Make Money Online

The term might be new to some but the method is pretty well used and it works if you are not sleeping while doing business and you can do some math. But before we get deeper, let me explain what does established site mean in simple words.

Established site is nothing else than a website which was built from the roots to the roof, including graphics, pages, content, traffic and even (if you give value) Google PageRank. To be more clear, it is a site where someone else gave efforts to build it but he now does not have any longer time or funds to continue managing the site as the returning revenue is not worth, for him.

Okey you might be thinking, the guy is selling the site because it is not making enough money for him, than why should I buy it? That is indeed a good and valid question, but not necessary true. It happens often that the owner is leaving a website because he gets busy with real life things, or simply because he is short in ideas on how to monetize that website or blog and turn it into a cash machine. Buying such sites on forums or any other marketplace is more like a risk if you really don’t know how to give value to a website and you can end up paying too high price for a website that is not worth the money. Here are some points I would like to highlight that you should consider when you are negotiating or willing to purchase an established site from the previous owner.

• Niche of website

  Is it in a niche you thing you can continue maintaining or even improve it?

• The age of the website

  Note, the age of the website not just the age of the domain. It happens often that the domain is older than what the age of the website actually is. A website that has a longer aging is more likely to be more trusted by search engines and also more likely to have a bigger reader base. I would recommend you in no case to buy websites under expired domains with or without PR or websites that have changed niche before selling (unless you think you can really make the investment worth of it, just as I did with this site).

• Website traffic stats

  This is the sweet part that you should ASK the owner of the site unless he has provided you with the latest traffic stats screenshot. You are buying an established site after all, and traffic is your source #1 to make money online, as well as metric to determine the value of the website. When asking for stats, ask for the next informations if the owner is able to provide.

  • The overall traffic and geo location of the visitors. PPC ads such as AdSense tend to pay better bucks for US/Canada/UK and other well developed countries rather than third country traffic. Aside PPC, visitors from more developed countries have money to spend and can turn into a good affiliate income as well through leads or even sales.
  • Referral sites, this is the part which will tell you if the site is being promoted or not, if yes you will need to get informed on the advertising costs, if the links are natural and are driving traffic from websites that share same/similar content as yours your site is more likely going to rank higher in the search engines.
  • Organic traffic referrals, if there is organic traffic that means that the website is getting more targeted traffic from precise keywords. And if the keywords are related to the niche of the site that means that you can feed those visitors with useful informations and place some related affiliate links to generate extra revenue, thing which the previous owner did not notice more likely.

• Current revenue that site is generating

  You can base how fast you can pull back your invested money based on the current revenue that the site is making. Make sure also to ask the owner what type of methods he is using the monetize the website, if he uses only one method there is more likely more space to improve your income.

• Does the website have PageRank

  Older websites even with minimum backlinks will have at least PR1, if a website does not have PageRank at all than there is something wrong in the relation between the site and Google search engine (remember, Google is the search engine that drives the most organic traffic). The PageRank also indicates how trusted the website is by the search engine (Google in this case) and what link popularity it has. The more backlinks the more traffic and better serps (and again more traffic)

Now that you got all the info, you know how much traffic the website has and how much revenue is pulling out. If you are good at marketing you than will know how to increase traffic and increase revenue by using the same method, or how you can simply keep the same traffic and double or triple the income of the site, pull back your investment and all the rest you will be earning is going to be clean cash for your pocket.

Now as far as it regards the pricing, based on all those stats. Usually established sites are being sold based on a). the traffic of the website b). unique content or not c). revenue that the website already pulls and in some cases c). the Google PageRank of the site. The pricing varies also from other aspects, such as the domain name for example, if the domain name is good, descriptive (uses keywords in the name) and clean (no hyphens) the price might be higher. But if the domain name is not in question that the usual formula for selling or considering to buy a website is the average monthly earning multiplied for 10 months (if 1st month earned $30 and second month earned $40 the average monthly revenue is $35).

If I would have to advice you than I would not considering the buy a website or blog if I can’t pull back the investment within 3 months, but I am not going to advice you that. If 3 months is already a long time for me to pull back the investment than 6 months would be more than great for others. It all depends on you how much money you want to make. For example, I purchased this website on 20th October for $100 , by 13th of November I had already generated $300 of profit (i.e. $400) which it turned into a great investment and all thanks to the previous owner that had developed the site and did not notice a way he could of monetize the site. Than some thoughts flied over my head, should I be selling the site and get the extra money and sleep tight, or should I continue the blog and build it as a make money online ramblings site? Well now you know the answer.

Let me know about your best investment in established site, and I will maybe tell you mine later on