It’s everyone’s dream when it comes to making a website – making one that brings in lots of traffic and has a positive return on investment. 
The reality of this, though, is very similar to that of businesses: people think they are sometimes good ideas, but completely fail and flop, whilst others hit the ‘sweet spot’ and succeed beyond any wildest dreams. The truth of the matter with making websites is that there are always going to be failing websites and successful websites. For one, I have created over 8 websites in my lifetime and, as of now, only three can be considered true successes – 38% is a bad rate of success! However, there are some steps you can take to make sure you create websites that succeeds. Learning from experiences, here are some of them.
When You See Signs of a Failing Website, STOP
This is, by far, the most important step to creating a successful site – sounds weird but concentrating your efforts not where it will work is the first step to success. Preventing yourself from putting time, effort and money into a failing website will allow you to allocate it to other opportunities that are more likely to succeed. The problem with many people is that they struggle to understand what a failing website looks like, as opposed to a successful website.
To help with this, I thought it would be a good idea to go through all of my websites, to give an appreciation of why I stopped the ‘fails’:
- AskWillOnline.com – success – a website dedicated to revision content for students and blogging tips. Gains lots of organic targeted traffic and has always been a solid success due to that – relies on a new batch of students wanting revision help every year.
- Tweetaway.net – fail – a website dedicated to Twitter tips. Bubbly and qwerky theme, but lacked the high quality content to help it differentiate from competition. ‘.net’ in domain name did not help too.
- F1insight.co.uk – fail – a website on revision help/informative articles on F1 and motorsport. Failed due lack of demand for articles to make it succeed.
- RestoringMamods.com – success – a website dedicated to restoring a certain type of steam model engine. Regarded a success as allowed me to see the popularity in people wanting to restore the engines, hence the book I wrote on the topic sold well.
- techrigs.com – fail – A website dedicated to technology tips. Failed due to saturated market already.
- appleipadnewscentral.com – fail – a website to Apple to news. Failed due to a saturated market already.
- educashtion.com – fail – a website dedicated to articles of short tips and tricks to make money, in an intuitive theme (sliding right and left to quickly read through cards). Theme was plagued with problems and articles didn’t hold enough SEO/content to gain traffic.
- PoemAnalysis.com – success – a website dedicated to analyzing poetry. Very unique and high quality content means websites gains lots of traffic.
When you See Signs of Success, CONTINUE
The biggest regret I have from this list is educastion.com, simply because I saw warning signs early on that I thought would improve. Whenever you start a website and see warning signs and potential problems, ask yourself truthfully if you can ever fix it. If you cannot, take a cut to your pride and end the website – you will have other ideas and websites to create and, just like me, one, two or three of them can be winners. When they do, use that to your advantage. For example, PoemAnalysis.com was created from using AskWillOnline.com as market research: the top articles gaining the most traffic on AskWillOnline.com was poetry.
