Purchasing a Website

helenhunt

Hi
Just wondered if anyone could give some advice really. I am looking at buying a website, not too expensive and its an informative site with income generated through sponsorship / advertising / market research. It is doing well I am told and I would have scope to extend the website as its current localised and information is for a specific child age group. The current domain/brand owner is selling privately and I just wondered whether anyone knew of any useful websites that give advice or could rate the current website? I would be looking to do this as a hobby/2nd job but have no idea as to the income it could generate has anyone done anything similar ?

Any help/tips would be great
Thanks

ITtim

Could be worth seeing if they've been using something like google analytics and have a look through the stats on there. It might be able to help you decide its worth.

There are some websites that give an appraisal on a url but i'm not sure how usefull they really are.

gb12345

There are a few things that you need to consider when valuing a website.

The first is the amount of traffic that it is getting, which something like Google Analytics will tell you.

The second is how much income that traffic is generating - a site could be getting thousands of visitors a day, but if it is only generating 50p because the visitors aren't interested in clicking on the adverts then it's not really worth much.

A third thing to consider is the source of the visitors - are they coming from natural traffic or are they being generated by paid for advertising? There is a big difference between a site that earns £1000 a month with free traffic and one that earns the same but has to pay £900 to generate that traffic.

You really need to ask the seller how much the site earns and for proof of this and how much they are paying (if anything) for advertising to generate this income.

Also don't forget to factor in the fact that this would be earned income and would be liable to income tax, so you would have to register as self-employed.

Dazza86

I would recommend doing an analysis using OpenSiteExplorer first and foremost. This looks at the link profile of the website, offering a chance to see how authoritative the site is in its market. You can also compare results with competitors, so you'll know how the (search engine) rankings will likely perform.

Also, request access to whichever traffic analytics software they use. If they have Google Analytics (which most do) this will be simple to do for you. Then, as others have suggested, take a look at the traffic numbers. However, you really want to look at the traffic sources, and make a decision based on how sustainable that traffic is.

For example, is a lot of the traffic coming through one link that may be deleted at some point? Or, is the website at risk of being penalised due to a Google algo update? These will devalue the business, but you'll need a bit of knowledge in the area to really understand them. SEOmoz is also a great COMMUNITY for doing this - people are really helpful.

Just think about things from a marketing perspective and ensure risk is diversified, I.E. the more traffic sources sending sustainable traffic the better.

Hope that helps.

jamesrobins

The other posters have responded with some good tips but how much do you know about this stuff? Most websites sell for something like 10-20 times what they make a month so it may be a long time until you see a return on this investment and you will only improve upon it if you know how the game works, SEO, traffic, analytics, adsense etc.

nathand_2

Be very careful. Unless you have a lot of experience in this area (and judging from your post that's not the case) you're likely to lose much of what you put in.

Lighthouse_in_the_dark

right to put it bluntly nathand is bang on the money with what hes saying.

for starters the person your buying the website off should have analytics and web master tools.

I could spend all day explaining how to use it to maximum effect but lets keep it simple

how do you know buyer, in real life. or flippa if flippa be very wary there are a lot of sharks on there and its so easy to sell crap to the unintiated its not even funny,

look for the age of the site
the page rank
how long has it been generating income for
is it seo or ppc / ppv aka organic or paid traffic
is it black or white hat seo, with google cracking down now on black hat seo techniques you never know when your site is going to get blown to page 10 for your highest paying keywords.

country to what has been mentioned above i would always go for a site with high traffic and low conversion as this will decrease the price and 99% of the time you can always find a better way to monetise

is the domain valuable in itself. (going off course a bit but iv brought websites because the domain is valuable and the last thing you want to say to the buyer is you just want the domain because they usally add another couple of zeros to the end of the price.)


thats all i can think of at the moment, I know a couple of website brokers but they only really deal in the £xx,xxx bracket and i cant imagine your willing to spend that much