The Article Writer

“I’ve decided to shelve my site for awhile because the new job is taking up all of my time. I’m even considering deleting most of my pages and I may not renew my domain.”

When I learned that a friend was planning to shutter his website, I wasn’t too surprised. He launched his first site in 2004 and soon after we exchanged links, shared tips, and I even sold one of my domains to him. Later, when his “real job” took off, he sold everything that he had except for his original, flagship site.

“Good for him,” I thought when I read his note, but then it quickly occurred to me that this move would actually be bad for him. The “bad” wasn’t the new job which was paying him quite well and providing what his family needed, rather removing the last vestige of his online presence was a move that I didn’t agree with. I quickly wrote back and encouraged him to rethink his strategy.

To make a case for keeping his site, I shared the following bit of advice with him. These tips are something I routinely mull over whenever I consider selling a site or closing down a slow performer:

How old are you? Your domain name, that is. My friend Brian’s site was established in Spring 2004, making it four years old. In that time, he has accumulated a lot of backlinks including some from a handful of .gov and .edu sites. Though his site currently has less than 60 pages to it, many of these pages have been around for three or more years and nearly all have received PageRank. Clearly, the search engines recognize that there is some value to his site as the inner pages are ranked and have inbound links.

How deep is your love? Relating to the backlink issue, Brian’s site is linked out to several authority sites and a few of those link back to his site. His links appear naturally and they are the types of links readers would find valuable, complementing his pages and making for good “further reading” material.

Should you sell instead? In almost all cases I would instruct the person who no longer wants to manage a site to simply sell it. Although Brian’s site was never much of an income producer, all of the material on his site is original and written by him. Many buyers will look at monthly income and simply offer 6-18 times the average monthly ad income amount for a site, but the age of the domain, number of pages, and the quality of the backlinks demonstrates that this is a poor way to calculate its worth. Definitely, his site has an intrinsic value that the average buyer would not recognize. I suggested that he consider offering it to one of his business partners if he absolutely had to dispose of it.

After considering my points, there were a couple of other things which Brian hadn’t thought of which eventually convinced him that shuttering or selling his site wasn’t in his best interest:

Careers change, a site is a valuable marketing tool. Like so many people these days, I rarely send out a resume. Why? Because, this site is the best example of what I can do for a customer. Brian realized that although he loved his job, having an online presence would allow him to maintain his visibility, a good idea whether his career takes an unexpected turn or not. With companies merging, downsizing, going out of business, or otherwise changing, his passion for his work could eventually cool. An attractive and informative website can be the best personal marketing and networking tool for anyone.

Good hosting is cheap these days. The cost for keeping his site running is negligible as he uses shared hosting. Domain registration and annual hosting fees cost him about $60 annually, not much money to make this an issue. To manage his site in his spare time, he’ll be deleting several outdated pages and redirecting the search engines to other pages on his site. I encouraged him to set aside a few hours monthly to regularly tweak his remaining pages which should keep his site fresh going forward.

Just about every site has value based on its age, content, links, authority, income, and more. The hidden value is often what we don’t immediately recognize, the personal marketing angle that would take months, perhaps years to replace if a treasured site is sold or shut down.

Yes, I did it again — I helped launch a new blog — this time for a customer of mine, online jeweler James Allen.

The idea of having a blog with the site was something we tossed around, deciding two months ago to go for it. As with many businesses who run a blog, it can be a drawn out process, making sure that everyone is in agreement and that all of the administrative, writing, editing, and security needs of the blog have been met.

For you freelancers who provide content for customer’s websites, do not be surprised if your client wants to expand their horizons to include a blog. Although the style of writing is different from writing copy, you can probably make that transition with ease. Besides, if you are already familiar with the company and what they sell, you are a natural for blogging for them.

I’ll be blogging here as usual and on my other blogs, but also for James Allen. Please stop by when you get a chance to see what the James Allen blog is all about!

The day I quit making new blogs will probably be the day when I either come into a lot of money (and decide to pursue other interests) or I will have lost my eyesight. Well, I certainly do not want to experience the latter! The former would be nice though.

Over the past two months I have launched five new blogs, three of which I created within the past two weeks. I held off mentioning anything about these blogs because they are in various stages of development.

The new blogs are:

Debt2Assets – I bought this domain on a whim and decided to develop it by gathering together select articles from discontinued Blogspot blogs of mine that were gathering dust. The theme of this particular blog is to help people go from a life of debt to financial freedom. How they get there is up to them, but getting out of debt (or having control over debt) is where this blog is at. I should have the remaining articles moved over by February 2008.

Matthew Keegan — Gee, you think I would eventually develop a site based on my name, right? While “The Article Writer” is specific to one area of my business, my namesake site (which is barely registering) will reflect my entire business, not just article writing. What you see right now is barely more than a shell, but I have plans to overhaul and expand the blog after the first of the new year.

WordJourney — I bought this May 2000 registered domain earlier this month, seizing it because the name struck me — I have wanted to run a devotional blog based on Bible scripture and my personal, but inspired commentary. For people familiar with “Your Daily Bread” they will see something similar in style, but uniquely me. I hope to be able to update the blog 3-4 times each week.

That is it for now — I may have another blog rolling out soon and then I will take a break. Yes, 1 or 2 of my 7 blogs are “flip” material, but I do not have plans to move any blogs out of my portfolio at least for a few months.