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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Michael decide if he should start a new site or continue on with his domain and blog that has grown stagnant.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s question from Michael Taylor at Householdbudgetcoach.com
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
SHANE: What’s going on guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. Today’s question comes from Michael Taylor and Michael writes, “I’d like to restart my stagnant personal finance blog, Householdbudgetcoach.com. I am currently positioned as a personal finance coach but I’m considering rebranding and redoing my site copy, maybe a new URL too and creating an online personal finance course. Trading time for dollars as a coach has lost its appeal in my busy family life and full time job. Where should I start? Should I rebrand my site, start over or jump straight into creating my online course? Thanks.
JOCELYN: Hey Michael, thanks for your question. If I were you, I would not start all over again. Your domain name, Householdbudgetcoach.com is still okay for doing a personal finance course. That will work just fine. So what I would do is just work on getting the language about one-on-one coaching off of there and maybe adding in some information that people who were looking for a personal finance course will be looking for. So maybe you can write some blog posts, things like that that would bring you some traffic from the search engines and if you want to have sort of a new look and feel, I think it’s still okay on that same domain name that you have.
SHANE: I agree. I don’t think there’s any reason you should start completely over when you want to change the direction of your website especially since you are going to be talking about the same kind of content that you already are doing. You might as well just use whatever you’ve got. You can change the look and feel, maybe go hire a designer and just tell him to come in and say, change this, make it look better, put a fresh coat of paint on everything and then while they are doing that, you could just write 10-20 new blog posts on the side and as soon as your new site or your new look goes live on that same domain name, you can just put the new content out, let it roll out just like normal. Put it on a schedule and all of your old stuff is going to disappear into the background anyway. But you really don’t want to mess around with redirects, you don’t want to have to lose all of that search traffic that you have got from stuff that you’ve written before, you are still going to be getting traffic coming to your website off of your old posts. So instead of starting completely from scratch and having to sit there for a month or two, and get WordPress set back up and redo the entire site, it’s probably better if you just kind of come in like you never left and just start back where you left off at. Also, if you do have an audience that already came to your website, that already enjoyed your old content, just send them an email or put something up like, ‘Hey, new site, check it out!’ and then you might want to drop a hint and say, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about making an online course. I’d love for you to click this link and take a survey to tell me if this is something that you would want.’ Don’t just start making a course. Never start making a digital product without testing your audience first. If you have had this blog for a while, you can go ahead and ask the people that are already reading it or if you have already got an email list, you can pull them but do some kind of research to real people and ask them if that is what they want. You may think they want one product and they may want another. So, normally we would say yeah, start with your digital product but in this case, since you’ve already had a blog, it’s already there. It’s probably already got some traffic, there’s already somebody coming to it, you might want to go ahead and research that a little more through existing audience before you jump into a whole new course.
JOCELYN: All right Michael, so what we are trying to say here really is that you just need to do whatever works best for you. Don’t worry about it, don’t let it paralyze you where you are not taking any action at all. I think sometimes people do that because they are not really sure what to do so they decide not to do anything. Just don’t do that. Work on your course, spruce up your website if you want to, but just make sure it’s the direction you really want to go and if you have an audience, that they are onboard with the change as well.
SHANE: I agree. If you don’t want to do the coaching anymore, then go right now and delete everything that says that they can hire you for coaching. Jocelyn and I were doing a lot of consulting there for a while and we decided that was not what we wanted to do. So we cut it down to like one a week and then we basically do it to help people now just because we want to have some availability where people can get one-on-one coaching from us. But we didn’t want to do four calls a week so we said, we are not going to do it anymore and we just deleted that. I had a product on CoachXO that was selling pretty well; it was a weightlifting manual and I decided that I didn’t really want to push it this year because I didn’t want to deal with the customer service and I kind of just got away from that product, I didn’t push it anymore and I just let it go. I did a similar thing with CoachXO where I was writing a lot of articles and did a podcast for the website and I didn’t really feel like it was helping the brand or it was the direction that I needed to go. So, I stopped doing the podcast for CoachXO.com, I stopped writing articles and I turned it more into a social network and a forum where people could talk instead of me having to write all the content about football. So there’s no right or wrong answer. Anything you do online will probably work over the long term. You just have to take action and do something. So like Jocelyn said, if you want to make a course, do it. If you want to rebrand your site, you want a new URL, do it. Whatever you feel like is in your gut is right, that’s probably the correct answer.
JOCELYN: Thanks Michael, I hope that that answers your question. If you would like to answer – if you would like to ask us a question, head on over to FlippedLifestyle.com/QASJ and we’ll see you next time.
SHANE: Bye.
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