Website Buying Tips #1

Posted on 14th March 2009

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.