All too often you hear people complain that they arent getting results quick enough. Personally, I like to give a project (or a website) at least a year before making any major decisions as to whether its going to meet my expectations or not.

And if not, I generally never just axe one. I simply make changes and test other options.

-Lynn

I enjoyed your article, by the way. You brought up some great points, definitely thought provoking!

And Rae – “spring cleaning”, I like that! It sounds much better than “scrambling to organize the chaos I’ve created”

-Lynn

I think the key aim is to have long-term goals, and especially have at least a basic idea of how you think you should be able to monetise them – then offset early investment in outsourcing against that.

2c.

Besides, I’d never disagree with Lynn. It’s just not possible!

No matter how long you’ve been doing this or how much money you make, everyone has those abandoned sites. I live by baecamp and my whiteboards lately. I put up a ton of sites last year and never touched some of them afterwards. So this month and next is “no new sites month”. Seems we’re all in “spring cleaning” mode.

But ultimately I think that good project management skills and outsourcing are necessities for our sanity.

-Lynn

Here’s what I hear a lot of:
“I’m not making enough money from my website. I’m going to start something different so I can make money. What do you suggest?”

But when you ask them what they tried that wasnt working on the original website, the answer is usually: Nothing.

Going back and actively working on the original website is an easier and faster means of earning income online that starting new project after new project – without ever properly testing and tweaking any of them.

-Lynn

I checked out Alice’s post (thanks for the link – I’m behind catching up on my feeds this week!) and I actually thought you meant that we were contradicting each other drastically… until I went and read it.

It’s a great post, of course. Alice puts out some awesome tips! But just to clarify, we were speaking on completely different subjects.

Alice was talking about ways to expand on your current website. And I was talking about getting discouraged with your main website, and setting out to start on something totally new – leaving your original site/project to die a slow and unnecessary death.

Domain names are cheap, and they are great tools – for particular promotions, separating or sectioning out site elements, etc – but all too often people rack up 100 or more domain names and never actually fully develop any of them.

In my post above, I was trying to outline a way to manage each of your projects on an ongoing basis – instead of always being distracted with “the current passion”.

Thanks again for the link – that was a great read!

-Lynn

On the other hand, Alice Seba posted here that it is often a good idea to diversify!

Both of your posts, within a few days of each other, have me seriously thinking about my Internet Marketing future…

Balance is the key!

There is some mention of BaseCamp and TasksPro at this post on Rae’s blog for anyone interested.

-Lynn

I have started so many websites, and have lost interest – now I treat tham as a project, and project plan them properly by using Microsoft Project (or an Excel spreadsheet) plan each task you have to undertake and set yourself a deadline.

It’s worked with me – my newest project is nearly near completion and the actual site design took me a weekend to complete because I’d planned it all beforehand.