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.

After just over one month of doing the “Entrecard thing” I have decided to pull the plug.

All right, let me rephrase my statement: After using Entrecard for the past five weeks on five different blogs, I removed the Big E’s widget from the sidebar of this blog and on my automotive blog. I’m still running Entrecard on three blogs, but I’m only accepting new ads on one of them.

My reasons for cutting back on Entrecard are many and include the following:

Entrecard takes up a lot of time. Yes, there were a few days where I hit the 300 limit for one site (600 total drops for all sites) and I realized two hours had gone by. Time carefully expended in exchange for a small amount of fleeting traffic — not good!

Quite a few sites were dead or rarely updated. I don’t mind visiting blogs but there has to be something new for me to read. I rather not drop and run, but if there isn’t anything else for me to do, why should I visit an aged or neglected blog in the first place?

Newer blogs benefit, but for older blogs it can be a drag. Don’t get me wrong if you found this blog via Entrecard and are now a regular reader — thank you and please stay! But, the quality of the blogs submitted for advertising here just hasn’t measured up.

Bait and switch. I know that I shouldn’t depend on power dropping sites for my supply of websites to visit, but they can be useful to find blogs to visit and drop cards on. Unfortunately, some sites are suddenly converted to porn or other senseless babble, sullying Entrecard in the process. What a shame.

Of course, there are some benefits to Entrecard including:

Newer sites. I launched Auto Trends last month and got more than 1100 visitors from Entrecard alone. Add in all of my digging, stumbling, and propelling and the site got off to a nice start. It remains the only site where I am still accepting ads to this day.

Networking. Some of the bloggers I have met have been friendly and helpful, the usual trolls notwithstanding. I’m sure many of the more active users are also active elsewhere and our paths will cross again and again.

Please don’t take this as a slam of Entrecard as it isn’t — Entrecard just isn’t working that well for me. After this month I may remove the widget from one or two other sites and I’m not planning to resume regular card dropping on a consistent basis.

My time is valuable to me and dropping cards doesn’t seem to add value to my time.

Further Reading

Entrecard and Other Internet Mysteries

Entrecard Notes, Update 1

Entrecard Notes, Update 2

Jennifer at Catalyst Blogger had a provocative post (at least it provoked me to write this post) mentioning that she has been toying with the idea of offering some sort of guarantee for her work. I won’t explain each of the options she suggested, but I immediately shook my head in disagreement when I began to read her article.

Instead, I shared with her how I handle the writing submission/approval process, one that helps me avoid guarantees, whether expressed or implied:

• If a customer is dissatisfied with my work before my final submission, then I do what it takes to make the work acceptable to them.

• Once a job is finished, my work is done and I expect my final payment to be made. If the customer comes to me after the fact and asks that additional changes be made or if they are unhappy with the results, then they must pay for the work I do over and above the original project.

In early 2007, I had dealings with a doctor who was unhappy that his press release didn’t bring in the results he wanted. It was well written (’natch) and submitted to a leading PR distributor, but it wasn’t the springboard to new customers he thought it would be. He didn’t ask for a guarantee for future work and I never broached the subject. We parted ways which was fine as I sensed that he wanted me to give to him something (customers) I couldn’t deliver.

I work with four excellent clients right now who know what kind of work that I provide, what I can deliver, while leaving the results to them. I cannot worry about people who are dissatisfied after the fact, but I’ll do what must be done before we both sign off on the final copy.