Website Investment Tips

[DogFaceBoy]

Source = http://www.dnitips.com (my website)

Have you ever wanted to invest into buying a website from another person? I am sure all of us do at one point or another, but then lots of the time there is a catch to your investment. Here are some helpful tips on investing your money for a website, and what to look out for:

1) The seller
2) The price
3) Revenue
4) Traffic
5) Keywords
6) Fraud

Here are some details on each of the above and what you can do to make sure you have a safe sale.

1) The seller is a very important person to look out for. Are they trying to scam you? Usually the first thing I will do is look at the sellers previous sales and see if the buyer was happy with their investment. If not you have more work to do and research to do on the website you want to buy. Always ask the selling for a direct link to his/her awstats or other web stats so you can fully look through everything to do with the website. There are many things you just never know about the seller though, they can do terrible things, they can do suspicious things, and they can totally get caught trying to do so.

2) Is the price seem to good to be true? Usually when it does, it is to good to be true. Most cases of low prices are results of Pump and Dump. The seller will even try to make the price seem to good to be true, but that just raises the alarms and they will rarely make a sale. Another question to ask yourself is the price to high? I have seen many website go for an inflated price. Lots of the time the seller for the first few days will make the price really high, and lots of the time people fall for it. You will notice you can save yourself hundreds, or thousands of dollars a few days later. They will usually drop the price alot after the first few days to a more reasonable price tag.

3) Is the site making any revenue? If it is that will usually raise the price tag, but will also give you the path to gaining your money back. Websites in most cases sell between 10-24 months of revenue. Stating that you will earn your money back within that time period. Take a close look at all revenue figures given and make sure it is not a case of Pump and Dump or a slowly falling revenue. Look for consistency. Also, when looking at current revenue, look at the site and come up with ideas to optimize that revenue to its max!

4) Traffic means alot in the case of website purchasing. Of course the more traffic the better, but is it all real traffic? Targeted traffic means alot. Did the traffic come from ads? Or a guy telling all his friends on Myspace (or any other place) to visit the site before he sells it. Look at IP addresses in Awstats and see if there are any proxies laying about, and do a little research on that to make sure he/she did not use a Proxy Clicker of some sort.

5) Keywords mean alot when buying a website and can almost promise consistent traffic. You will know prime keywords when you see them. Always check up to make sure the keywords are real, because Proxy Clickers can be used to create fake keywords in Awstats. So make sure you research them to your best ability. You could probably find a keyword tool on http://www.iwebtool.com to do that for you.

6) Fraud happens 50% of the time in sales somewhere along the line they true to make the truth look better. That can include ad clicking, traffic spoofs, image faking, etc. This is what you have to watch out for #1 overall. People will even take screenshots and edit them in Photoshop to make that little bit more money on the sale. Take all screenshots and zoom in and make sure everything matches a real screenshot and no pixels removed from the original (you will notice blurs if an original was edited if you zoom in). Just do what you think seems right, and only bid/buy if it seems 100% legit with no catches.

I hope this article will save you from falling into the tricks out there these days.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright 2006 - DNItips.com

[Shark]

Very nice article.. quite informative for people like me..

Some Sellers give fake PR value, by redirecting their domains to high PR sites. While most PR checkers indicate the fake PR value.. The buyer has to make sure the PR is not faked.. just my two cents..

[DogFaceBoy]

I don't really think there is a such thing as a fake PR. Since usually you will check the rank in a PR checker anyways. I don't see this happen very commonly.

[Shark]

Well, i dont agree with that.. see here for instance, even the seller may not be aware of it..!

http://www.dnforum.com/f5/page-ranki...ad-128224.html

[DogFaceBoy]

Yes, I do know that it can be faked, but usually you will catch on.

[clasione]

Very good article and I'm sure it will help many people....

[britishbulldog]

Cant agree on the revenue as it depends on how hot the domain is itself,ive seen 10 years worth of revenue being touted about ! if ebay,google or any other site remotley as big as them for 24 months revenue i would eat my hat !
There is a lot to factor like how the site is etc,how good is the domain,is the site been marketed at its full potential the list goes on ! but if anybody has a site doing 10k a month and is wishing to sell for 120k let me know as i could borrow 1 million against the 10k a month over 10 years !

Nice business !

By the way it was a great post i just had to say my say !

[ParkQuick.com]

Good tips!

[jora]

Thanx for sharing.

[britishbulldog]

already said what i wanted to say !

[-Raja-]

great information thx

[sukantab]

Nice Article. My 2 cents: try to check for fake pageranks at http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html
This is very efficient script.

[edyst3]

Thanks for the article. May I use your article for my site? Please pm me and tell me the terms

Thanks
Edy Subiyanto

[Giembo]

useful indeed. would i be allowed to translate it into italian?

[StockDoctor]

Websites in most cases sell between 10-24 months of revenue.

Whoa. That seems awful cheap. Some sites offer revenue increase potential, so selling a biz on the last 24 months revenue seems just wrong to me in a lot of cases. I'd love to find where these discounts are listed for sale.

[DomainLobe]

Great article thanks for sharing.