How to Change Your Website’s Focus (and do it Well) FS167

Are you wondering if if you’ve picked the right business topic? Thinking about changing to a new topic, but maybe you’ve already built something?

This is common. You come up with an idea, get to work on it and at some point down the line you get a sense that a different topic (or part of your topic) would be better to focus on.

In this episode we talk you through what you need to know to do a great job on a transition like this.

• What do you need to know about the new topic before switching?
• What questions should you ask yourself?
• How do you know when to trust your intuition or not?
• How can you switch without pissing off your existing audience?
• Have you planned enough about the new topic so it’s more likely to be successful?
• Plus some smooth jazz flute stuff… seriously, I’m way into it.

All of that in a totally unedited podcast episode (well, we do bleep the swear words) so you get everything; you won’t miss out on a thing.

This topic is just a great recalibration of business ideas in general. I think you’re gonna like it. Enjoy!

Alyssa’s Question

This question was brought about by Fizzle member Alyssa Barnes. Here’s some of our email correspondence broken up into the sections of the podcast.

FIRST PART:

First, I must confess that I am a huge fan of your antics….

When I started my blog about cowboy culture for newbies, I didn’t exactly know what I was doing, but my stuff was getting found and I began to build an audience. Now two years later, I have decent traffic to my blog, 13-15K visits a month (mostly search engine traffic), a 5K FB following and about 1500 subscribers to my email list.

But I have realized over the course of building this audience that there is a smaller subset of my audience that I specifically want to serve. So I have decided to start a new venture with much clearer (and shorter) paths to monetization.

MORE INFO: I want to target women specifically so I’d be cutting out a big portion of my existing audience. Plus, I have done some podcast episodes recently that are more geared toward this topic, basically helping women with the mental aspect of competing with horses. I’ve had feedback from women who love the new content and also feedback from people who don’t like the departure from my original stuff.

THE MISTAKE IN HER WORDS: I think my biggest mistake in the beginning was not nicheing down enough and not having a clear idea of how to make money. My initial vision was “art of manliness” for People who were interested in the cowboy lifestyle. But through all that I’ve done, I’ve discovered this subset of my audience, mainly women, who are either out there competing with their horses (or would like to be) and having serious confidence issues that are keeping them from winning. The rest of my audience (most of the traffic finding me from Google) just wants to know how to shape their cowboy hats and what boots to wear with what belt. So, pretty wide chasm there. And my bounce rate is like 85%. My website is earnyourspurs.com.

SECOND PART:

My dilemma is, what to do with what I’ve already built… Fellow fizzlers basically think I’m crazy for wanting to abandon what I’ve built as I could make money with it if I put the effort into it, but I’m afraid that maybe my heart isn’t really in it anymore.

The reason I’m reaching out to you specifically is, I’m curious about how you went about moving away from Father Apprentice. How did you decide you weren’t going to actively manage it anymore and why? And how did you go about “ending it?” I feel like I’m letting my audience down in a way, but I feel pretty strongly that this is the right move for me.

Any thoughts? Thank you! Alyssa

Show Notes

The Art of Manliness

Put Your Baby In The Crib Without Waking It Up – How To — Father Apprentice