We’ve covered how to purchase your website and what exactly website flipping entails. The next question we’ll be tackling is how exactly do you choose the best website to buy?
There are thousands, millions even, of websites out there, a tonne of which are up for sale. Choosing the best and most profitable one may at first seem like a daunting task. How do you know which sites have the best potential? Which websites should you avoid? How do you decide which niche to explore? This exactly what we’ll be covering in this article.
Choosing Your Niche
One of the vital components to running a successful website is publishing consistent content. You’re going to need to post a lot about your site’s niche to draw people in and engage your audience. Therefore it’s best to choose a niche that you’re passionate about, or at least have a significant amount of interest in.
Perhaps you’re particularly in fishing – choosing a website with a hobbyist audience interested in fishing would be a great place to begin as you’ll actually enjoy writing content and won’t become tired of it. Choosing a site focussed on magic ticks, however, may bore you to death and leave you unmotivated to continue with your site, wasting the fees to paid for it and the time you’ve spend improving it.
Additionally, choose a niche that is alive and isn’t on the verge of becoming extinct. Choose something that is popular right now – use Google AdWords to get an idea of what niches are trending/have a large audience. If you choose a niche that isn’t attracting a large audience then you simply won’t earn money through your site.
When you deploy ad campaigns onto your site you’ll be paid depending on how many clicks they get. Visitors of a particular niche are more likely to click links related to their hobbies and so it’s vital to gauge the interests of you audience to maximise profits.
Choosing a Budget
A website can be sold for anywhere from £40 to £40 million so deciding on how much you should spend can be a tough decision for somebody just starting out. Really, the choose is entirely yours depending on how much money you’re willing to put in.
Buying a cheap site may at first seem like a great way to minimise risks and maximise your initial profits. However, low-end websites typically aren’t fully optimised for search engines and won’t have much potential to earn you money. If a site is up for sale then you’ll need to find out why. If its owner has decided that the most profitable thing for them to do is flog it as it simply isn’t making money then perhaps the site won’t work out for you either. In some cases, though, inexperienced web-hosts will sell a site in hope of earning a decent sum of money when actually they’re abandoning a gold mind and selling it off for far less than it would be worth in the long run.
Most importantly, if you’re a newbie you’ll have very little experience and thus won’t know much about the costs of websites. Many website flippers overpay for sites in the beginning, spending far too much on a site that doesn’t hold much potential at all. To gauge how much a website should cost, check out Flippa’s ‘just sold’ section to see the prices being paid for different types of website. Use this alongside tools like Google AdWords to get a feel for the market and an idea of the sort of prices you should be paying for a site.
As a general rule of thumb, aim to spend no more than half of your budget on a site. Avoid forking out almost all of your funds on a single site, leaving you with next to nothing to fall back on. Make a small investment and get your website-flipping feet wet before diving straight in at the deep end.
Competition
You need to check out the competition for your site’s niche before making a purchase too. Using sites such as SimilarWeb can allow you to find out important information about any competitors such as their page views per month, time spent on the site and bounce rates.
Carrying out a keyword search using a platform such as Google’s Keyword Planner can also allow you to gauge the attention your niche is receiving, as well as the attention your competitors’ are attracting.
Don’t be fooled, though. Although choosing a niche that has many millions of visitors may seem like a fantastic opportunity to start earning megabucks from ad-clicks, a huge traffic base probably hasn’t gone unnoticed. It is likely that a very popular niche is being exploited by many other entrepreneurs and so it’s vital to choose an area that has just the right amount of visitors.
Choosing a niche with around 100,000 – 150,000 search results on Google would be a good place to begin. A site with this volume of traffic will be generating enough attention to earn you money without sitting on a market filled with competition, making it easier for you to take the top spots without having to compete.
A Few Things to Keep in Mind
- Explore multiple search platforms such as Facebook and Bing, not just Google. There are a wealth of sites out there that generate a tonne of daily visitors so don’t neglect them.
- Add value to your site with great content. If the website doesn’t include a blog already, insert one and post top-quality content. This will not only draw in new readers but give them a reason to stay and revisit your site in future.
- Don’t sell your site at the wrong time. Once your growth rate slows down to around 30% a year it may be wise to sell it on, however cutting your profits short in the hope of getting paid a few thousand for your site while it still has plenty of room for growth is not a wise idea. Picture the site as a mine – you want to gather all of its resources before moving onto the next mine in search of more. Don’t be greedy and lose your common sense.
