- You read about all the money everyone else is making on their websites.
- You get all excited because it sounds like a great and extremely easy wealth generation strategy.
- You convince yourself that you could make that same amount of website income too.
- You slap some ads up. Nothing happens.
- You write some bigger, longer articles. Your traffic is basically the same.
- You start a second blog or website. No one visits it.
Depressing. Isn’t it?
You’re trying so very hard to make some extra money for yourself. And you know that your website and posts are just as good as everyone else’s. But for some reason you can’t seem to make more than a few bucks a month at what you’re doing.
So what are you doing wrong?
You Are Preventing Your Own Website Income:
Have you ever thought that maybe YOU are your biggest obstacle to making more money online?
Though that might be a hard pill to swallow, it’s probably more than a true statement. And the reason I can make that claim is because I made the same mistake myself.
I found that doing a lot of little things and focusing too much on the details rather than the big-picture stuff was preventing me from achieving the income from my websites that they deserve.
As I learned to understand, developing laser sharp focus is exactly what you need if you want to really be successful.
The Failure and Comeback of My First Niche Website:
Around the summer of 2012 I had the itch to start a new website and expand my chances for bringing in good website income.
MyMoneyDesign.com had been around for about a year and it was making almost no money. I was HUNGERY for an alternative.
In my quest for anything and everything to improve my chances of bringing attention to my small website, I soon discovered the website Niche Pursuits and the world of building niche websites. For anyone who doesn’t know, a niche website is a website that focuses solely on one particular topic. The idea is to target low competition keywords that will drive traffic to those sites and to turn those visitors into advertising revenue. It was a simple idea and relatively low in risk. I was IN LOVE with this concept!
Having a lot of unpublished articles regarding “retirement”, I decided I was going to create my own niche website on this topic. I registered my first site (which I often dub as NS1) and I was ready for money to fall from the sky!
…. But nothing happened.
Absolutely nothing ….
Why My First Niche Website Flopped:
It was a pretty big blow to my ego.
I was pretty sure I had wasted my time and that this whole niche website thing was a fraud.
My content was great. So what the hell was the problem?
Do you want to know what it was? Focus!
At the same exact time I started my niche site I was also pre-occupied with the fact that My Money Design’s Google Pagerank score was not moving up. I was just starting to learn about SEO and had realized that there were a ton of things I was NOT doing right on my own blog when it came to writing articles or promotion. At the time THAT was the most important thing for me. Not NS1.
Focus on One Project At a Time:
The book “The One Thing” starts off with an incredible Russian proverb that sums up pretty much this whole situation:
“If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.”
The problem with the website wasn’t anything related to the website itself at all – it was me!
It was my decision to put NS1 on the back-burner in favor of building up and figuring out what to do with My Money Design. So is it any wonder the site was a flop and wasn’t making any income?
Not only was I not fully giving this project all the attention it needed to succeed, I had built a website without a plan. There was no real monetization strategy. I knew I wanted to use content to produce more website income. But I had only scratched the surface of what I truly needed to do.
Eventually once I realized my mistake and was able to turn my attention to NS1 with the singular target for earning more income online. And things began to change!
I began to:
- Understand the importance of long tail keywords and how their relative competiveness can make all the difference. I even purchased the fantastic software Long Tail Pro to help with this.
- Pay more attention to on-page SEO minding things like content structure, titles, meta descriptions, and other things.
- Learn more about backlinking and other promotional strategies using methods like social media, bookmarking, blog comments, carnivals, and even my own internal linking.
- Started using virtual assistants and freelancers to help write content and maintain some of the more routine tasks while I focused more on the big-picture things.
- Figure out and structure my websites to achieve my MWR – most wanted response.
Within 12 months my first niche website went from total obscurity to #4 for the primary keyword! And it also started passively earning as much as +$400 per month!
What a difference focus made!
I attribute this success to a sole desire to succeed. When you want something bad enough, your mind will figure out how to make it work. You’ll always be trying to answer the riddle, balance the equation, and find the magic key to unlock what you know others have found before you.
When you spread yourself too thin, nothing that you’re working on will get the right coverage that it needs. To make something successful, you need to give yourself the opportunity to concentrate on it.
Don’t sabotage your efforts. Give yourself the space and focus you need to succeed.
Readers – How has focus made a difference in your own website income efforts? Are you really doing everything you need to order to be a success?
Related Posts:
1) Niche Website Update 16 – NS4 is Growing – Plus My Passive Income Report
2) Getting Serious About Building Up My Multiple Streams of Income in 2014
3) Your Residual Income Formula for Creating An Online Business
Images courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Don’t you think the key really is to sell a product like Long Tail Pro? Because whether you succeed or fail, Spencer will get paid as the product is not based on a client’s success.
I think we should all think of something similar. It’s a smart business model.
Yes and no. There are lots of examples of bloggers who have not really created a salable product and yet they make way more money than I could ever dream each month. Smart Passive Income is one example. By his own income reports his affiliation with Blue Host sales seems to bring in the majority of his revenue. So I do think it is possible to have substantial income without necessarily creating a product.
However, I do believe that creating a salable product as Spencer has does help tremendously to diversify your income and hedge your income against the ups and downs of traditional blog income. It almost puts you in a class all your own. I don’t think Spencer would be 1/4 as successful or popular if he hadn’t thought of something as useful as LTP. I’ve watched this sort of thing several times with the bigger blogs. At some point they seem to move beyond direct advertising and affiliate sales and create some kind of product or service. Fizzle (formerly Think Traffic) is one example that comes to mind.
I have a hard time using virtual assistants… for some reason, I have a mental block that prevents me from paying something I could (in theory) do myself. It really slows everything down with tedious work. Thanks for the great post MMD, always enjoy your posts on your niche website work.
You’re welcome Jon. I’ve got a great update coming up in two weeks on NS4!
I can say it’s not all sunshine with VA’s. More than once I’ve said to myself “I got what I paid for” when I tried to find cheap help. But it’s just impossible to try to do everything yourself and scale it upwards. Plus every now and again you get a good diamond in the rough that you stick with.
I think you’re exactly right in that if you want something bad enough, your brain will figure out a way to make it a reality. Basically, it’s Think and Grow Rich.
It’s impressive how much your mind becomes like a laser when you want something bad enough. Your eyes cut through solid stone trying to overcome every challenge that comes your way. The thing that always helps me is that I keep telling myself “this person from this website did it, why can’t I?” I find a lot of motivation in other peoples’ success.
That is oh, so correct. I went through the micro niche website craze too a few years ago and at one point I had as many as 17 websites focusing on low competition keywords but clearly spreading myself way too thin. There was no way I could make it alone and there was no way to hire somebody to help, because I wasn’t generating enough money. Some relatively poor research (it really bores me to do all the research and you can imagine how much had to be done for 17 websites…) also resulted in a bad start anyway….
In the end, I decided to cut off the dead weight and focus on the bigger websites. The most money I made was a couple of years ago when I only had two websites. So in this case, it’s clearly not necessarily a “the more, the better” thing.
Great example! I’ve seen blogs claiming that 5 to 10 niche websites are the way to go. But why? Why not focus on one or two and build them up really big? More than once I’ve thought about starting a new personal finance niche website. But then I stop myself and remember that using that budget to buy 20 more blog posts and adding them to my first niche website (that already has rank and authority) would make more far more sense.
Like any money making venture, focus is key. Ambition, determination and drive are others, which all go back to focus.
Great point NNL. These are all just an extension of focus.
Well said! We could list several things that create success. But they all come back to having your eye on the prize.
I think this is one of the reasons that I stopped developing Healthy, Fit, and Frugal. I realized that my attention was being thrown all over the place and BATB wasn’t quite fully developed enough to have to sites going. Not with the time I had. I still have so much that I want to accomplish with BATB first.
I can completely understand why you did that. Running more than one website isn’t exactly easy. There are still times when I just want to only focus on MMD. Perhaps when you get to a place where BATB is where you want it you can go back to experimenting with other sites.
Hello,
I am also planning to start my next blog but after reading your article, I have changed my mind and will focus only on one project at a time..
You are right, Focus is only thing which help everyone to give his/her 100 % in their project…
That is probably a smart move. Building up a big site is worth way more of your effort than messing around with several smaller ones.
This is a subject that I continue to struggle with. On the one hand, I know the benefits of focusing on just one site and my first big online success came as a result of focusing on just that one site for 6+ months and building into a serious authority in my niche.
That said, there are inherent risks associated with building an online business so while I rarely jump from one project to another, I normally try to “spread my bets” by working on 3 or 4 sites at a time. In this way I can put similar effort into each one, until I see some clear winners appearing – at which point I know where to put most of my effort in the future.
I can totally identify with that logic since that is basically what I’m doing as well! I’ve got a number of websites now that I run and maintain. However, in keeping with the theme of focus, I do only work on one of them at a time. I’ll build and build and build the one site until I am comfortable with it’s progress (or until I give up!). Right now effort is all on my NS4 which is getting probably 90% of my time and concentration. But you’re right. The other 10% is spent keeping this blog going, guest posting to promote my other sites, etc. A small amount of diversity is a necessary evil. There’s no reason to totally let the other things you’ve built completely slip away.
Just recently I’ve been able to leave my job and work from home full time. A lot of people think that it’s going to be easy to make it happen online. Some people are lucky enough to make it work right away, and some are not so lucky. Desire is definitely a huge factor. You’ve got to work hard, research hard, and take hard action.
Congratulations on your decision! In many ways I think having the discipline and focus to work from home with reminders from your co-workers could more difficult than actually being in the office full time.
Yes, I think that lack of patience and hard work plays a role in helping bloggers generate more revenue from their blog!
You’re so right about focussing on one project at a time
I got so many projects on hold and I really need to finish one before starting another.
Thanks for reminding me again!
Yes. It’s true. Your all points are really heart touchable and worth taking.
I appreciate your all points here. It’s tough time for every new blogger who are getting same types of difficulties in earning money from blogging.
Thanks to bring us into this points. 😉
Love the proverb. Focus is key, but that’s a lot harder to remember than an evocative saying, especially one involving rabbits!
Personally, my life is so busy I can barely keep one website going. I can’t imagine trying to manage a dozen different sites, even if they’re targeted niche sites with canned content.
For me, the most important thing is picking the right thing to focus on. It’s far too easy to focus on small things that don’t move the needle, because you can get those done easily, and the impactful work is so hard.
Good Advice and really helpful to many bloggers who are struggling to understand this difficult space. Also if your not semi – techie, then you might not fully grasp the back end issues holding your website back.
Fortunately for anyone not tech savvy I’ve been pouring everything I learn about tech into the Niche Website updates. You can either pickup some good tips (or avoid the mistakes I’ve made).