Most Super Affiliate Handbook readers and Affiliate Blogger PRO members will be familiar with a personal blog of mine that was used as an example of an affiliate site until about a year ago.
The blog was called Roamsters and I had a lot of fun building and working on it.
It was the only one of my blogs where I could write about whatever I wanted… whenever I wanted. I posted mostly about my adventures near and afar, but the blog didn't really have a defined niche.
As a professional blogger / Super Affiliate, that removal of pressure to post regularly about a specific topic is a welcome change of pace.
It also introduced me to a whole new audience of people who shared my personal interests in travel, cool gadgets and shoes. 🙂
So, why did I kill it? Here are my reasons:
- Roamsters began life in 2006 as a joint project with my friend, Ed, who had recently retired and wanted to supplement his retirement income. Ed, however, never really ‘took' to blogging, so I soon found myself as the only contributor.
- Using the site as an an affiliate site example required that I maintain and upgrade the core and theme components when necessary. Not a big deal, but around the same time, StudioPress moved to the new Genesis Framework, so changing over to that and a new theme involved a bit of a learning curve.
- I also had to regularly check to make sure that the affiliate links were still valid and working. On a non-niched site where you are dealing with many different merchants and product types, checking and changing affiliate links and products can get time consuming.
- Attracting free search engine traffic to a blog without a specific topic is much more difficult than if all your posts are within the same niche. And because it was a hobby blog, I wasn't keen to use pay per click advertising to generate traffic.
- Another reason I didn't want to use PPC was because it got to the point where I didn't care if the site made money or not. Hmmmm… can you see a decided lack of motivation?
I already RosalindGardner.com, which at the time was being used as a business card site. Redirecting visitors from Roamsters would not only boost traffic, rankings and sales; but personal brand awareness as well.
That realization alone cinched the deal to kill the blog.
Combining the blogs would save time (time is money) and make more money — which is exactly what I did. I moved all relevant posts over to RosalindGardner.com.
Nowadays, if you try to visit Roamsters.com, it redirects to RosalindGardner.com.
The lesson?
Don't work on sites that don’t serve a real purpose or for which monetization is difficult. Kill it or combine it. Just do whatever is necessary to keep your blogging business and brand growing.