Copyright 2005 Richard GradyIn my opinion, one of 'Golden Rules' of Internet marketing has to be following:
'Once you have uploaded a website, you should leave it online forever - even if it is only making you a couple of dollars a month.'
As long as you are covering hosting and domain registration fees each year (maximum of a couple of dollars a month), then why take site offline? Admittedly if site is causing you hours of work every week and still only making you a couple of dollars income each month, then yes, remove it. But if site involves you in no work (for example if it sells an eBook or you generate Adsense income etc from it, then why remove it?)
The point is that whilst site in question may only be generating a small amount today, you never know what might happen tomorrow…..
This principle has been illustrated to me in a pretty big way during past week and this is sole reason that it is fresh in my mind and I want to share experience with you so that you don't make mistake that I very nearly made.
I have a site which I built about three years ago. It was a bit of an experiment and not connected to my main income-earning sites in any way. The site covered a topic that was pretty competitive online - an industry for which top search engine rankings were exceptionally hard to get. As I say, it was an experiment and I didn't really expect site to make me much money - which was a good thing as it meant that I wasn't too disappointed when it didn't! :-)
After a few months of receiving no traffic, site was eventually picked up by a couple of major search engines and it started to receive a handful of visitors each day. I guess on a very good day I would get 45 referrals. Needless to say, site wasn't making a fortune in income but something is always better than nothing.
Anyway at beginning of this year I undertook a review of all of my websites and made decision to ditch a few of under-performing sites. This is where I nearly made a big mistake by deleting my little site but for whatever reason, site in question managed to survive my 'cull'. It was a close call but in end I decided that even though site was only making $20 or $30 a month, it wasn't involving me in any work so it would be stupid to turn it off just for sake of it.
So site remained online and up until last week, it continued to tick over as it has done for past three years, earning a minimal income every month from few visitors that manage to find it.