Looking for advice regarding the next steps to take with my website

Bugatti

I've created a niche review website. It's been live since January 2019. I've got a full time job and this has only ever been a side project. But I'm at a bit of a crossroads with the website now. On average I'm getting about 75 unique visitors per day. I know that's a very low number but I'm spending nothing on marketing/advertising. I could keep going like this but I don't see the point in that if there's little or no returns. Or I could seek investment. I do think with a proper budget there is a great opportunity to get the site ranking well for potentially thousands of keywords.

In terms of generating revenue, the site could do this through multiple sources. Firstly is by placing ads on the site. I'm already using Adsense. Secondly, each listing on the site have their own page, and on some of these pages I will be able to have affiliate links. Third, I've also created "Featured" sections. In the future I'd like to charge a fee to have a listing appear in the Featured section.

Realistically is a site like this something I could get investment for? As mentioned marketing is the key area that needs funding. But if I was going to take this to a wider audience I'd also need to get a more experienced developer to "polish up" some parts of the site. I know the obvious answer is to speak to my local Enterprise Ireland office. And I probably will do that. But I'd also like to get the opinions of this forum in terms of where you think I could/should go from here with the site.

This post is not intended to promote my website. Therefore I haven't linked to it in my post. If anyone wants to see the site in order to engage in the discuss, drop me a PM and I'll share the link with you there.

Brendan Flowers

PM sent

YellowSheep

Please sent link.

Kind regards Oliver

Brendan Flowers

Thanks for sharing the link. Since you haven't mentioned what your niche is, I wont either. But I will say this. You have no idea how much I wish there was a website like this 15 years when I could've done with those reviews! The graphs are great as well for getting a quick overview.

One thing I did notice though is that the site isn't working brilliantly on mobile, some parts of the search area are overlapping. Not sure if you are aware of that? Also the Compare option wasn't working for me.

In your opening post you mentioned using the Featured section in the future to generate revenue. I see you already have a number of listing Featured. Are they paying to be featured?

In terms of funding/grants/investments/etc, I can't really offer any advice on that as I don't know. But best of luck with the project!

Bugatti

Brendan Flowers wrote: »

Thanks for sharing the link. Since you haven't mentioned what your niche is, I wont either. But I will say this. You have no idea how much I wish there was a website like this 15 years when I could've done with those reviews! The graphs are great as well for getting a quick overview.

One thing I did notice though is that the site isn't working brilliantly on mobile, some parts of the search area are overlapping. Not sure if you are aware of that? Also the Compare option wasn't working for me.

In your opening post you mentioned using the Featured section in the future to generate revenue. I see you already have a number of listing Featured. Are they paying to be featured?

In terms of funding/grants/investments/etc, I can't really offer any advice on that as I don't know. But best of luck with the project!

Regarding the issues on mobile, these are being worked on at the moment. In fact I'll be rolling out an entirely new design for the area above the fold on the homepage next week which will be much more user friendly on mobile devices and in terms of the search functionality.

The Compare function is not yet ready, hence why that link wouldn't open for you. I'm going to hid that option until it is ready.

The institutes that I have Featured are just some that I offered to Feature for free until the end of the year and they agreed to that. Depending on monthly site visitors at the end of the year, I will make a decision on whether to start looking for a fee to Feature listings.

That's no problem regarding my question about funding/grants/investments/etc. Hopefully others here might be able to advise me on that.

Thanks.

horgag

PM sent