How to buy a website? Where to buy and how to do it right
Buying a ready-made site can be a great investment with a yield of 40-50% per annum and higher, or an investment of money that will never pay for itself. Of key importance here are the correct analysis and evaluation of the site being purchased, primarily in terms of its attendance and profitability. But an important role is played by the technical component of the site, the promising direction and other points that you should definitely take into account – let’s see in more detail.
The advantages of buying a site
Buying a site has a number of advantages over creating a site from scratch or buying a business that does not work on the Internet.
The ability to accurately assess the site being purchased. This is the key difference from buying a business that is not online. Unlike buying, say, auto service, you can always evaluate the exact attendance of the site both now and in the past. Evaluate the seasonality and the general dynamics of development, evaluate the effectiveness of website promotion. It is also often possible to estimate with great certainty the real incomes of a site.
You see what you pay for. Buying a ready-made site, you know exactly the site with which design you buy and what functionality the site will have.
Save time. The ability to significantly save time on the development and promotion of the site. Many sites for years achieved excellent reputation in the search engines, you have the opportunity to save this time. It is important to understand that the buying process takes some time and in some cases can last one month or more.
The opportunity to buy a profitable website, with attendance or verified by a working monetization scheme. For example, if this is an online store, it will already have established relationships with suppliers, logistics, a manager who processes applications. And most importantly – incoming requests from customers.
The main disadvantages are that good sites have a fairly large price and a payback period of one to two years on average. Also, if you want to name the site yourself, when you buy someone else’s site you will not have such an opportunity.
How to buy a site, what to look for when buying
Sources of site revenue. Perov what you should pay attention – the sources of his income. Good sources of income: contextual advertising or affiliate programs, income from direct sales of goods or services from the site. Bad sources of income: selling links, advertising not recommended by search engines (pop-ups, clicker, shocking ads). You should also not give in to “trendy” goods and services and sources of income, the demand for which can fall 10-20 times, for example talking hamsters, users’ interest in hamsters decreased by 33 times compared with what was at the peak of demand:
Proof of income. This is an important point in assessing the sources of income of the site. It is best if there is a solid proof of income, for example, access to an account with statistics on contextual advertising or access to a client-bank with payments from online store customers for a long period. The worst option when there is no proof of income: a large direct advertiser who pays for services in cash or online store income confirmed only by orders on the site, but not by real payments. A frequent option – the number of applications for services from the site the seller is ready to show, and how much the company has earned them – you will have to take a word.
Sources of site traffic. If the main source of site traffic is search engines, this is very good. If the source of visitors is other sites, social networks or a source cannot be established (visitors from bookmarks), additional checking of sources of attendance is necessary.
The quality of site traffic. Imagine that you are buying a website for a company selling plastic windows, a site attendance of 100 people per day. The number of applications from such a site can differ by tens and hundreds of times, depending on what requests and where visitors come from. For example, if visitors come to the site on the requests “how to install plastic windows” – there will be no applications for the purchase of plastic windows. Another thing is if visitors come to the site on requests like “buy plastic windows”. Also, visitors can come by requests that are not related to the subject of the site at all or come from sources that have no relation to the subject of the site. We also recommend to look at the article on the selection of keywords, in order to understand the visitors who came for what keywords can become customers.