Chad

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For me, success is being able to build something sustainable without it owning all of your time. That means the option to say no, take time off, work on projects you care about, and shifting away from being 100% dependent on trading hours for dollars. If you're an entrepreneur reading this, you probably know that running your own business isn't a 9-5 gig, it can consume a lot of your time especially when you're a startup, you'll be spending 80+ hours a week doing a lot of the tasks yourself and wearing many 'hats'. It was definitely eye opening for me when I started the various businesses I've been involved with over the years. But freelancing is unique since you can 'moonlight' at first, do some work in evenings and weekends while you still have a traditional corporate job or are in school. That's how I personally started, I was freelancing while in school, throughout university, and even while I was working a corporate job before I transitioned to running my own agency full-time. To @Ryyyan 's point, revenue matters, but only to the point where it supports the life and work you actually want. If the business makes money but you are constantly stressed, taking clients you resent, or stuck chasing every new opportunity, that doesn't feel like success to me!

Hey Ryyyan! Welcome to WebInsiders! I'm glad you joined. Sounds like you have some great experience running blogs and forums. I wouldn’t give up yet on your sites, but I’d stop looking at the 3 sites as one big problem. Pick the one that still has the best signs of life and focus on that first. Can I ask what niches the two blogs were about? Maybe you can revive one of them by posting great content, maybe start a YouTube Channel to compliment the blog, YouTube is a great source of traffic and where a lot of your audience might be searching for things that used to visit your blog for answers. The drops you mentioned line up pretty well with Google updates. A lot of older blogs got hit hard around 2019/2020, then again in 2023. Especially sites that had older posts ranking for years, affiliate links, display ads, product-type content, or content that hadn’t been updated much. First thing I’d do is open Google Search Console and look at: which pages lost the most traffic whether impressions dropped or just clicks any indexing issues manual actions/security issues pages Google crawled but didn’t index For the blogs, I’d find the posts that used to make money and update those before writing anything new. Not just changing the date, but actually improving them. New info, better formatting, remove outdated stuff, add real experience/photos if possible, fix broken Amazon links, etc. You could use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to help you research and add new updated info, but be careful of the blogs sounds 'too AI' written. If nothing changes, then yeah, maybe it’s time to let one or two go. But I wouldn’t rage-quit all three without at least doing a proper cleanup first. Old domains with real history can still be worth something, but they usually need work, not just waiting. Hope that helps!

When it comes to affordability for performance, Hostinger has become my go-to recommendation, they are a really affordable hosting choice, great for WordPress sites, and their custom control panel is easy to use and their site loading speed is good for the price. They start at $10.99/mo USD regular price, but you can purchase their 48-month plan which, if you can afford it upfront, slashes the price to $2.99/mo for 4 years. That's crazy low for what you get. If you're looking for a really fast host with great support, but a bit higher cost, check out Kinsta. I have a few clients hosted with them, and they have a fantastic live support chat in their control panel, you can chat right away with expert techs who know systems like WordPress inside and out. Kinsta also monitors your site for malware every 3 minutes with their "Proactive site monitoring". If your WordPress site gets hacked with malware, they clean your site for you and fix it free included in your plan, which is a really great service that other hosts usually charge hundreds of dollars for. Their plans start at $30/mo for 1 WordPress site if paid annually ($350/yr), or $35/mo if paid monthly. DreamHost, I've had clients that host with them and their sites have loaded ok, but haven't used them personally. They look like a good value choice if you're hosting multiple WordPress sites, as their low tier plans allow for 25-50 sites. Hosting companies I would avoid from personal experience: Hostgator - affordable, but every client I've worked with that host WordPress sites with them that are more than a few basic pages, their site loads very slow, WordPress loads at a snail pace even in the admin backend, just a poor experience overall. You really do get what you pay for, and there are other hosts like Hostinger that are comparable price-wise but offer way better service in my opinion. Siteground - they were my #1 recommendation years ago, but I have been really disappointed in them in recent years. Their customer service isn't what it used to be, they make it more difficult to contact them. Their Help area pushes you to their automated AI assistant. I've noticed sites hosted with them loading slower than other competitors I've been using. TTFB (time to first byte) is lower than other hosts, which is important when you're optimizing for PageSpeed and Google SEO.

I wouldn’t say email marketing is dead, it's still working great for the clients I work with. But it's true that lazy email marketing is dead, if you aren't providing value to them first and just sending out promo emails they are going to land in the Promotions tab or spam folder. I'd recommend using email marketing for: 1) Retaining existing customers Email is often better for retention than cold acquisition. People who already bought from you are much more likely to engage with the emails. Send them valuable info that relates to the product(s) they purchased, so you stay top of mind, and then when your next product launches you can notify them about it and the email open rate will stay high. 2) Nurture sequences Instead of one-off promotional blasts, value-driven automated sequences work best. Start with useful/interesting information, then you can always include a sales CTA in the P.S. or at the bottom of the email. Just make sure the first few emails are super helpful, give away a downloadable resource for free that they didn't expect, surprize them with something high value. If every email is “buy now” people tune it out. But if the emails are useful, timely, or genuinely relevant, they can build trust over time.