The SignatureBar Story - Part 1

Posted on 16th May 2008

Signaturebar.com cost me $900 back in July 2006 and was one of the first sites to enter my investment portfolio. In fact back then it wasn’t much of a portfolio or a business just a single website purchased with the intention to redevelop (a purely experimental endeavour at the time).

During my ownership the site underwent multiple changes allowing it to mature and more importantly grow both in terms of traffic and revenue. After the first year I received offers in the region of $10,000 which isn’t bad for a project that started out as an experiment. Fortunately I declined them all as not only is the site worth a lot more now but it’s continuing to grow and develop at a steady pace.

In fact a lot of what I’ve learnt about search engines, web development and community management came from my work on signaturebar.com. This series of articles is aimed at sharing the highs and lows of what it takes to truly redevelop a website and more so focus on the types of actions required to turn a bog standard $1000 website into something worth much much more.

By splitting the signturebar story over 3-5 separate posts Im hoping things will a) be more digestable and b) easier for me to explain and cover the many aspects of web development during a typical investment project.

So lets get to the details and start looking at what I went through when purchasing the site. You already know how much I paid for it but where did I get it from and what did it look like back then ? Well the venue was sitepoint.com (you can still check the original market place auction here). Take a quick read of the details but in summary the key plus points that went through my head when purchasing this site are listed below:

• It had a reasonably active forum community
• It had some earnings (approx $10-$30 per month)
• It offered a free service, people just love free stuff
• The previous owner looked after the site very well so it had some goodwill

For many of you the above points might not seem worthy of the $900 price tag (that’s over 30 months revenue and people usually only pay 12-24 months) but that’s what makes the whole business of flipping and developing web sites so great. It’s an art and there’s no right price, or way of knowing whether you paid too much or too little until you come to sell the site. It’s a highly unpredictable business and in my case I probably paid above the market rate but it’s not so much how cheap you buy a site but what you do with it after acquisition.

That’s an important concept to grasp because too many people focus simply on buying a site as cheap as possible rather than spending the time to analyse whether the site is suitable for them and carries the right ingredients for long term growth. Im not saying don’t try to grab a bargain but just remember
under one owner a site could lay dormant and untapped whilst the very same site under different ownership can come alive. I have seen it happen time and time again so you need to make sure the site is not only suitable to redevelop but more importantly suitable for you and your skill set.

For me signaturebar was a good match, it had the potential to develop over the long term and more so I felt comfortable with the subject area and how I might go about promoting it. My previously listed points were what stood out as success factors when purchasing and ultimately justified why I ended up paying the buy it now (BIN) price so quickly. A couple of hundred dollars too much back in July 2006 is minor compared to the growth I have achieved till now. It’s always more important to make sure you feel comfortable with a site before seeing how much of a discount you can lock in on purchase. It will save you a lot of time, money and heartache if you pay a little more but get the right site.

Anyway getting back to the case study one positive point I forgot to mention in the list above was that the site had a few major flaws that needed work immediately. That’s actually a very good thing for the buyer because it’s through these types of major flaws that you can very quickly add value and thus profit. The first thing which stood out like a sore thumb was the whole look and feel. See for yourself I have posted some screenshots below (grabbed courtesy of archive.org). Not only did the forums and the main site have two completely different skins but for a digital art site it just looked wrong.

The second problem was that other than a few adwords campaigns and the site getting a few new users via word of mouth recommendations it had no overall growth plan and was getting very little traffic from the search engines. It was ranked well for the term “userbars” but with a great name like signaturebar.com why limit yourself to userbar art only. There were countless other terms to rank for and these would all require some search engine optimisation work (funnily enough I didn’t know much about seo back then, but I learnt).

So that’s where the project started and this first post ends. Part 1 of the signaturebar story is really just an introduction to the overall case study. In part 2 I’m going to cover more detail on the actual changes I applied and how the site reacted to those changes. Im hoping this series of articles will be helpful to webmasters around the world and anyone who might be interested in getting into web development projects.

Remember if you found this article useful or simply want me to cover other sites within my portfolio please leave me a comment or even better sign up to the forums for more webmaster discussions.