Blow up your website? Why not?

There is a saying “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.  Well recently I decided to blow up a website I’d worked on for years. It took many iterations over the years but in recent years it got away from me, it lost its focus and direction so I shut it down. If you’ve ever run a website or blog, it usually starts with an idea, some excitement and a heck of a lot of work.  I’d done a lot of writing and work on it over the years but it got to a point where I said, does this still work for me to keep it going.  The truth is that it didn’t and it was time to change it up.  Now that’s not to say that the website was a failure.  Truth is, that it generated a hundred dollars a month at its peak mostly from affiliate marketing and paid reviews, educated countless people on websites and taught me a heck of a lot about running a website from dealing with malware, managing a web server, learning about php and mySQL, curating content, researching new ways and technologies to improve the website. It taught me a lot of things like…

• Search Engine Optimization
• Affiliate Marketing
• Developing content and pillar articles
• How to market content (that people actually want to read)
• Website analytics and data trend analysis
• and more

The shortcomings of the website as I look back to figure out why I lost steam over years of running it are best summed up with:

• Narrow focus – The site was definitely in a niche that interested me when I started it but it got to a point where I I’d learned so much and it was time for a change
• Too many iterations and a lack of focus – Because I’d made numerous changes to it over the years what it had started as was muddled with what it had become and it was probably confusing to people who read it

Now fast forward to today, I’ve been running UseTheForceLuc.com for a few years and this blog shows a lot of promise.  Its quirky, its fun and most importantly, its me.  I feel like this is a blog where I can just be me, write about the things I want to write about in my own voice and words.  After all the best blogs out there are successful for just that reason.