Welcome to part four of the Midascode Buying Websites guide.

If you haven’t already read the previous chapters then visit website ownership changes, website buying multiples, and industry importance.

Today we are going to look at traffic relevance as a factor in buying websites.

Traffic Relevance

This is one area where I have been guilty in the past. I had a sports gambling website that provided free tips for upcoming games. However, I started to rank very highly on Google for terms related to “football transfers”. During transfer season I was getting a few thousand visitors per day from Google who were looking for transfer information.
I eventually created a transfers section and I got 10,000+ people to subscribe to an opt-in list for free transfer info, but I didn’t make a whole lot of money from this traffic.

Many gambling terms can be worth over $10 per click, but I doubt this football transfer traffic was worth more than 1c per click. So although my traffic figures looked great, they were not as impressive or profitable as they may have seemed.

Websites accidentally rank for terms all of the time, so it is important to ask these questions before buying a site:

*How relevant is the traffic to the site?
*What is the average value of this traffic?
*What could I do with this traffic?

Let’s go through those three points:

How relevant is the traffic to the site? – My site had lots of info and adverts for gambling, but the visitors were looking for free football info. At best this was only partially relevant to my site. How many of the 10,000+ subscribers joined my poker club = 3. So always check the traffic relevance before making a bid. You can usually see the traffic from screenshots of the stats package.

What is the average value of this traffic? – Unless the site uses PPC or has a very complex tracking package, the best you can do here is look at the top 10 terms the site ranks for, and then use a keyword research tool such as Googles or Overture to get a rough idea of the value of those terms. Example, if a site gets 1000 hits per month for the term “Free hosting” and you know that the average bid for that term is $10, then you get a monthly traffic value of $10,000 just from that term.

What could I do with this traffic? – Not everyone is a marketing expert, so ask yourself what you could do to make money from this type of traffic. Could you write and sell some ebooks? could you use affiliate programs? could you create a store or a forum?. There are many options, but certain webmasters prefer certain techniques. Try and see of the traffic matches your preferred techniques.

Summary: Before buying a site, make sure you get to see the types of traffic the site gets. Then assess the value of that traffic and see if it fits your business model.

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