Downsizing Your Blog or Business to Expand Growth Once You’ve Refocused

Previously, I explored several ways that you could leverage your readers to promote your site and brand to achieve more by providing more services to readers.  Now, I’ll take an alternative approach to this topic and explain when it’s better to downsize your blog (remove services) to improve visitor readership and continue to grow your blog.

First of all, everyone mistakes.  They are bound to happen.  When you notice that one of the services that you’ve been working on hasn’t become successful from whatever standpoint you have taken - profit or membership, it may be time to call it quits.  

Dropping one of these services can be a hard decision to make, but in the end, it must be done, or you will continue losing money/visitors as you simply can’t provide the necessary support and/or resources to continue the operation.

A seemingly simple tool that you have added to your site such as a forum may become more cumbersome than a truly worthwhile addition.  If you can no longer provide members support and answer comments, respond to suggestions, or update the forum on a regular basis, then it may be time to “drop” the idea of the tool.

While many tools added to sites or services that are sub-sites of a larger brand can be beneficial at first to members and visitors, the effect over the long-term may become less than ideal to new members if you do not find the resources (financial and time-wise) to continue keeping the service updated.

We’ve seen this plenty of the times, more often than not, in the online sphere of companies who have invested a lot of time and funding into starting a new company and leaving the members to run the site after their funding became exhausted.  The members that were faithful to the program since day one were left out of the equation, and ended up without a once seemingly useful site/program.

I don’t like referring to any single website or group of people, as I apply these basic business/blog management tips to any blog, but it you notice that one of the add-ons to your site hasn’t had such “hot” results with visitors, then you may be better off completely removing it and moving onto another project.

One of the main advantages of downsizing is that it frees up time and resources to focus on your core business at hand, likely blogging and producing new content.  Removing a forum leaves you extra hours each week to respond to more comments on your blog, grow your blog, then refocus on growing the services that will help expand your blog in the future.