Thursday, February 10, 2011

Website Value Estimation - Simple Steps to Successful Websites

seo training dvdsI'd like to talk about website value estimation. One excellent and fairly easy way to add value to a website is to get these SEO training dvds and go out and find more sponsors and also add more places to sponsor your site.

I remember in one website I used the Frank Kern core influence cd and had a banner in the top somewhere and one in the footer. We added a right sidebar, we added some text links, we added some banners in between posts. So we just increased the inventory so we had more to sell to more sponsors. You might get a bit of complaining from the community but usually they adapt pretty quickly. If the sponsors are on target they don’t mind because they get exposed to places they can buy what they’re there for anyway That always works well.

We first did some googling and found some potential sponsors. All we did was send them an email saying, we’ve got this website, it gets this much traffic, it’s the type of audience you want, we’ve got two more banner positions available, it’s first come first served, it is $100 a month or whatever it was. We increased the amount of inventory we could sell and we increased the amount of sponsors we had.

As simple as it is, it is rare to get out there and send an email to someone and say here is an offer, apart from spammers. To do it in a classy way and targeting it to the individual and saying, hey, I know you’re interested in this particular niche, I have a website, here’s what I have to offer you, that in itself is very targeted. I think that creates the opportunity there.

The good thing about flipping websites, I suppose it’s like the real estate market in that it is an illiquid market when you compare it to the stock market. The stock market has a market that is traded and the buy and sell prices are very much regulated and it’s a lot more liquid because you have a lot more buyers and sellers and it’s a lot tighter. When you look at an illiquid market, real estate is a good example or even websites. Websites are even less known and the industry is still in its infancy, there is a lot of opportunity there.

I got out of buying and selling websites a couple of years ago to focus on my core blogging business. This buying and selling websites was never a full time thing for me. It was always a part time thing. I reinvested profits from blogging from my other business into buying these acquisitions.

At the time I think my goal was just to say, if I can buy a website and make $1,000 a month from it, let’s have ten, let’s have twenty, why not? I ended up not chasing that goal to the very end because I realized every time I bought a new website, it was almost like starting a new business in a way.

You basically create, not necessarily a lot of labour. I was good with having someone help me manage the sites. It was more a case of mindshare. I had to think about owning these sites and that created stress, simply put. I wasn’t after much more stress. So in the course of my website flipping experiences, I bought and sold three packages. That was buying a site, building it up and selling it, plus I had two of my own creations, websites I built up from scratch myself and then sold. So I did about five or six deals in the time frame I was doing this.

From the first time I built a website which would have been about 1999 – 2000, to maybe 2006, 2007 was the last time I sold a website and liquidated all my assets beyond my core blogging business. I don’t think it was a case of it suddenly becoming more popular to buy and sell websites. Flippa, Sitepoint helped. It found me places I could buy sites from.

Most of the time I sold sites, though, I didn’t go back to Sitepoint. I would actually sell them through the contacts I had. A good thing about being a person who makes money in online space as a teacher and writer in that area, I knew other people in internet marketing. I could get on to someone and say, do you know anyone who wants to buy a miniature bike site? It makes $2,000 a month. Have you got anyone who might be keen to take it over? Eventually you find a buyer just through your contacts. That wraps up my tips on website value estimation.

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