After I’ve launched a website, is it a lot of work?
Depending on the purpose of your website (What’s Your Revenue Model?) you should anticipate an investment of roughly 10% of the cost to develop the website each month in maintain it. Since small business owners often misvalue their time, let’s assume for this argument that your time is worth at least $20 per hour.
That means that in order for your website to succeed, if you spent $1000 to create your website (or 50 hours) you should be spending a minimum of five hours per month dedicated to your websites success.
Obviously this varies depending on the type of site that you’re running but I would say small business owners should plan to spend at least five hours a month on their website performing some fairly basic functions:
- Reviewing website analytic reports to know who’s visiting them (and what people are doing on the site)
- Adding fresh content as well as updating or removing old content
- Promoting the website on other industry and related websites
In the case of websites which operate exclusively online (ie there is no retail or business to support), maintaining the website should be a full time job.






A common question, but very hard to answer. At all depends on what type of site your creating. The simple answer is probably: more time than you think :)
promoting it is the key. be involved in other websites like this. Just be a member of the online world and it will come to you
brett @ the daily gadget’s last blog post..Worlds Fastest Camera Revealed
You have to love what you do! Can’t just put minimum time into launching a website and maintaining it. If you are passionate to run a website, it wouldn’t even feel like work at all.
Kai Lo’s last blog post..SEO Tool: Free Keyword Counter
Yup. Lots of hard work is indeed needed. Without it, site cannot be successful.
Dave’s last blog post..View Twitter (tweets) updates from Microsoft Excel
Many people think that website creating is the most difficult part, but they are wrong. If you want to get good results from the site you should update it frequently.
good post. website maintained regularly and place unique content. not more difficulties for this.
I can safely say that I spent 10% time in building website and 90% site in optimizing them, analyzing the traffic, promoting, liaising with advertisers and maintaining them.
All webmasters should concentrate on their websites, but when he/she has more than a couple of sites it makes life on the internet hard
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I love the h1 tag of urs. properly used
Dave’s last blog post..View Twitter (tweets) updates from Microsoft Excel
I normally concentrate on content and keywords.
There’s a lot of work to be done after the site is built. Most of that time will be spent adding good content and trying to get the site to rank well with the search engines.
Think the comments on loving what you do are particularly relevant. Maintaining a site is a lot of fun if you are passionate about the site content. Optimization, whether content or coding, gets to be a lot of fun as you start seeing results.
Chris’s last blog post..What Are You Really Charging (Costing) Your Customers?
I wish I had only spent $1000 or 50 hours to get my website of the ground. Now that it is, it seems that the hard work is only just beginning. Thanks for all your tips and advice, they are invaluable.
Nice rule of thumb, but my first thought would be maybe 10% a week instead of a month. But I supposed that 10% a month is much more doable for people how have physical offline businesses to manage as well.