Focus your efforts on the big picture

• Chris Guthrie
• My Sites, Personal, Practical ideas
• December 26, 2007
• 4 comments!

As a part time webmaster, you only have a certain amount of hours you can spend on the web building your business so it's really important to focus the time you have to work on your websites that have the most potential to pay off. Why start a bunch of little websites that take up your time and can ultimately lead to spreading yourself too thin? I asked myself this question when I took some time to look at the websites still hosted on my old shared account. Why did I even bother creating these websites?

Nearly a year ago when I got into buying domains and websites on NamePros.com I bought a little flash arcade site (I was making such terrible money at my previous job the $10 arcade was about all I could afford at the time. My thought behind the purchase was that I'd simply put little affiliate buttons on the side of all my video game based sites and use that traffic to make a little extra money off the arcade. Unfortunately, what I didn't count on was the time it would take for me to set up the website, get it transferred from the seller and place all of the buttons on my websites. And when I transfer this arcade to the new owner the total work will probably come out to about 4 hours or more. All this work for only $8.25 via Adsense for the website's 9 months of operation. Looking back, was it really worth the time to take the time to deal with transferring the site from the seller, learn how to use the new arcade script, apply and put arcade banner exchange buttons onto the site and now to transfer it to the new owner? It really wasn't worth the time and so this is why I recently decided to liquidate some of my really small sites that have not made me any money and just sit there reminding me of the time I wasted on low priority items.

As a part time webmaster it's important to focus on continually driving more traffic to your primary sites that are already set up and optimized and other sites that show great growth potential. Don't spend your time working on sites that already have a preset limited potential cap like a sub par arcade script site that can be found anywhere else on the web. If you find yourself working on new websites and the extra work load prevents you from providing the same amount of focus required to maintain your primary websites you have a problem. This is a mistake that I am focused on avoiding in the future; however, I hope some of you bloggers, forum admins and website owners will learn from my mistake.

Have you ever spent a lot of time on a website that showed little promise for growth and success? Or allowed the time you spent on a new website to take too much focus away from your key moneymakers?

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