Although i tend to float between projects, i do spend some time on all of them about once a month. Updating plugins, checking stats, making sure they’re all online 
So i know all of my sites and i don’t usually forget about them – quite the opposite. Even though i might not be physically working on them, i do spend quite a bit of time thinking about ways to improve them. Or even just thinking to myself – ‘i really should start working on that site’.
But i know that to you guys, there are a lot of ‘forgotten’ projects – projects that i’ve mentioned a few times on this blog but then they’ve just disappeared. Here’s just a few of them and here’s how they’re doing traffic wise;
Famous Nerd
Small niche site with about 10 articles on famous nerds. Built in August 2008 and left intact since then. It gets a steady trickle of traffic as you can see from last months stats;
Face Arse
Another niche site which was set up as a sort of news / parody version of a certain large social network. I last worked on this last summer (2009). Like famous nerd, it still gets drips and drabs of traffic monthly.
Chrome Guide
I was very quick to buy this domain the day Google Chrome was announced way back in september 2008. I knew Chrome had massive potential and i was on to something good with that domain. Recently i’ve switched over to chrome as my main browser thanks to their new extensions so i’ll you’ll be seeing more of chrome guide this year (although i probably won’t have the time to work on it until the summer).
Charity Bypass
The controversial one. I set this up last summer (2009) and haven’t done much with it since. It has shown potential and you’d be surprised just how anti charity some people can be I still think this has a lot of potential, purely for it’s novelty factor but i’d probably have to make it more of a social network for it to work properly… this is a site i’d love to work on if i had the time.
Hotels Revealed
Another niche site which i HAVE to do more work on. Much like theleavingcert.com maybe 6 months ago, this is a site just waiting to go places. I’m 100% confident this site can grow and grow but again it probably needs to be community driven in order to fulfill it’s potential. I built this one quite literally step by step right front of your own eyes, which shows how easy it is to do. Actually sitting down and doing it is the hard part (for me anyway).
I Want Ideas
This is probably one website which will never work they way intended it to. A place where people can rate and share ideas and submit their own. The traffic is pretty fascinating though on this site – people spend a lot of time on it and seem to view quite a few ideas which suggests the site can grow, but only if i keep supplying all the content (ideas!). A one man community isn’t what i had in mind when i created the site but none the less i hope to give this a makeover too this summer.
The reason i included traffic stats for all of the above sites was to show that even without any effort or updating, they’ll all still bringing in traffic. Most of it from search engines. No matter how obscure or ridiculous a product or a niche might sound to you, people are searching for it. Constantly.
Of course the volume of searches will dictate whether or not it’s worth building and maintaining a site, but more often than not online you can’t sit back and look and stats and do your market research etc… It doesn’t work that way.
For example, who would have known there was a huge audience out there who love funny pictures of cats? Or a huge audience who hate xfactor so much they’d buy an alternative single just to stop it getting to no.1?
Sometimes you just don’t know an audience exists until you start performing & experimenting…