I sat across from my dad in our conference room, wearing a black two-button blazer. I was about to tell him I wanted to kill three websites he’d spent years investing in.
On the edge of my chair, I rolled a pencil between my fingers and bit the skin on my lips.
My dad loved those sites. They’d existed since before I joined his company. He had a whole team writing and editing content for them.
But I looked at what all those years of publishing were buying us:
– We didn’t monetize the sites with ads.
– Most articles had no links back to our online shop.
– Much of the content had nothing to do with what we sold.
– The sites generated no meaningful revenue.
We had built a content mill without the part where the mill makes money.
The worst part?
The sites were part of our main e-commerce domain.
We were paying to publish content that made it hard for Google to understand what our domain was really about.
Content has to earn its place.
Bring the right people in. Move them closer to a product. Make money. Strengthen the rest of the site.
Sometimes the expensive content decision is publishing more.
Sometimes it’s admitting you should kill what you already built.
When was the last time you killed something you’d spent years building?
First published on Eva Domijan Linkedin
