As webmasters, we constantly like to improve our websites; offer more features, upgrade to web2.0 design, put new content and improve the current ones. When do we say enough? When do we stop improving the site itself and start marketing it? These improvements cost money and there has to be a justification for it.
I believe for smaller websites (50k uniques/month or less) money well spent on marketing can bring much more revenue than the same amount spent on improving the features of the website. This is not to be mistaken for not investing on the website itself.
We need to set certain standards for our websites and make sure they are improved to such standards. We should not spent $1000 on marketing a website when the website doesn’t even have a unique design.
We have see many websites out there that look beautiful and work great but have little traffic and users. We also have seen many MFA (made for Adsense) sites with very bad designs that make large amounts of money.
Improve your site to a presentable level and start marketing. Make sure to market your websites to the type of visitors that it targets and can keep. If you have a Forex blog for Forex beginners market it on smaller finance forums and not on popular investing blogs or forums. Your money will be a waste as your website can not keep those visitors. It works the other way around too. If your website provides sophisticated advice, beginners wont be able to keep up so don’t market to them (even though it probably costs less).
The point that I hope you learn from this post is this:
If you own a website that is of a level 4 (out of 10) quality, it is perfectly fine. Invest money to market that website to level 4 visitors instead of improve the website to level 8. Once the website reaches level 8 you still need to spent money in marketing it before seeing true investment return – and level 8 marketing costs a lot more than level 4 marketing. So first market the level 4 website. Improve your earning from the site. Then invest on improving the quality of the website to level 5 or 6 and so on.
This way you won’t run out of cash when needing to market the website. If you do, you just might have to sell the website for much less than it is truely worth and we never want that.
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