Small update on sites I had done by aeiou.com

There seems to have been a little bit of controversy with a huge rant here & reply by Rick here on his minisite service. I posted my thoughts before and promised an update. 

Firstly, it’s not meant to be development, it’s a quick and lazy way to get a domain indexed and possibly ranking for non competitive terms, from the few I have had done some do rank - for me this gives them more credibility when looking to lease the domain out, if it’s ranking for it’s name it just makes it easier. It’s not something you can do with 1000 domains with no type in traffic and expect a return, for me it’s a start to leasing domains or building on them later.

One of the domains I used aeiou.com for ranked top 5 within 2 months, it wasn’t a competitive term so no major feat but exactly what I wanted. I then leased the domain to an end user for £100 per month who took over the site and put their own website on it, this wasn’t a waste of time, it helped me get the domain to where I wanted it- to an end user. The domain cost £1500, minisite about £170 and now I get £100 per month back so a safe return on my investment for little work and the domain is put to proper use.

One major point I want to make, it seems like loads of people like to comment on how you can get the same for less, that it’s overpriced, I decided to let others try it then and I offered to let 2 people do them cheaper if they felt $250 was overpriced, neither of them delivered anything. It’s always easier to comment than to take action. So as an option to not doing anything I think it’s a good option, if you have time and inclination your better of doing the work yourself, it’s not a one size fits all.

Should also point out Kieron offers a service for content & linkbuilding at ContentNow which I have yet to try out but hope to at some point so would welcome any feedback if you have used that.

The google tool really has come into it’s own for me and I’ve certainly been putting it to work, I mentioned in July that the tool is showing numbers, I have been doing some keyword research and using that tool throws up some interesting search terms that have relatively decent search volume. Also using it for checking possible dropping domains.

Take a search term like ‘leasing’ I like leasing as I have mentioned before, monthly repeat payments hmm!
If you put leasing into the Google tool ‘exact match’ it brought the usual search terms that you would expect:

car leasing
car lease
contract hire

But quite near the top was a term I didn’t expect to see : lease cars ~ 9-12,000 searches a month
Checked and no website on leasecars.co.uk, checked the whois and found a name. It then took over an hour of detective work (no email addresses in UK domain whois) to track down the owner through other domains he owned as even the address he used on the whois was for his registrar so all I had was a name, he lives in the US so that means I could make an offer in dollars which is nice

I offered $750 for the domain and within 12 hours received a response that he would accept $1000 and split Escrow fees, completed the deal at the end of last month, bargain I reckon. It’s not easy finding a car leasing company/affiliate scheme but I sent a few emails and tracked someone who will in the next few weeks supply me a feed for unique content and pay 50% commission on completed deals which range from £400 to around £1000 per deal, a nice addition indeed.

I was asked a question on Marketing Chat the other day and it probably deserves a post, what would I normally look for or do when I found a website that I wanted to buy that earned it’s income mainly from Adsense? Keep in mind I have only learnt from my own mistakes so those lessons that cost me time and money could hopefully save you some. These things are easier to do with an example site so I’ll use TattooFonts.net which I have mentioned as a minisite I own in the past.

Initial homework
Google the domain name - make sure it ranks preferably No.1 for the domain name, so if the domain was TattooFonts.net I would google “tattoofonts” as one word and expect it to rank well - just to make sure there are no penalties like the recent ‘John Chow’ debacle. (more…)

Another post on finding old sites for sale but a short one, this one is gold dust so for those of you who like the idea of looking for an old site that may have some traffic & rankings already that can be bought then improved upon but you don’t know where to look or how to find the inspiration…this post is for you.

On a side note if this isn’t what you want to read about then please comment here. We want to hear your thoughts. (more…)

I mentioned last Monday that I managed to find (in my opinion) another decent gem of a domain, this one is a full website that ranks and is 5 years old and currently not monetised at all at present which means over the last few years it has been able to do it’s job ranking and getting some natural links.

Some of you that visit forums like Sitepoint & DP will perhaps have noticed two things that have happened in the last 8 months in what is a fluid industry when it comes to buying/selling websites.

1/ Good websites can now command more than the old perceived 8,10 or 12 months x net income, in fact a really good old site with history can easily get 24 x net monthly income and in some cases more like 36 months.

2/ The really good & robust sites for sale are scarce, very rare, hence this ads to their sale price a bit. When you remove the turnkey, warez, foreign traffic, seasonal & proxy type of sites you are not left with that much.

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When discussing website valuations there are a two distinctly different thought processes as far as I am concerned, namely whether you are looking to buy a site or looking to sell a site. For me these have two completely different criteria and today I am continuing the developing online posts that I have done previously and will explain how I come to a rough valuation in my head when I am looking to purchase a website. It’s handy to have a rough upper limit when negotiating a price.

Normally I am trying to find & buy a normal information website with some age & traffic, this doesn’t apply to an ecommerce site or forum, an ecommerce site would have sales & profit already whereas ideally if you find a nice information site to buy it preferably has not had Adsense on it at all and there could be bought as a bargain. So on the basis that a nice information site has been found and contact made I would then look to:

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This is the third in a series of posts devoted to developing online and this could be the part that makes or breaks your ability to get a deal done. If you asked any offline property developer what the hardest part of their job is I would guess it would be finding the gems being land or property with potential.

We are lucky in that I could do various types of searched and find 20 websites I would like to own, further nobody gets homeless here so most people have a price and could move on, I have a price, Al has a price, the person you contact has a price even if they don’t know what it is yet. Finding good sites is easy, finding good old neglected sites is harder but they have the added benefit that they are often not monetised and therefore can immediately start paying for themselves. The present owner may not be aware of the full earning potential thus avoiding having to pay any income multiple or the like.

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Picking up where I left off on Monday with part 1, after being creative and using the engines to search out a website or sites that look closed or neglected and would be worth buying you can then formulate a plan for contact.

If the site is listed as ‘for sale’ then it is much easier and you can go straight to making contact, however the real gems are often not listed for sale, therefore still working with the example in my previous post of Aurora Webcam your next step is to prepare an email.

There are a few important points to remember when creating your email, a poorly constructed email may well be deleted faster than the time it took you to create it.

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Property developing online is comparable with property developing offline in many ways with valuable neglected properties that need work scattered throughout the world that could turn a profit, the main biggest difference being that doing it online means you can find a bargain without having to have a huge budget/mortgage and you can do it from the comfort of your home.

The idea is to seek out a property (website) that is either not monetised or very poorly monetised that could do with some work put into it and then buy to either add to the portfolio or sell for a profit. Older sites often rank naturally for their obvious terms and can sometimes be improved upon greatly and very easily with a little on site SEO. It doesn’t always take big bucks either, you can start with as little as $100 and turn it into something much more if you can find a good buy.

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