Website Buying Tips #1

Following up from my last post it seems people got quite excited about the three sites I picked up in January 2009; not only was the response a positive one but it was great to hear the enthusiasm and excitement in peoples emails.

Now despite the positive feedback one issue which did plague most readers was the lack of real life tips and methods that people can actually follow to secure such sites for themselves. In line with this I thought I’d kick off a weekly post covering some of the techniques I personally use when picking out my websites.  Part 1 will cover where we should buy our sites, and how we identify these hidden bargains, so without any further delay let’s get stuck in.

Choosing A Marketplace

To keep things simple the first thing to lock down is where you buy your sites from. I personally use DP for 90% of my buying and despite many feeling that it’s just filled with clutter you’d be surprised at the types of bargains that simply pass through the system without being sold. My suggestion to most people entering this game would be to stick to one marketplace and in this case my recommendation is DP.

Narrowing Your Scope

The core challenge on DP is learning to identify which sites are worth looking at and which aren’t. DP has a huge throughput in terms of new sites for sale, so it’s easy to get lost in the never ending threads popping up every hour. Checking DP daily is essential, and there’s no automated script that will do this job for you. You can’t program code to help you select a winner and the sooner you get that into your mind the sooner you’ll start to see success.

Manual Selection

So how do we manually select sites, well the biggest tip I find is to check the site daily but start on Page 3-4 rather than page 1. You’ll find that page 3-4 has those threads that have been posted today but haven’t been picked up by any eagle eyed buyers. Those are where the bargains lie and in my last post all but one of the sites were picked up using this technique.

The logic in the above method lies in the simple fact that people can’t be monitoring DP all the time so it’s eventually going to happen that a decent site pops up but doesn’t get any responses so slips down in terms of visibility and exposure. It’s at this point that you need to PM the guy and start probing him with questions and ideas of what his Buy It Now (BIN) price is going to be. Using the above technique is essential if you don’t want to waste endless hours searching through crappy, useless sites.

More Filtering

Ok so now that you’ve started trawling through pages 3 and beyond, how do you find the sites that offer some potential ? Well, a few things come to mind, firstly unless a site has a great domain, ignore all sites that don’t have any income. It’s usually the sites with a BIN between $10-$50 that are worthless so simply ignore those.

Secondly if the site does have some income then start doing some checks. I generally don’t rely on the sellers proofs, since experience has shown that they usually over inflate and fake their stats. I’m not sure why they do that but 90% of them cheat so watch out for that.

The key here is to do your own checks which despite not giving you 100% accurate numbers will at least give you an approximate idea of how much the site is really worth.

What To Check ?

Check the domain name, check it’s age, check it’s PR and check it’s history on archive.org. Is the site being sold the same site that was on that domain 2 years ago. Doing all of these checks will help you build a quick picture of

• a) The credentials of the seller
• b) The general character of the site

I always do these checks and you should too! A good site that I personally use is checkpageranking.com (and no, that’s not my site). In terms of traffic, I guess you could use alexa.com to run some traffic checks, but in many cases this doesn’t tell you much other than the sites general traffic levels (Alexa stats, can be faked so use it but don’t put too much faith in it).

I once purchased a wallpaper site with an alexa ranking of 150,000 which to me indicates traffic of around 500-1000 uniques per day (I can gauge that based on sites that I own ranked at a similar level) . In reality the site was getting only 10-15 uniques per day, the seller had purchased paid traffic to help boost the rankings, so just be careful when using alexa.

Lastly check the sites referrer stats, ask the seller what keywords the site is ranked for and which of these get the site the most traffic. Take these keywords and manually verify where on google the site is listed for those keywords. In some cases this is a straight forward process but in other cases it can be a little more complex. Use common sense and if the seller is wishy washy with his responses and details then move on and ignore the site.

Using Your Gut Instinct

Depending on what the site is about, using your natural gut instinct and common sense is the last and most important check. If a site looks like it’s a piece of crap and doesn’t quite line up with the traffic and image being portrayed by the owner then once again move on. The old saying, “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is” holds true with most types of buying and selling, and websites are no different.

Content Sites (Informational)

If the site is a content site use copyscape to check if the articles are unique and above all, actually read the articles. Just remember that more than copyscape the manual reading is essential, never ever skip that step, because many times a sites will pass copyscape perfectly but in reality the article is just a bunch of jibberish (i.e. the articles are so poorly written that no one in their right mind would ever read them).

As much as before always look for quality. A site with low earnings but sitting on a good domain with quality articles is far superior to a site with higher traffic and PR but loaded with spammy articles.

Conclusion & Next Weeks Tips

Buying sites is a skill, and like most skills you’ll need to practice and work hard at it. I can skim through 3-4 pages on DP in 30 minutes quickly pulling out the sites that in 90% of cases are winners. A person new to the game might spend 3-4 hours doing the same thing. Don’t be afraid of this work as the more you do it, the easier and quicker it will become. If buying and selling sites were easy then everyone would be doing it and that just wouldn’t be fun for anyone! Learning to quickly lock down sites will only come with practice so don’t give up.

Next week I’m going to cover how to haggle and negotiate the best price possible. See you all then and keep me updated on any cool sites you pick up.

Buying Websites In A Credit Crunch

It’s true, we’re in a recession, the economy has gone into a never ending slump and many are doing what most clever investors and business owners never do; that’s selling up and off loading your websites and domains during what is possibly one of the worst times to do so.

The websites I’m talking about aren’t the cheapo variety either, many are established sites, with a history going back as far as 2003-2004 and a steady income to match. These are the sorts of sites that I wanted to buy back in 2007-2008 but was unable to do so because the owners wouldn’t accept reasonable offers. These are the very same sites that I was told would never be for sale but are now available at such great prices that I’m actually spoilt for choice

Life for me as a website buyer is as good as it’s ever going to be which in my opinion makes this possibly one of the best times you could ever imagine to buy a website. Whether it’s your first site or your hundredth, right now is as good a time as ever to buy up what you can. I personally picked up 20 adsense earning websites last month, which isn’t an impressive amount for my standards but the prices I picked them up for certainly were.

Now before I wet your appetite with some real life examples and purchases I made, let me give you an idea of what’s going on and why people are selling so low. I’m going to share with you some of the real life reasons I heard when I asked the prospective website owner why they were selling and why so low. Check them out below.

• I need to buy my girlfriend a wedding ring
• I need to pay for my car insurance, it’s overdue
• My adsense income has dipped and I just want to get out of the website business
• I enjoyed some great years with my site, but have decided to focus on my studies now, the economy has really taken a big hit
• My Xbox got the red ring of death, (basically means it curled up and died) and I need to get a new one
• …. and the list could go on

What you’ll notice about all of these comments is a general sense of pesimism and desperation for cash. All of these owners were either extremely cash strapped or simply had an extremely bleak outlook for their forseeable future. A real sense of “I need to sell up and horde my cash” or “I need some cash to buy something and I need it now”. These were the core feelings and sentiments I was getting from 90% of the sellers, which just reaffirms how ideal the situation is for buyers. Most sellers right now are interested in one thing only, and that’s getting hold of some cold hard cash (even if it means selling their once beloved website at a huge discount).

Now the above reasoning is beyond me, I don’t understand it but I don’t care either. As far as I’m concerned it’s bargain time and I’m picking them up all over the place. I’m collecting sites which I can probably sell for x2, x3 even x4 when the economy picks up (and thats without doing anything to them). If I actually work on them rather than just sitting on them, numbers could go up as high as x5 or x6. Some may argue with my reasoning but when I share with you some of the sites I’ve purchased you’ll quickly change your mind. So lets get into a couple of the outstanding bargains I’ve picked up during January-February 2009.

Warning - The Examples Below Will Excite You !!!

Just remember the below list is merely a sample of the many sites I’ve purchased during the first quarter of 2009, there’s plenty more where they came from but I’m revealing to you only a select few. Also to give you an idea of how great these bargains are, just remember that under normal circumstances a web buyer like myself pays around 10-12 months worth of monthly income. That means you’re looking at around 1 year to earn back your original investment, but many of these will be paid off far quicker! Just check the list below and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

• UFO Videos - No daily maintainence required for this one, no article writing, it simply shows off some cool ufo videos. I bought this puppy for $100, I’ve had it for about 2 months and it’s making roughly $20 per month via adsense. In just 5 months I’ll have paid off my original purchase price but the way this site is going it’s probably going to be even quicker than that. Under normal circumstances this site would have sold for atleast $300 (total saving $200).
• Crossword Puzzles For Kids - A great little information site, which i purchased on the quality of the domain alone. This site is just a baby and only a couple of months old but it’s already picked up some great rankings on the search engines and is pulling in around $10 per month. I picked this up for just $30, meaning I’ll own it within 3 months and the income is still growing.
• Free Poems - Bought this for $300, changed the ad placement around and turned it from a $1 per day site into a $3 per day site. At even $50 per month I would recover my investment within 6 months but at the rate this is moving I’ve almost recovered it within just three.

Conclusion

If you want to build up a portfolio of sites that earn you an automated daily income, night or day then now is the time to get started. There’s more bargains out there to be had and I would suggest if you have money lieing around or simply want to increase your portfolio ownership then consider buying a website. Not only will you earn far more than the interest you’d get from your bank account but you’ll have the added satisfaction of calling yourself a profitable businessman and earning your money the smart way.

P.S Note how all of the sites mentioned above don’t exactly look impressive, but hidden within them was a bargain and an untapped potential waiting to be unlocked. If you look beyond the ugly exterior there are loads of great sites to be had. Good luck with your site buying and I hope you found this post helpful!

Namedrive Review

If you’ve read some of the articles I posted earlier this year regarding the subject of domaining you’ll know that the subject has not only drawn me in but has continued to become a greater part of my online earnings.

Domaining in its simplest terms is about buying domains and then parking them with a domain parking company (most are free to sign up to). Namedrive is one such company and this post is going to highlight some of the successes I’ve had with them.

Now before I get into the details I just want to clarify that I’m not a domain parking veteran. For me domain parking is a short term solution that allows me to earn from the 30-50 domains I usually hold whilst their sitting idle waiting to be developed. Many of these domains are purchased from domain expiry sites like tdnam which ultimately means they’re aged (anything from 2-12 years old) and have active back links to them.

Thanks to the backlinks 90% of these domains have some sort of traffic passing through them. This could be as little as 10 uniques per month to as high as 1000 uniques per month. Either way these domains aren’t the best types to monetise, they certainly don’t get any type in traffic and in most cases they’re not keyword rich. However despite these short comings if these domains weren’t parked I’d be losing around $100 per month. It’s not a lot of money but if I already own those domains why should I miss out, that’s an extra $1200 in my pocket at the end of the year.

So how does namedrive come into this, well firstly their free to sign up to and are the only domain parking service that has actually worked for me. I’ve tried sedo ($0.50-$10 per month), I even tried a paid service called whypark (cost $100 to sign up) which despite having worked for some colleagues of mine earnt me next to nothing ($0.05-$1.00 per month).

So the key to my earnings is 100% linked to Namedrive, no other parking service has paid me as highly as they have. What’s great is that if you signup using this link and earn more than $20 in November they’ll actually pay you a 10% seasonal bonus.

So if you have domains just sitting there, my advice would be to get them onto Namedrive. Remember sign up is 100% free and you’ll probably have your domains listed within 15 minutes. Their admin panel is second to none and their customer service is actually quite helpful (in most cases they replied to my queries extremely professionally and within the hour).

Give them a shot and let me know how you do ? I’ll keep you updated on any other services I find but for now Namedrive is my #1 choice..

The Wallpaper Directory

Following on from my last post, I’m going to take some time to discuss a rather unconventional project I started six months ago. The reason I call it unconventional is because it’s not a single website rather a collection of related wallpaper sites combined to form an overall network. The sheer scale of the project meant it had to be handled slightly differently and that’s something I really want to touch on as we work our way through this article. Lets get stuck in.

The Scenario

Those of you that read this projects scenario in my last post can skip this section but for those that have never heard of this wallpaper network project, I’m going to quote a section from my last post which you should read and digest below.

Well earlier this year I purchased a project off a friend, some of you may remember me mentioning it on the forums. Those of you that didn’t, well in simple terms he had this grand old plan of buying loads of niche wallpaper domains like say ferrari-wallpapers.com or sea-wallpapers.com and turning each one into a site earning atleast $1 per day.

On paper the challenge doesn’t sound too difficult but it was going to be hardwork and I told him that the day he started. Anyway I continued with my life and a month or two later we were talking again so I asked him how it was going. To my surprise he had not only lost interest in the project but had also decided to off load the project which at that time was maybe 1% complete and earning a whopping $0 per month.

Now under normal circumstances I would have stayed away from this over ambitious attempt at earning money online, but there was something charming about this challenge, it had a point to prove and something very experimental about it. So like its previous owner I too was seduced and ended up buying the project for around $800. This included over 120 niche wallpaper domains and one master domain which represented the overall network.

Well the idea was simple enough all I needed to do was develop atleast 100 of these sites, and if each site earned $1 per day that’s approximately $100 per day extra income all on autopilot. Yes it sounds highly achievable but the real question is can it be pulled off ?

The Script

Ok so I’m sitting on around 123 new domains in my namecheap account of which 1 site Funny Wallpapers was half developed by the previous owner. In fact the site in question is still in the same state it was when I started, ugly, loads of broken links and only a handful of wallpapers to share. (Edit: It’s now been converted) Check the image below to see how it looked:

If you’re a digitalpoint user you’ll quickly recognise the skin and realise that it’s the infamous CollectPHP script in action. Since I purchased the network I also purchased the previous owners choice of script. On initial inspection I wasn’t hugely impressed with the script but after checking out my options which included:

a) coding my own script (could be time consuming)
b) using other 3rd party scripts (most much more expensive and requiring a license per domain)

I quickly realised that CollectPHP was going to be the way forward. For starters the script was 100% unencoded giving me full access to the source code, I could use it on as many domains as I wanted and most importantly it actually did most of what it said on the tin.

My main concern however was the look and feel of the site and how easy it would be to modify. A quick glance into the code revealed a few more things:

a) The script was actually very poorly coded.
b) No templating system was in place.
c) The script had some bugs

I quickly realised that before I could get to the skin I needed to get my hands dirty with the code. If I was going to develop in excess of 100+ sites using this script I needed to make sure the scripts weak points were re-coded sooner rather than later.

Overall this wasn’t a huge setback as after a day of fiddling with the code I manged to get the script to a point where it was cleaner, more managable and even had better SEO urls for search engine readability. The script was ready to go and working just the way I wanted.

The Skin

Ok so I had the script working perfectly but I still needed a skin that wasn’t being used by every single owner of this script. Just go to digitalpoint and you’ll quickly realise that 99% of wallpaper site owners are using this script unmodded complete with the naruto header at the top.

That’s right on DP it doesn’t matter what theme your wallpaper site covers, good old naruto is the theme to have. I’ve seen car sites, barbie doll sites and even pet sites all using the same skin complete with the orange naruto header. You would think people would have the decency to atleast change the header but for some even that’s too much work (but lets not go down the whole list of complaints I have with the buyers and sellers on DP churning out cheap useless sites).

Getting the skin right and of course distancing myself from the overused naruto skin was a top priority. My requirements were simple, I needed a skin which was 100% unique but more importantly easy to update, change and adapt for different niches.

After a day of messing around in photoshop I came up with a fixed width layout which employed a simple header image that could be swapped and changed to match the niche I wanted to create. I modded the css file as well so that I could quickly change the background and font colors to complement the style I was targeting, I’ve taken some screenshots of the skin to show it in action, see below:

As you can see the skin looks much better than the original, true it’s still not a work of art but it does the job and most importantly carries the content and adsense ads perfectly.

(Quick tip: Wallpaper sites convert very well when the ads are placed above the fold of the page and offer very few distractions in terms of other links and buttons. My experience has shown that the type of users that pass through a wallpaper site are very likely to click on links and ads that are related to their niche so putting the ads in the center of the page just above the fold works very well for click through rates.)

Overall my tests showed that running my skin versus the standard naruto one increased my revenue by almost double. Never under estimate the importance of a sites skin, the placement of your ads and how it can impact your revenue.

The Earnings

Ok so the building blocks for the project have been explained, I’ve even hinted on the success of the new skin but what about the sites, what sort of traffic are they getting and what are the earnings ? My initial goals were to earn $1 per day via adsense but was this really achievable?

The above questions are all key areas that will determine the future success of this project and it’s for this reason my very first decision after sorting out the script and skin was to run the project on a smaller scale. You would be foolish to develop 100+ sites without knowing the answers to the above questions, so my first task was selecting 10 domains from the 123 and getting them online as soon as possible. It took me around 2 weeks to completely launch my first 10 sites (this included adding over 200+ wallpapers to each site and performing some light SEO).

My initial findings were actually quite demoralising, firstly I learnt that adsense on wallpaper sites can often be quite low paying, my initial clicks were very very low and my total earnings were around $1.00 per month. Yes the above is not a typo $1 per day about 3 months ago would have been an amazing feat because each site on my network was struggling to make that in a month.

Despite the above one thing that was in my favour was that my search engine rankings were still improving hence the type and quantity of traffic I could capture was bound to change. Remember the low earnings per click is usually related to the quality of your traffic. Until your sites move higher up the search engines you can usually expect more of this cheap overseas traffic. Overseas clicks are usually lower paying per click compared to traffic from the USA, Canada and UK which you usually only capture once you maintain better rankings on google.com.

As of today search rankings have improved vastly (but still well off where I want them to be). Despite this let me give you a break down of where the earnings are as of today. Remember I have only launched 10 sites.

- 1 site is earning $2+ per day
- 4 sites area earning $1-$1.50 per day
- 5 sites are earning $0.10-$0.50 per day

So what does the above demonstrate ? Well to me it shows that the $1 per day goal is certainly achievable, it also indicates that with time the potential to earn is much greater than $1 day. The second positive point is that apart from the initial investment of time required to upload the base set of wallpapers you probably only need to update and add new wallpapers every 6 months.

Remember these are 100% auto pilot sites which require very little involvement on a day to day basis. Secondly sites that run on auto pilot fetch a much higher value when you sell them. So instead of the usual 12 month revenue model a solid page 1 ranking site with a good selection of wallpapers could easily return 18-24+ months of revenue upon selling.

The Actual Directory

I haven’t really touched upon the parent directory i.e. http://www.wallpaper-network.com yet but this site itself has been extremely successful and is continuning to gain solid rankings on the search engines for many key terms.

The model is simple keep adding quality sites to the directory, many of these are mine but the site is open to the public and so far around 20% of the submissions received belong to other webmasters. Over time as I stop developing new wallpaper sites this percentage will increase.

The wallpaper directory isn’t earning much at the moment (maybe $10 per month via adsense) but that’s expected. The positive point however is that I would say what is being offered is almost unique on the web. There are at most 2-3 quality directories catering for the wallpaper niche and I’m pretty confident that as more sites are added to the network offering featured subscriptions as a means of monetisation will be completely possible allowing for incomes as high as $200-$300 per month. (I say the above based on experience and actually having owned a quality niche directory in the past).

Final Words

Building sites on the web is all about quality and patience. Rushing any task usually leads to failure and disappointment, if there is one thing I can recommend and suggest to webmasters embarking on new projects its that you should plan well and then stick with the program trying to improve and provide real value to your users.

The web is no different to real life, if you deliver a site that people can take real value from you will be rewarded by repeat visitors and a good ranking on google. If you build sites with a short term viewpoint and the intention to make a quick buck you’re sure to be one of the losers. Yes there are ways to speed up things and optimise certain processes but in all cases hard work and patience have to be a part of the equation.

Overall I hope this case study has offered some insight into the scope and potential of developing wallpaper sites and more so developing a complete network. When I get to 50% I’ll make sure that I post some updates and include more data with regards to the actual traffic and earning stats which by then should be much more substantial. As usual feel free to leave a comment if you found this post helpful.

I Love This Blog, Really I Do

The above is no joke, when I first started this blog I knew the articles were going to be fresh and distinctive. I knew people would enjoy my writing style and may even stand to learn something from the case studies I offered. This blog was going to be special, unfortunately somewhere along the lines I became busy with my sites and got so heavily involved with a mass reorganisation of my portfolio that I had absolutely no time for this site and its members.

Well last night I decided to end the drought and post some updates on what I’ve been up to. I have a lot to share and a lot to blog about so for this post I’m going to be brief and quickly outline some of the subjects that I want to cover in the coming days. (Yes Im going to post 3 new posts 1 every day from today). So heres the quick summary.

Post 1 - The Wallpaper Network

I’ve always been curious about desktop wallpaper sites, you know those cheesy looking sites that offer you an assortment of desktop backgrounds for your PC. You see so many of them on sale at DigitalPoint that they seem almost worthless.

Well earlier this year I purchased a project off a friend, some of you may remember me mentioning it on the forums. Those of you that didn’t, well in simple terms he had this grand old plan of buying loads of niche wallpaper domains like say ferrari-wallpapers.com or sea-wallpapers.com and turning each one into a site earning atleast $1 per day.

On paper the challenge doesn’t sound too difficult but it was going to be hardwork and I told him that the day he started. Anyway I continued with my life and a month or two later we were talking again so I asked him how it was going. To my surprise he had not only lost interest in the project but had also decided to off load the project which at that time was maybe 1% complete and earning a whopping $0 per month.

Now under normal circumstances I would have stayed away from this over ambitious attempt at earning money online, but there was something charming about this challenge, it had a point to prove and something very experimental about it. So like its previous owner I too was seduced and ended up buying the project for around $800. This included over 120 niche wallpaper domains and one master domain which represented the overall network.

Well the idea was simple enough all I needed to do was develop atleast 100 of these sites, and if each site earned $1 per day that’s approximately $100 per day extra income all on autopilot. Yes it sounds highly achievable but the real question is can it be pulled off ?

The answer will be revealed in my next post where I will be talking about the projects current status and what plans I have for it in the near future.

Post 2 - I Only Use Adsense

Yeah that’s right until now my method has been to keep things simple so I’ve really only used adsense as a means of monetisation. Things changed however in my recent portfolio reorganisation where I spent time trying different things. That basically meant using adsense along with another type of ad provider. I’ll be talking about my findings and how much of an increase I achieved by tweaking the ad providers and their placements.

Post 3 - PPC Coach Review

Another aspect of online marketing is the use of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. There’s nothing obscure or odd about using it but until now I’ve only delivered traffic to my sites via natural organic SEO. So what’s the problem ?

Well PPC was probably one of the last methods of internet marketing that I still didn’t fully understand. I wanted to fill this knowledge gap and more importantly actually use it as a method of driving traffic to my sites whilst they’re still new and working their way up the search engine rankings.

Using PPC to kick start a new project could be quite profitable, the only problem was that my experience with PPC stood at zero. I knew absolutely nothing about how it worked and how to do it correctly, that was until I signed up to the PPC Coach program (a well known PPC coaching program where many members are earning over $1000 per day profit).

I’ll be giving my review and assessment of what happened whilst I was with PPC Coach and how it could benefit you as it did me. A highly recommended program but not for everyone so watch out for the review.

Other Updates

Well I have plenty of other small juicy bits but I’m going to save them for later because this post is getting way too long, but one thing I will mention is that one of my science related sites got a mention in the BBC Knowledge Magazine.

Unfortunately it’ a US only subscription magazine so I never got to see the actual snippet. (Im sure it wasn’t anything special but I did get some emails from subscribers of the mag telling me they saw my site in it). So just goes to show what honest hardwork and real quality articles can do to help you get noticed.

The Forums

Oh and lastly after sending out a mass email on the forums notifying that they would be closed for private coaching members only, I recently decided to reverse that decision, leaving them open for the public but also giving the private coaching members a separate private forum for their needs. This means the forums are still kind of open to the public but with a twist.

So whats the twist ? Well from today the forums will be invitation only. This means you can only join if you’ve been recommended by another member or if you send me an email giving details of why you want to join. This hopefully will cut the spammers and of course the useless members who make one post and leave.

I think that pretty much covers everything for now, so watch out for my posts over the coming days and I hope you had a great halloween.