Murphsy.com was not always an online marketing blog. In fact, it wasn’t a blog at all. A few months ago www.murphsy.com was a mobile phone review site. And I was deeply in love with it. A few brands (including Nokia, HTC and Sony Ericsson – thanks you guys!) sent me review samples. This enabled me to play around with new gadgets, without spending money. The website was well-read. On most days I’d have 250 to 350 visitors. Monthly I’d reach ten thousand eyeballs. It was quite satisfying. One monday a while back I deleted the whole website, this is it’s story:
Act I: The prologue
You might not know it by reading my articles, but I spend a lot of time writing this stuff. A full article typically costs me around 6 to 8 hours to write. If I recall correctly Murphsy.com contained at the end somewhere between 90 and 120 articles. The Waybackmachine from Archive.org shows a first indexation on january 22 2009. In reality I created the site at the 22nd of october in 2008. So in the three years I was building the website I spend at least 540 hours on the content. Ofcourse I also did the design, development and other related stuff. A thousand hours? It might not be too far off.
I hear you asking: what did you get in return? Not much, really. I was spending my spare time investing in a website that really only existed because it could. I loved the website and I got some great feedback on some of my articles. It felt nice to be building something. I was happily spending my time on the site. All was well. Until a new project came along…
Act II: Confrontation
A more commercial friend of mine saw what I was doing with my website and approached me with a proposal: lets build something together. And, being the commercialist, he came with a goal: make some money! We got of to a flying start, with me already having a lot of experience and him streamlining the proces. And soon there were two websites. But still just one me.
I had to chose.
Even after three years Murphsy.com simply wasn’t making any money. I had (have!) a great job, so money wasn’t my priority. But with the new website starting to earn some steady income the comparison was turning very bleak for Murphsy.com. Other than that I was noticing how working together on a project helped me staying focused and added a whole new layer of fun and learning.
But I was still way too attached to the site to let it go. So I invested time in trying to monetize. Which didn’t work out at first. I invested some more time to try to monetize it using different methods. I went affiliate. I went adsense. I went pricecomparison. I tried it all. I spend nearly all my time during half a year on trying to monetize te site. It was solidly refusing to make any money.
Spending all this time on Murphsy.com meant my coop-project wasn’t getting a lot of my attention. The growth started to stagnate. Now I had two websites not going as I wanted. And both not reaching the goals I (we) had in mind. Motivating myself was getting harder. What’s the point in working on websites that are failing you?
Frustrating!
Act III: Resolution
In a final leap of faith I overhauled the whole styling and layout of Murphsy.com. I spend days redesigning the complete site. Results after two months? Nada. Yet still I couldn’t let it go. As long as the website was online it was going to pull my attention towards it. By this time I knew I should be focussing on our new project. I decided to take a drastic measure. FTP > select ALL > delete, bye!
It was fun while it lasted, but I lost sight of my goals: creating a site which was making money. I couldn’t keep focus with both sites online. The moral of this story? Sometimes you have to kill your darlings to do something better.
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