It’s easy to think that if you want to have a portfolio of website assets, you need to turn up every day to work on them, or work 9-5 to maintain them.
This is a common question Liz and I get all the time, people seem to think we need to turn up every day and work on our sites as if its a PAYG job.
The great news is with websites they do not require daily maintenance (in general) – this is why we refer to them as being semi-passive or passive websites.
So what do we do to maintain our websites?
How much does it cost and how much time does it take to maintain our websites?
Today, we show you 3 key things we do to maintain our websites – click on the video below…
Does maintaining websites take a lot of work?
Matt: So, a really common question today. How and what is it that you do to maintain your websites? We get asked this all the time. We take it for granted.
Liz: So, very simple. In fact, for the websites that we buy, we only focus on ones that take very little maintenance. So, we don’t buy ourselves high maintenance, complicated websites.
Matt: You can if you want to work hard!
Buying websites that are easy to maintain is the first secret
Liz: But we buy WordPress websites that are easy to maintain. Basically, they make their money by ranking in the search engines.
So, what they need to do is rank in search engines. When someone types a question around a particular topic the website’s about, then one of the pages in this website will come up.
Maintenance Tip #1 – Create a good quality content plan
In order to do that, we need to get good content on the website. So, the main thing that we do to maintain websites, is to have content written. Now we don’t actually write the content. Instead we focus on having the right knowledge. We do the research about what content needs to go on there. And what questions we want answered by the website.
Matt: So, if we buy a website, we will typically go in and research the website’s niche, and the topic around it. And then what we like to do is come up with a 12-month content plan.
So, we create a plan around that, and we do that through keyword research. We look at the key words that we’re going to use on the website, and the topics that the website’s going to cover.
We spend the time doing the research, and to me that’s really good fun! I love going into a brand-new niche that we know nothing about, researching the niche, and coming up with a content plan. And we just work backwards from there. From there we determine that we’re going to post X number of articles each month.
Liz: And it might be one a month. Or it could even be less. It depends on the size of the website.
Matt: I often have a plan too, because we like to keep our websites for a long time. Often, I am actually planning it out over a couple of years, because you don’t want to post all your content at once. You just don’t need to.
“Have a website content schedule”
There are a lot of people out there that post tons of content, and then they get bored and run out of steam. We don’t do that. We plan it out over a year. In an ideal world (say on the smaller sites), you might only be posting good content once or twice a month. And that’s all that’s needed.
Liz: And the price of good content (articles) can be anywhere from a dollar per hundred words. So, for a good 700 to 1,000-word article, could start from $7 – $10. But we will pay up to $50 or $60 for a good article.
And sometimes, depending on the niche (if it needs a bit of extra research), you could pay up to $100 or more for an article if you wanted to. But again, it’s a “choose your own adventure”. It depends on what niche it is, and what level of content you want to put on the website. What it needs to maintain its rankings and the traffic coming in. It may not need to be that complicated.
Matt: But these days, the good news is, a lot of success online now revolves around good content. And when you know how to research and plan it, from there you can outsource the rest of it too. There are wonderful writers out everywhere. We’re seeing especially with print media dying, there’s so many journalists you can hire now.
Maintenance Tip #2 – Have good technical people on call
Liz: And the only other things that you need to think about for maintaining a website, aside from content is the technical stuff. We always have a technical person on call to help.
So obviously, we’ve got technical people, but you can actually hire them on places like Upwork for a half-hour job (or a small technical job). You don’t have to hire them full-time. And we’ve found some of our students have been hiring them from US$5 an hour up to US$30 an hour. We personally pay around US$10 – US$15 per hour (occasionally up to $30 for a very good technical person).
Maintenance Tip #3 – Managing images on your website
And then, the other thing may be images. That’s something you really need to be aware of online. You don’t just copy images out of Google. If you’re going to use an image, you need to make sure it’s not got copyright, or otherwise you can pay for a royalty-free image. Now those are anywhere from a couple of dollars, up to US$10.
So, the costs of maintaining a website are not high. The majority of our website income comes in as profit. And that’s the awesome thing about having websites. And that’s how you maintain a website. So, if you’ve got any questions about it, just let us know.
Great article, thank you
Some great simple tips. Thanks.