Evaluating my ways of working is part of being self-employed, so it is something that I like to do on a regular basis.  I make a lot of notes, and have a lot of thoughts, and eventually put some plans into action.

I started reducing – or should I say concentrating – my websites and domains a year ago.  Over the years some of those ideas that I had, actually made it into reserved domain names.  But then, for whatever reason, the project did not get off the ground.  A few years ago I consolidated these domains into a single package, and last year every one of them got re-evaluated.  The first step: cost reduction.  Each of these domains was costing me a small mount of money each year, so if they were not doing anything, and not even earning me some advertising revenue from being parked somewhere, then I really did need to decide whether the project would ever happen.

I cancelled around 70% of those domains during the course of 2018, so that they did not renew automatically.

At the end of 2018 I then started looking at the statistics and earnings of some of the websites that I no longer write for.  Again, was there a reason to keep them? [Read more…]