Last year I started three new websites and dubbed them site 6, site 7, and site 8. If you remember, they were all in the same general niche but just broken apart into sub niches. Each sub-niche was plenty big on its own to be an individual site. The plan was to grow each one of them into a stand alone site that I would eventually monetize with ads on Mediavine or Adthrive. Well… plans have changed.
I’ve decided to combine all three of these sites into one. Well, actually I already did. I spent part of the last two days registering a new domain, building a site, and doing all the things involved in merging sites together.
Why did I do this?
The site’s weren’t growing quite like I hoped. Each one of them was at least 6 months old, which is still young, but many of the posts weren’t even indexed yet. I would at least expect the majority of urls to be indexed at this point even if they weren’t ranking. Site 6, which was about 8 months old, was actually doing ok and fast approach 2k visitors/month.
However, the other tow sites were lagging way behind. Though they did have half as many posts. Regardless, I made the decision and it’s done. I don’t regret it, it was the right choice for many reasons.
I also wanted to trim the fat off my portfolio. Not including this site, or the gaming site (that I likely won’t continue with… oops!), I have 6 sites total. I am also strongly considering selling site 3, the one I purchased in March of 2021 for $7k.
That site has been slowly but surely growing and will reach 50k pageviews in the last 30 days soon. So I’ve pretty much doubled traffic over the last year. If I’d put more energy into it I could have done better, but it was a side project.
Anyway, once that site is sold and gone it will live me with a lean portfolio of 5 sites. All 5 sites I created myself and I’m proud of. Each one has amazing potential and can be grown to the moon. I’m going to try and limit myself to those 5 sites only for the foreseeable future, having multiple sites really makes focusing difficult. No promises though, every 6 months or so I seem to not be able to help myself. We’ll just have to see, but that’s the plan.
Recap of the sites
Site 6
Posts: 62
Traffic: around 1.7k/month
Earnings: monetized with Amazon, earning a little from a couple of ranking of affiliate roundups
Site 7
Posts: 32
Traffic: around 1k/month
Earnings: monetized with Amazon, a few sales
Site 8
Posts: 34
Traffic: around 750/month
Earnings: monetized with Amazon, a few sales
The new site
The new site is in a niche one level up from the above three. Now I have a site with just 3-4 categories and 128 posts instead of 3 small sites. I have already set up all of the redirects and done everything that needs to be done. It’s completely built and branded. Now it’s time to wait.
Plans for the site
As mentioned, it has 128 posts as of now. I don’t plan on adding any more content at the moment. I’m going to let it sit for a few months so Google can get to know the domain. I’m already tracking all the keywords for the new domain, that were being tracked on the old domains. I’ll keep an eye on their rankings.
Eventually though, I’m going to continue growing the site. It has the room to grow into a big site. Once site 3 is sold, I hope this site along with sites 4 and 5 will quickly pick up the slack and then some. Rather than make call this new domain site 9 or something, I’ll probably just shift everything backwards to keep the lineup nice and clean with no gaps.
I’ll update this ever-changing case study as things develop.