QA 45 – Should I Start a New Website or Just Rebrand the Old One

In today's Q&A, we are helping Michael decide if he should start a new site or continue on with his domain and blog that has grown stagnant. [Tweet "Should I rebrand my site?!?"] Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today's question from Michael Taylor at Householdbudgetcoach.com Let's dive into this week's question! SHANE: What's going on guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. Today's question comes from Michael Taylor and Michael writes, "I'd like to restart my stagnant personal finance blog, Householdbudgetcoach.com. I am currently positioned as a personal finance coach but I'm considering rebranding and redoing my site copy, maybe a new URL too and creating an online personal finance course. Trading time for dollars as a coach has lost its appeal in my busy family life and full time job. Where should I start? Should I rebrand my site, start over or jump straight into creating my online course? Thanks. JOCELYN: Hey Michael, thanks for your question. If I were you, I would not start all over again. Your domain name, Householdbudgetcoach.com is still okay for doing a personal finance course. That will work just fine. So what I would do is just work on getting the language about one-on-one coaching off of there and maybe adding in some information that people who were looking for a personal finance course will be looking for. So maybe you can write some blog posts, things like that that would bring you some traffic from the search engines and if you want to have sort of a new look and feel, I think it's still okay on that same domain name that you have. SHANE: I agree. I don't think there's any reason you should start completely over when you want to change the direction of your website especially since you are going to be talking about the same kind of content that you already are doing. You might as well just use whatever you've got. You can change the look and feel, maybe go hire a designer and just tell him to come in and say, change this, make it look better, put a fresh coat of paint on everything and then while they are doing that, you could just write 10-20 new blog posts on the side and as soon as your new site or your new look goes live on that same domain name, you can just put the new content out, let it roll out just like normal. Put it on a schedule and all of your old stuff is going to disappear into the background anyway. But you really don't want to mess around with redirects, you don't want to have to lose all of that search traffic that you have got from stuff that you've written before, you are still going to be getting traffic coming to your website off of your old posts. So instead of starting completely from scratch and having to sit there for a month or two, and get WordPress set back up and redo the entire site, it's probably better if you just kind of come in like you never left and just start back where you left off at. Also, if you do have an audience that already came to your website, that already enjoyed your old content, just send them an email or put something up like, 'Hey, new site, check it out!' and then you might want to drop a hint and say, 'Hey, I'm thinking about making an online course. I'd love for you to click this link and take a survey to tell me if this is something that you would want.' Don't just start making a course. Never start making a digital product without testing your audience first. If you have had this blog for a while, you can go ahead and ask the people that are already reading it or if you have already got an email list, you can pull them but do some kind of research to real people and ask them if that is what they want. You may think they want one product and they may want another. So, normally we would say yeah, start with your digital product but in this case, since you've already had a blog, it's already there.