Netvestor: Reinvest thy money, buy a website!

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Reinvest thy money, buy a website!

Since my Wii Finder project is going on very well I decided to reinvest the money earned and bought a website.

Reasoning behind that is simple. Worst your money can do is just lie around and do nothing. There are many ways to reinvest money and since this is website investing blog, I will be talking about buying websites. You can also consider for example buying marketing services.

A website can be found for sale in many different ways. Easiest is searching around auctions on forums like Sitepoint and Digitalpoint (here is the list of all webmaster forums).

You will soon discover there are a lot of websites for sale. What I recommend is to avoid everything related to adult and gambling related topics, web and image hosting, game arcade scripts and proxy servers. I think this covers 90% of advertised sites and now when you are cleared of those you have selection of nice sites left.

Next step is to decide whether or not the site can justify the price it is being sold for. This involves analyzing the traffic stats, backlinks, brandability etc. I am leaving this topic for in-depth coverage later.

After that you should decide whether you can do anything about the site to increase it's present income. This topics covers everything from SEO to Marketing.

Let's make an example of the site I just got. It is called ScriptCopy.com and it is useful when you want to find a clone script of a popular site. Let's say you want to start your own digg or facebook site, you will need a script to run it. And exactly this is what you will find on ScriptCopy.

Now, I bought the site that was functioning as a link bid directory. That means all links for the scripts in the site had to be payed for. That's complete nonsense to me and the first thing I am changing is allowing everyone to put a link to their script for free. You must be crazy how will you earn money, you are thinking? I am keeping sponsorship option for those who want their script to be featured. At present time site is having about 200+ unique and targeted visits per day. It also earns close to nothing.

I already changed the way links are added and I think this will add more value to the people. I also removed main page adsense and replaced it to script pages. I did a fair bit of optimization. I also have put the affiliate link for HostGator, great hosting company I am using to run ScriptCopy on. My plan is to make $60-70 a month for starters let's see if I can do it.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting post!

Just for curiosity, what is the price level for purchasing a site ? How did you make your calculation with http://www.scriptcopy.com ?

I have started a websites review blog http://freewebsitereview.blogspot.com . I will be glad to review your site for free.

netvestor said...

Thanks Joe, I appreciate that. Let me know when the review is up.

And a good question. Usually if you can get a site for 10-12x times monthly income you consider that a very good deal. The site was making a $1 a day according to previous owner and if you add in an odd hosting sale which gives you $50, I should be able to earn around $60 monthly with it. Considering I payed $650 for a site that's a pretty good deal.

Anonymous said...

Hi and thanks for great informative article.

I was looking at this site http://www.playstarcraft2.com on sale at Sitepoint. How much would you appraise it for?

Thanks

Jeremy

netvestor said...

Hello Jeremy,

Not much. Basically you are getting a domain name, template a few posts. Nothing you can't do yourself and it will cost you about $10.

If you want to save some time you can value that maybe $50. Site has almost no traffic and it doesn't rank for niche (starcraft 2). You are basically starting almost from scratch.

So, I would ask myself this:
- am I passionate about sc2 and do I want to post articles about it?
- can I think of a better domain name to start with?
- how long will it take me to regain the initial investment?