Laurie

Thank you so much, Susanne! You have helped me make a decision about one of my sites. I have been struggling about whether to keep it or not. I have decided to keep it; focus on my main baby until, as you say, it’s profitable, then go back to this other one and make it profitable.

Hi Emily,

great question. I actually don’t outsource a whole lot. I work a lot in batches and get websites to the point where they are profitable and get a fair amount of seo traffic each day. Once they reach that point, I focus more on another niche site and just occasionally go back and add content. If they are very profitable, they get more of my attention and I may hire an assistant to help me run them.

Karen, how much time are you spending on building links, writing guest posts, article marketing etc?

From my experience (both personal and with my customers and coaching clients) it’s often a matter of not doing enough “offsite” stuff to get the site to rank, attract readers, subscribers and customers.

A good rule of thumb is to spend 20% of your time on your site (adding content etc) and 80% out on other web properties be it social media, article marketing, guest blogging, forum participation etc.

You have to market your sites until enough momentum builds up where others start to talk about your site, recommend it to others etc.

I do a combination of things. For some of my bigger niches I use my name and photo. For smaller niche sites I use pen names and either stock photos of people, or a more general picture (i.e. a stove or some food items for a cooking site). You can also use your main logo for your social media picture.

Hi Marcia,
great question… here’s what I do:

I’m usually pretty excited about a new niche site when I get started and do a good bit of work on it in the beginning. Then I usually let it sit for a bit to see if it starts to make money. If it does, I keep working on it a good bit again. If it doesn’t it may sit a bit more and I may eventually put a little more effort into it. Otherwise, I’m fine with a site that brings in $10 or $20 a month without me having to do much.

A word of caution: Don’t take this as an excuse to jump from one niche to another. I’ve been doing this since 2004 and have accumulated quite a few niche sites over the years. It does take time and you have to spend some time on each site, both building it and adding content to it as well as going out and marketing the site, building links to it etc.

You are very welcome.

Yes, the passive income come via various affiliate offers that are on the site itself or in email messages that go out to a list I’m building for the site.

Using PLR is a great way to quickly add content to a site and I use it on a regular basis, both when I first start the site and later as more and more content is added. I like to rework the PLR I use a bit to make it sound like me and to optimize it for certain long tail keywords so I can get search engine traffic to my niche websites.

You don’t always have to write about your own experiences with affiliate products, but it can help with conversions. Sometimes all I do is add a link in the context of the post, sometimes I write a little recommended reading note at the end of a post etc.

Yes, you want to promote different affiliate offers that your readers are interested in.