Reviews do work and will work for a long period of time, it is possible that it will change shape in internet but it will exist in one or another way. Lets take a banal example, you are about to get your first web hosting account and host your website at since you got tired of the free hostings that limit your website functionality and you want to get more flexible on that regard. The first thing you do is look after a web hosting that has good testimonials. These testimonials are that same shape of review, where existing customers review the hosting company they are with and share their experience with them.

Okey, the web hosting testimonials and the website reviews that we see now on daily basis is not quiet the same thing. For example the testimonials are much shorters and hit the nail on the personal experience (like, the hosting company has great support staff which helped me within a short time, or the technical staff is polite and fast, their prices are cheap and the up time rocks).

While the testimonials are short and go right to core and expressing customers experience with that hosting company, with the reviews we do see lately on blogs we don’t read anymore those “first person experience” but rather they do write a review for the website owner in first place and then this review serves as a great marketing tool as well. When a blogger reviews a website he is exposing that website to his/her readers, readers which might turn out to become customers of the website if non the less visitors of the website.

Some smart folks did see these reviews as great money making opportunity and they created a online marketplace where advertisers could find blogs on which they could get reviewed and exposed as well as for bloggers to find websites to review and get paid for this, and here is where that middle man is making profits for introducing YOU as blogger to the ADVERTISER, simple and clean, but sometimes things flip out of hands when there is the middle man, even tho in many cases it helps you start growing.

The middle man has the power to determine the price for which you can charge their advertisers for a review, of course you can negotiate this or rather, you can try and prove them that a review on your blog is worth more then what they are actually paying you. But how does the marketplace holder determine the price of which you can charge? They take in account some small (and I would say useless) factors such as the PageRank of your site (and this kinda comes in first place), your websites alexa ranking (easily tricked) and then your technorati ranking (much better, but this works only for blogs and is being determined from links coming to your site from other blogs while the static sites are being ignored).

Based on these informations is determined the value of a review in your blog. Even tho this can sound pretty fair, some times it can become frustrating when the company is paying you small cash for a review based on the informations they have to determine this. What slips out is your “time” from their calculation, or rather they don’t put that in account when determining the price of a review.

To write a real review for a website you need to surf the advertisers website, take notes on things that work and things that don’t work, you have to take a close lookup on their history (you would not want to advertise with positive review a company that has a shady background), and then finally you have to sum up all that and write a detailed review for the website owner and as well for your readers. It takes close to an hour to come up with “decent” informations for a company which you are reviewing and writing the review. Now imagine the schenario, the middle man says that a review on your website costs $7 no matter how much time you will need to come up with the informations and write the review. Whats for sure is that you MUST write a review which is not going to be short and spammy (at least if you want to continue with them) and you have to link out from you site to the advertisers website.

When these scenarios show up to me the answer is simple and clear NO.

But, how do you handle this? Do you prefer to write a scam like review of few words without looking at who you are reviewing and take the money? Would you really waste all that time to earn $7 ? Or you’d actually ask the middle man to raise the price or you will try an alternative. I’d be happy to know.

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