Midascode | Buy & Sell Websites

One of the major factors in the value of a website is how well that sites performs in Google, Yahoo and to some extent MSN.

Today I am going to teach you an insiders trick that I use to find potential bargain websites.

Let’s presume that you are looking to purchase a website in the “celebrity” industry. In particular you decide that you would like to purchase a celebrity forum. One technique would be to check websites like Sitepoint.com to see if there are any celeb sites for sale, but this can often be a very long process.

The more aggressive site buyer could go to Google.com and type “Celebrity forum” and then contact the owners of the top 20 sites.

But let me save you the time and effort…… if you want to purchase a website that is ranking highly for a powerful search term, then you will have to pay a LOT of money. Often more than the site is really worth. So here is a trick that I use to find great bargain websites.

Step 1: download a SERP tracking software or use an online version.

Step 2: Monitor the top 100 results for your search term

Step 3: Ignore the top 10, but monitor closely the sites from 11 to 100

Step 4: Look for any sites that make a large, fast jump in rankings. E.g 90th to 36th within a week.

Step 5: Contact the site owner and make a bid

This works because the site owner won’t have realised that they are climbing the SERPS, and therefore won’t realise the site is growing in value.

Also, the fast jumps in rankings can often be due to Google Sandbox related filters, so it is the perfect time to buy the sites. To give you an example of this… I once had a site that got around 200 visitors per day, then, within 4 days it went to 2,000 per day and stayed that way until I sold it 4 months later for a LOT of money. This was due to the Sandbox effects. Had someone contacted me during the 200 per day stage, I would have sold for a lot less.

It is a very powerful way of getting high value sites for low, low prices, and is one of my biggest website buying secrets.

Enjoy.

When buying a website….

Keywords equals profits.

What does this mean?

Well, we know that search engines are by far the biggest traffic referrer on the Internet. So therefore it is vital that we have good positions at places like Google.com in order to get a lot of daily visitors.

However, some sites rank higher than other sites, and ideally we want to purchase sites with high rankings….

Sounds easy enough, but there is one major problem.

Not all keywords in Google are equal.

For example, being number one for “Web hosting” is far better than being number one for “Web hosting services in the south of Texas”

The first will provide tens of thousands of visitors per day, the latter may provide one per year.

So when we buy a site we must first ask the current owner to show us the main keywords the site gets traffic for.

Here is an example:

web hosting 7890234
Internet hosting 35433
Hosting online 3434

With these sorts of rankings we know that the site in question is clearly hugely powerful in Google, there is no way a weak site could rank for such competitive terms.

The next area we need to look at is are the keywords profitable?

By this I mean that some keywords are hugely valuable, whereas some are virtually worthless.

e.g

Buy Cars Online - what does this tell us? Well, it tells us that the person is looking to buy a car or cars online.

Firstly, this is hugely valuable, as the cost of cars is high (i.e better to sell one car than one pen), also, we know from the word “buy”, that the person is towards the end of the buying cycle.

e.g if they had typed “photos of cars” then that would suggest the research stage, and you are unlikely to make many sales from the term “photos of cars”. At best you may be able to sell a few photos.

So look at the types of keywords and ask yourself, could I make money from these?

This should be done prior to buying and website.

When buying a Website……..

Check the Stats for the Facts.

Many site sellers love to how shall I say this….. bend the truth a little. But the stats do not lie. So ensure you get access to the stats.

The best way to do this is via Google Analytics, but you can also ask for screenshots of any other program they are using.

In particular you will want to see the main sources of traffic. For example:

Google 70%
Yahoo 10%
Buy-Crappy-Traffic.com 9%

In this example we can see that the site is doing well in Google (always a plus), but we can also see that the site owner is buying traffic from a suspicious looking website (not good).

You can learn a lot from these stats.

In the next edition we will look in more detail at the search engine keywords stats.

When buying a website…. Google the Domain Name

This may surprise a few people, so bear with me.

To do this you simply go to Google.com and type the url into the search box. e.g midascode.co.uk

As you can see, Midascode.co.uk shows as number 1 in Google, and so it should.

However, certain sites have been very naughty, and Google has given them a slap on their little digital wrists. A high profile example of this is with the blog JohnChow.com - a hugely powerful blog with tons of links, yet up until very recently it wasn’t number one for it’s own name.

You can still see some of the effects of this here: John Chow Google

This shows us quite clearly that the site has been hit hard by a Google penalty.

Generally it is best to avoid such sites, as all future work may be virtually worthless in terms of increasing your rankings… and remember, search engines drive over 70% of traffic to most websites.

So next time you consider buying a website… Google the Domain Name.

At Midascode we have been amazed by the number of website offers we receive each month.

However, we have noticed more and more that a trend is occurring where people are selling sites on hosted domains.

e.g let’s say the owner is called Jim: jim.wordpress.com or jim.blogspot.com or jim.freewebhost.com etc…

The problem here is obvious… you don’t really own the site, and you certainly don’t own the domain. The only thing you really could potentially own is the content, but even then I am sure that in many cases you won’t even own that legally.

As you can see, this makes it a VERY risky business proposition. It is like buying a car that has no engine, no wheels, no suspension etc.. in fact, it is not even a car, it is just a set of keys. You are essentially selling the keys, but not the actual car.

One person contacted us recently with a site that was on a free host, and had zero traffic. What were we supposed to be buying in this instance? There was nothing of any value, certainly nothing that the seller actually owned, and personally, I feel ownership is an important factor if you are selling something

Don’t get me wrong, there are some BIG sites that are hosted on free hosts and are worth a LOT of money, one that springs to mind is the hugely powerful Seth Godin blog, or the Google Webmaster blog at Blogger.

But generally, the types of sites that are hosted on free hosts share one resemblance… they are not worth paying the $7 for a real domain for. Hence why the owner put it on a free host in the first place.

Also, even if you do find a gem. How do you value it? Who is to say that the free host won’t accidentally delete your account? Or ban you? Or shut down? There are so many liabilities involved.

Have you heard of Squidoo.com? Everyone and their dog decided to create squidoo mini sites… but then some people started spamming, and Google penalised the entire domain. That means that people have worked hard creating genuinely useful sites, and the actions of others destroyed their traffic. Would you be comfortable buying such a delicate business?

As a general rule, I would value a site on a free host as 10% of the normal price, and I feel that is generous. Also, 10% of the price is what I would use if it was on an authority like Wordpress.com or Blogspot.com if it was on something like crappyfreewebhost123.com then I wouldn’t go anywhere near it.

So if you are looking to create a site, if it isn’t worth paying $7 for a domain, then it probably isn’t worth doing.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this… would you buy a blogspot blog? Do you own a site on a free host?

Midascode

As humans we have numerous amazing abilities, one of these great abilities is imagination… don’t get me wrong, I am not claiming that other animals and insects DON’T have imaginations, I am sure that millions of dung beetles around the world are currently imagining being in a field full of cows who have eaten too much.

So on that note, I want you to remove any images of cows with bowel problems from your mind, and instead, I want you to imagine you are walking down the high street on a rainy Thursday afternoon.

Imagine yourself coming out of the rain and into a clothes store.

You flick around a few of the t-shirts on the “Everything is $35 section”, but your focus is drawn to one of the t-shirt price tags that says $13.

At this point you are a like a child who has found grandpa’s dirty magazine collection, your heart is beating and your palms are getting sweaty… can you feel it?

You take the t-shirt off the rack and spring to the counter to pay for said clothes item.

Don’t make eye contact, stay cool, you think to yourself. But the young lady in the ill-fitting staff uniform notices the in-correctly priced label and tells you that the actual price is $35.

Now at this moment you go from mr cool to Simon Cowell, you say in a loud and arrogant voice that the label shows $13 and therefore it is legally binding that you MUST sell it at that price.

ok, you can stop imagining now. The question here is what is the ACTUAL law on such a scenario? Are they legally required to sell you the product at the advertised price?

Do you want the answer?

Of course you do you handsome reader!

The answer is that they DO NOT have to sell it at the lower price. In fact, they can sell it at any price at anytime. The labels on products are not contracts, they are guides, or offers. They only become contractual once you have paid for them. If it was contractual, then you would HAVE to pay for anything you took off the rack, regardless of whether you liked it or not.

So what has this tidbit of retail gold got to do with buying and selling websites?

Once you scrape away the back stories, imagination explanations, and dung beetle scenarios of this article, you are left with one simple but hugely important nugget of advice: a deal is never done until the payment has been made!

I was contacted recently by a reader who was in talks for a site purchase, he agreed on a price of $25,000 and he got the seller to confirm that it was a done deal numerous times via email. However, the seller sold the site for $40,000 to someone else the day after.

Bear this in mind when buying sites, no deal is ever done until the site has been paid for.

Dean

There is one factor that is often overlooked when buying websites: Multiple revenue streams.

A site that makes $1000 per month may seem like a great site to purchase, but the reality is that it is a dangerous purchase due to
being heavily reliant on Adsense.

Personally I always apply more value to sites with multiple revenue streams… e.g memberships, donations, affiliate deals, fixed ad deals, adsense etc…

However, I have seen sites that claim to have multiple revenue streams, but in reality they are not making any money from them. So be careful.

Dean

There are thousands of websites listed for sale every day, but how do you know who to trust?

The Old Duck Cash Scam

There are a few things you can do to ensure you do not get scammed.

1) Use archive.org to see the history of the website. Avoid any adult or potentially unsafe material.

2) Go to Alexa.com to get a rough idea of the site’s traffic. Compare this to the stats the buyer has published.

3) If you are buying from a forum, look at the members previous posts or sales. Also be aware of any negative feedback he/she may have had.

4) Always use Escrow for larger payments and Paypal for all others.

5) For larger purchases, ask the MidasCode.co.uk to do the due diligence on the site for you.

Overall the most important aspect is to use common sense. If something sounds too good, it probably is.

Dean

So you wish to splash some cash on a new website? Today I am going to show you one of the places that the high rollers go to find websites for sale.

If you are looking for websites that are high traffic or high profit then the vast majority of site selling places will frustrate you.

However, there is a place within a popular site selling forum that is great for anyone with deep pockets.

Here it is….

Drum roll….

Sitepoint.com

But wait a minute… Everyone knows about Sitepoint.com already, this is nothing new…

Well perhaps you already know about Sitepoint, but not many people are aware that there is a section called the “Premium Section” that only deals with premium websites.

On the first page as we speak there are two sites for sale at over $250k

If you are sick of crawling through piles of crappy $100 proxy and arcade sites, then this is the place for you.

Enjoy.

Today I am going to tell you of a hidden danger when buying websites. This is something you will need to be aware of if you want to make a lot of profit from buying and selling websites.

Today I was contacted by a site owner who wanted to sell his motorsports portal. The site looked nice, and certainly had potential. But the source of traffic was mainly from offline word of mouth. In fact, I later discovered that he would go to major motorsports shows and spread the word whilst he was there.

This for me instantly devalued the site. I would be unable to go to these shows, but even if I was forced to go, I wouldn’t have the same knowledge and contacts that the previous owner had… In summary…

His shoes were too big to fill

This is something that you MUST be aware of when buying a site. I am sure you wouldn’t purchase a website in Japanese for the same reasons. You have to be confident that can you run the website AT LEAST as well as the previous owner.

If you want to make big moeny from site flipping, then you will need to be able to run the site BETTER than the previous owner.

So ask yourself: “What is my main asset/skill?”

For some of you this may be SEO, or marketing… for others it may be that you have an indepth knowledge of an industry. Once you have identified your main asset, the key is to look for a website that compliments your skill.

This is actually one of the biggest mistakes site buyers make.

For example, I have a friend who is an SEO guru. He was looking to buy a site, and I found a great site for him to consider. However, he refused to buy the site because the previous owner had no knowledge of SEO.

Instead of seeing this as a negative, my friend should have seen it as a positive. He could get the site cheaper due to the site not being SEO optimized, then he could use his own skills and vastly improve the sites traffic, rankings and revenue.

Be wary of your strengths and weaknesses, then look for sites that compliment both areas.

Dean