This story goes way back in time. In November 2018 (a repost from November 2014), I wrote an article titled Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thin. In that post, I talked about how sometimes we all try to do too much, and how I had way too many things going on, especially with all the travel I was doing at the time.

I’m tired…

I listed some things to think about, but point #4 was especially telling, though most people seemed to have missed it:

Don’t be afraid to let go of certain things, but make sure you look at it from all sides first before doing it.

For those who don’t know me, I have a main business, even though I also have a part time job locally to bring extra income into the house. With the main business, which is incorporated (which means, by law, that officially I’m both the president and CEO of my organization), I had basically 3 business divisions, two of which I market from my business website.

First off, I’m a health care finance consultant. In essence, I help hospitals generate more revenue and bring in more cash while making sure they stay compliant, which means aren’t doing things that are illegal. I’m very good at that, with my biggest success being that I helped one hospital increase their revenue by $730 million in one year, which meant they generated more than a billion dollars that year; not many people can say that. 😀

Second, I write about and talk about leadership issues, which includes diversity, communications, and all things that involve employees and, well, people in general. From that part of the business, I’ve spoken in 9 states and given presentations on those and health care subjects. If you didn’t notice (cough), I’ve listed 2 books and a CD (I probably need to take that down one of these days).

Third… I had a business called SEO Xcellence. The purpose of that business was building websites, doing SEO work and writing articles for others. Because of that business I presented in public 4 or 5 times locally and, well, some of you know that I’ve written for lots of folks other than myself, and still do even now. It was an actual business; I added it to my corporation, which meant it got its own tax breaks.

Let’s talk about the above business.

It started kind of on a whim. I gave a presentation to a consulting group I belonged to as a last minute replacement because our scheduled speaker notified us she couldn’t make it. In one day I put together a presentation on social media marketing (a day after I gave a health care finance presentation for a local organization I was still president of), and I gave that presentation the day after. It was such a hit that within a week, 3 of the people in that room were clients of mine.

That was quite a rush! Over the course of the next few years I’d build some websites for people and organizations, optimize them, and write some of their content. It was a nice way to make some extra money when I wasn’t traveling as much, which came as we changed presidents and the economy was in the tank. Hospitals weren’t hiring consultants, companies weren’t doing any leadership training, organizations weren’t hiring speakers outside of their area to save on costs… but writing gigs were everywhere.

Over time, it got tiring building websites for myself and others, and it also wasn’t overly economical anymore. I’m not a designer; I build basic websites that tell the story of a business; in other words, SEO friendly sites. These days, websites are either templates or themes, both extremes from what I do, and I just don’t have the time to keep up with the technology.

I still know SEO, but marketing it to people who have no idea what it is and learn that it doesn’t necessarily conform to ROI (return on investment) like other businesses do was very difficult. Frankly, it’s hard enough marketing my health care talents without trying to figure out how to market for something that, based on a person’s business, might not work for them.

So, I stopped marketing overall, but I kept up with blogging. Not as much as with this blog, but I was still putting out the articles on some kind of schedule. Over the years I was really spreading myself thin; no one can say I was just sitting around, waiting for something to happen.

I had a website called Services and Stuff; it had two specific goals, which was offering free business listings on one side, and selling… well… stuff… on the other. Affiliate marketing was a big deal at the time, and I made it look as nice as possible… remember, I’m not a designer, and I don’t do pretty. But it made some money, I sold some stuff, I helped a few people find a place to list their business and it helped all of us increase our traffic.

I had a website called Top Finance Blog; I bought the domain name from someone else I’d come across who decided he was tired of writing on the subject (there’s a pattern here; have you followed it?). Truthfully, I was shocked at the knowledge I’d gained over all the years I was writing it. I made pretty good money off it; not enough to live on by itself, but it definitely helped sustain the household. I’ll be coming back to this one in a moment.

I had a website called Reviews of Everything… which meant I reviewed everything! lol Well, I reviewed things I knew something about, which meant books, movies, products, etc. I made almost no money from it, but I gave it two years.

I also had another site called Smoke Not So Much; if you can’t guess, it was anti-smoking. lol I started that site because a guy asked me to write 20 articles on the topic of stopping smoking. I shared 2 articles with him after I wrote all 20, and he said he wanted to see all of the articles and decide which ones he wanted. It felt like a scam, so I told him no, bought a new domain name and there you go. I ended up writing maybe 34 articles in total… then I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to say. It was up for maybe one full year before I shut it down; it needed to go!

Finally, I created a website called Medical Billing Answers… because I did! lol It’s main purpose was to work on driving more traffic to my business website and blog, as well as offer the public general information on medical terms and services throughout the country. I’d write relatively short articles separate from the initial titles to improve SEO, listed ways patients and anyone else looking for health care finance related topics to reach out to me, added it to Google to generate a little bit of income from that and it was good to go.

As you can see, I had lots of properties. I made some money from all of them except the smoking website. Then I got my last gig in Memphis, and I was gone for basically 18 months. Some of my blogs and websites started to suffer.

for 2 years you could only buy this apple
in central NY and the Southern Tier;
it was wonderful!

My local central New York blog probably suffered the most, but that was okay because it’s a personal blog. My finance blog started to suffer as the quality of guest posts, which I made a lot of money off, kept getting worse, and I didn’t have the time to read and fix all that stuff and still, hopefully, write my own articles here and there.

The blog on SEO Xcellence (yes, it had its own blog; ugh!)? Truthfully, many of the articles I wrote there worked just as well on this blog. The differences were twofold, but neither major. One, the audience for that blog was, hopefully, business people who might be looking to hire someone to do the services that I was writing about. Two, most of those articles were much shorter than things I’d put on this blog. I’ve mentioned on this blog in the past about how what you write changes depending on who you’re writing for.

Anyway, during my week at home over Labor Day week in 2015, I came to a decision that it was time to shut down SEO Xcellence for good. As an act of serendipity, while thinking about it that week I got the notice from GoDaddy telling me that the domain would expire in the middle of December.

That’s pretty perfect timing if you ask me. What I did next was go to the blog and highlight articles I thought I could use on this blog. Then slowly, over time, I moved all those posts over to this blog and saved them as drafts. I also went and looked at any articles I thought I could use here and saved them as well.

Whenever I did that I immediately made those posts private on the SEO blog. I did that because I knew that after some time they’d drop off the search engine’s record, meaning that when I re-posted them over here I’d be good, and there wouldn’t be any question of duplicate content. Actually, since all my sites are on the same server and under the same account I might not have taken a hit anyway, but why take chances right?

How many articles did I move? Well, let me just say that many articles you’ve seen over the last few months started over there, and if I decided just to pop what I brought over here up twice a week until they were gone, I wouldn’t have to write another post until the first week of May. Now that’s valuable stuff!

But I wasn’t done. Eventually I shut down my finance blog; then I changed my medical billing blog into a training site… that one broke my heart, so I’m leaving it alone for now.

slimmer_jimmer via Compfight

Shutting down all those other websites and the other business took a great load off my mind; it was timely because I realized within a few months that I needed to start worrying more about my mother. Meanwhile, at the time I said I would never build another website unless it’s for myself or a friend; I ended up building 3 websites for others, one for me that I’ve finally shut down; people these days want pretty instead of inefficient; I’m too tired for that.

If I get writing gigs, I’ll get them because of this blog. If I get asked to speak at another conference, it’ll be because of this blog (actually, that part’s not true; I had two training gigs regarding blogging, but did a seminar on leadership and diversity locally because of my business blog and website 🙂 ).

I’m not the first person to shut down a blog or a website, but I’ve seen many people do it, go on to something else, and not think about the content they have on that site. I’m also not the first person to shut down a business, as many of my friends have done over the last 9 or 10 years. It’s not an easy thing to do but sometimes it’s necessary.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I’ll be thinking about more things as time moves on. Focus needs to be my goal because my eventually wished-for outcome is to have at least $1 million in the bank in the next 5 years; it used to be $10 million in 10 years, but 9 of those have passed; cursed life! Yeah, it’s pretty audacious; but remember, every rich person who made it on their own started with a dream. 🙂

And I can resume trying to build the audience up for this blog again; yay! Let me know what you think when you have the time.
 

Can I help your business or blog with some of the services I offer?

© December
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