In Oct/07 I had an idea for an website to fullfill a need in one specific market niche. I built the site and launched in jan/08 with only a basic mouth-to-mouth advertisement. By ago/08, I was getting a few new users, good feedback but traffic was mediocre at best. I decided to pull the plug on the site given my lack of time and the poor traffic.
Ok , for those who are still here, here is my question: I still think the idea is very good, lots of people ask me what happened to the site. Should I relaunch it? with a different name perhaps?
I appreciate any comments and would like to hear if anyone has been in the same situation.
You initially said it was your lack of time and poor traffic that killed off the site…has your situation changed now or is this something you still don’t have time for?
Also consider that people asking what happened to the site and actual visitors or members are two different things.
If it’s a project you personally like and would do it even if you never got a member or made a dollar from it then go for it, but if you want to make this a commercial success, you need to carefully consider the time and money you can afford to invest in it.
of encouragement… I will probably have more time available in a month or so. Then, I will try to relaunch with a different name, same features. And this time I will leave it running. Forever.
Well if people are asking for it, why change it around? I don’t think you need to change anything about it, given the short description in the OP. It also sounded like the only thing you lacked was traffic.
If people are requesting it, there’s obviously demand, however small. And it seems like that demand is only small because of the lack of traffic. So, since the site fills a need of a niche, and does so fairly well if people want it back, then get it going again and go to that niche and blow up the traffic
if people are asking for it then it must mean that people liked it. and when people are interested in a website, that could mean good things, such as earnings, for the site owner… you can relaunch it with the same name but you can update or change the theme or something. you can then say that you made some improvements that is why you left it out for a while… its good if you will use the same domain as old domains. most people say, is a factor in ranking well with Search Engines.
Before you spend your time find out if there is a real interest in the product service. If you had little traffic earlier, it could be due to two reasons. one is your sites SEO issues. lot of people looking for it, but they couldn’t find you. Thats a problem you can fix. If the low traffic was due to the fact not many people were looking for it, you are better off spending your energy elsewhere.
For starters look at the volume of searches based on your main keywords.
It doesn’t make sense to have super product in a niche very few people cares. people asking you about is just anecdotal evidence of interest. Dont proceed just based on it.
