The Only Type of MMO Site You Should Buy
Written by Trent Brownrigg · May 6, 2008
In my last post – Apparently This Is How You Really Make Money Online – Or Is It? – I talked about the new popular trend of buying and selling blogs, and how that is basically a stupid thing to do for either side. I also mentioned there was an exception to this where it is a good idea to buy a blog or static website. That is what I am going to discuss here…
If you are planning to buy a blog or a website then you need to buy one that is highly ranked for competitive keyword phrases in its niche. If it’s a site about making money online or home based business then you want it to be ranked for a lot of keyword phrases related to that. This is because search engine traffic is free, long term, not dependent on your writing style or personality, and won’t require any work on your part since the rankings have already been built up. If it doesn’t have high search engine rankings then you are wasting your money!
For example; I have a website that is ranked for just about every keyword phrase you could think of related to home based business, work at home, and make money online. Almost all the traffic comes from search engines with most of it from Google. If you bought that site from me the traffic would stay exactly the same and the money it earns would not drop at all.
The reason it would continue to make the same amount of money for the new owner is because the traffic, profits, and popularity are completely independent of me. My personality doesn’t matter. My writing style doesn’t matter. My knowledge of making money online doesn’t matter. My subscriber count doesn’t matter. My popularity among internet marketers and bloggers doesn’t matter. Nothing about me matters. The site has the rankings and the traffic and money comes from those rankings.
This is not usually the case with most blogs. At least it hasn’t been with the blogs I have seen sold lately. Most of them don’t have good rankings for important keywords. Their traffic and money mainly comes from RSS subscribers and other bloggers, and they are highly dependent on the owner of the blog for one reason or another.
But don’t get me wrong, there are blogs that could also be sold and continue to get similar levels of traffic and earnings. It just has to be a blog that has good search engine rankings. For instance, the blog you are reading right now, Can I Make Big Money Online, is ranked very highly for keyword phrases like: make money online, make money, how to make money online and many more. Those are competitive keywords that get a lot of searches so the traffic would continue to come in even if this blog was sold.
Also, if you are the one selling a site or blog with high rankings you don’t have it on your conscience that you just robbed someone out of $10,000 or whatever you sold your blog for. You can sleep at night knowing that the person who bought your site is getting their money’s worth.
Another good thing about being the seller of a site like this is that you can do it over and over again to keep making money. It’s a lot easier to build up the search engine rankings of a website for a few competitive keywords than it is to build up a highly popular A-list blog with thousands of RSS subscribers. You can do this a few times a year and keep making big money on each sale. Whereas a highly popular blog usually takes at least a year or more to build up, if you can even do it at all.
Basically the biggest point I am trying to get across here is that if you are going buy a blog or a website make sure it’s one that has high search engine rankings for top keywords in its niche. And a lesser point I am trying to make is that if you are going to build a business out of selling sites then don’t try to build up A-list blogs to sell.
So, the next time you see a blog or website for sale that you may be interested in buying, don’t look at the RSS count, technorati ranking, how many posts it has or how many comments each post gets. For the most part, you should really only be worrying about how highly it is ranked for competitive keywords in its niche and how much traffic it gets from search engines.
Trent Brownrigg
Owner of a highly popular make money online website and a fast growing work at home blog.
Nice post Trent and spot on right on target. It is good to see this as it will maybe prevent a sale that otherwise would have gone ahead and somebody lost money.
Information is great, especially if it is the right kind.
Thanks Monika!
I just hate to see newbies get taken for $10,000 or more on a blog that isn’t going to make them any money.
If you are building and flipping blogs for a few hundred up to maybe even a thousand dollars and people are buying them to save time and get a head start on things, I see nothing wrong with that.
But when someone pays a ton of money for a blog because they have been lead to believe it’s the next Problogger, it just makes me sick!
Unfortunately the next blog purchaser who gets ripped off will probably never have a chance to read this post. And whatever happened to the seller of One Man’s Goal you refer to here? I think he is hiding.
Trent,
I think what you meant by this whole post was that someone should offer me a few million dollars for this blog so I can retire
@Bruce – You’re right, the next person who gets ripped off will probably never read this post. Or if they do read it they won’t listen to me and will waste their money anyway. And I don’t know what happened to the One Mans Goal seller. I certainly haven’t heard anything.
@George – LOL, yep that is exactly what I meant!
@ Bruce: agreed. Funny thing is that Marc who bought the site for the $10,000 seems to be really happy. Oh well, it is his life and I do wish him success and the best of luck. As for Brian, well, he is probably in the shame house somewhere.
@ George: a few millions sounds cool. Gee, once we get blogs to that level even more people will want to become bloggers.
@ Trent: I’m with you on that batman. I can’t stand it when people get ripped off but even sadder is the fact that they are too dumb to notice.
While I agree that a good search ranking is important I think you’re missing the value of the built-in reader base. If you bought a popular blog and converted most of the readership quickly many will continue to visit. I believe that neither factor should be more important. I have seen many businesses go under because Google changed a search algorithm and they suddenly dropped in search ranking losing 90% of their traffic. You should be building both search engine traffic and loyal return traffic at the same time. That loyal readership won’t vanish if you’re search ranking suddenly changes and you have to rework your SEO.
Granted if you were just flipping a blog around after a short time neither one would be very important.
This article is a good reminder of what makes a website defensible. It also speaks highly to the idea that if you have to sit at your computer and crank out mad content for 14 hours a day, is that really the lifestyle and “job” that you envisioned when you started out as a web entrepreneur?
The goal is to create a defensible set of web properties that is fairly impervious to the winds of change over at Google, and that get their steady traffic from multiple sources.
Also, as you pointed out, having a personality tied too closely to the content can be a major problem, especially when it comes time to automate or sell.
I completely agree. Blogs that are wholly dependant on social media/RSS traffic are pretty pointless to buy even if you believe you can emulate the previous owner’s writing style (which you definitely cannot). Great post.