while. If you make the page well, you can triple your income easily. We’ll talk more about how to drive your traffic to these pages in just a minute.
3. Ad Locations
Move your ad location to the left, and you’ll increase your click-through rates. You can literally make money twice as fast in just a few minutes.
Oddly enough, an outrageously few amount of blogs try this. They put their ads on the right, where few people click. Make sure you test locations out, because literally hundreds of dollars are at stake with how well you spend the 15 or so minutes it takes to place the ads.
4. Affiliate Footer
Think about the highest paying program that you’ve seen that’s also relevant to your niche. Write a three paragraph summary of the program that can be added the the ending of any of your pages, and edit it into the coding of your template so that it automatically will be at the end of all of your posts and pages. If the program pays a $100 per sale and you make an average conversion of 2%, and you generate only 50 visitors per week, you still generate a $100 per week.
5. Squeeze Theme
In line with the above way to monetize, instead just link to a comprehensive authority sales page, where you completely cover all of the aspects of the program. By pre-selling your topic even more, you can increase your conversion rate, meaning that you’re turning low amounts of traffic into high amounts of income.
These principles can, of course, be used to generate extra revenue on any website, but they are also targeted at monetizing new traffic to your website. If you were to continue blogging, you would want to keep building a relationship of trust with your audience, including those who might want to come back. You wouldn’t hit them up for a sales pitch on their first visit. But now, you won’t be adding more posts, and are ending the blog, so it’s vital to cash in on every visitor their first time at your blog.
No one likes the idea of ending their blog, but for some it’s simply the best option. When this happens, there’s no need to turn the domain off. You’ll simply build “link juice” with the domain that you can use to support other websites. Plus, if you get only 10 visitors a day, using the above methods should almost guaruntee that you make at least the money that you spent on the domain.
Shaun Connell is the webmaster of Make Money, a free resource for individuals who want to learn how to make money online with a website.
Now this is a very good point, and one that I don’t hear raised often enough! People too often abandon web sites that have not done very well, and go on to start something new. It’s a shame… they’re throwing away aged domains, pagerank and all sorts of other stuff. A web site is something that gradually builds through time. The good news is that you can return to it a while later and continue to build it up where you left off. And as you say, there are always new opportunities to revamp and monetize. Great article.
Great post!
This is truly a unique vuewpointg… I’ve read multitudes of posts on how to START blogging, but this is completely new… great job!