Grow or Pivot?

[Etido]

I have a site in the general information niche. It gets about 250k uniques per month. I've gotten as high as $0.018 revenue per visitor. Traffic has kind of leveled off and I haven't been able to increase monetization much (currently Adsense + Media.net) over the past year.

I'm trying to decide whether to really double down on SEO or start a new project. The site is somewhat difficult to build links for (and monetize) because of the general information nature.

Any advice on when to keep pushing vs when to throw in the towel?

 

[Lewis]

I would ask myself if:

1) I enjoy the "general information" niche
2) I have the skills to grow it considering the difficulty with link building
3) Do I need to cash injection from a sale & what would I do with that cash
4) What project(s) I have on the backburner that excites me

I've recently been through the exact same scenario with a guy in my mastermind group and the more he spoke about it, the more obvious it was what his sub-conscience really wanted to do.

Try talking with a friend or a group of friends in this industry and as they throw questions at you, you will find yourself defending one option over the other...it will soon become obvious which is right for you.

Good luck.

 

[Etido]

This is good advice, thank you!

The niche is boring and I've considered selling the site but it is 95% passive for me at this point. I have a writer who produces new content, moderates comments and handles social media. In addition, I don't have a need or plan to deploy the capital from a sale.

For the time being, I think I will continue to learn more about link building and see if I can make any additional improvements. I'll also keep an eye out for new projects which would require some cash to get going.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Look into CPM networks and adding a waterfall (if you've truly tapped out the comments and traffic potential). You could easily squeeze out another $1 per 1000 pageviews, which sounds like it would 1.5x your profit.

 

[Etido]

I've tried several managed services that do this and header bidding (Ezoic, Sortable to name two). The issue is my Adsense RPMs are really high ($10-12 range) so they haven't been able to come close unfortunately.

The best service I've tried was Adpushup which is a multivariate Adsense split testing service. I got in on their beta and got a big boost. They now charge a pretty large % of your Adsense revenue, which I don't think is justified as you get most of your performance improvements in the first 30 days.