Is It True?

[Tiggy]

Hi All

Is it true that if you create a website and manage to get a huge amount of traffic over a sustained period of time you can then sell the website onto an interested party for a good price, purely on the basis that you have attracted so many people, nothing to do with selling anything etc?


Tiggy :)

[tommy]

Yes this is true, but most of the domain buyers look for traffic that is relevant to the site and have lots of pages indexed.

Also if it has a High PR and is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directory then you can get a better price for your site.

Tom

[Jayne]

Now this is interesting, how much do they go for :D

Jayne

[Tiggy]

Yes this is true, but most of the domain buyers look for traffic that is relevant to the site and have lots of pages indexed.

Also if it has a High PR and is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directory then you can get a better price for your site.

Tom

Thanks Tom what's DMOZ and what do you mean by lots of pages indexed?

Tiggy :)

[tommy]

Now this is interesting, how much do they go for :D

Jayne

They can go from $200 - $40k depending on site.

DMOZ and what do you mean by lots of pages indexed

www.dmoz.org - Its the largest humanly reviewed directory in the world. To get on this site does take a very long time eg. 1-3 months. once you are on her you appear on the such directories as google, AOL and a whole lot more and as they offer a feed for other directories on the web this greatly improves your back links.

As for pages indexed, this is basically the amount of pages have been viewed by the search engines bots and added to their databases. eg, one of my sites has over 300 pages indexed where as something like dmoz has thousand upon thousands indexed.

hope this helps.

[Tiggy]

It does indeed - very useful information Tom thankyou

T :)

[MichaelG]

Have you got a website to sell?

[Ravenfire]

Id probably get about 2p for mine then!

Wouldnt you have to have a site up and running for a couple of years before it would be ready for sale?

DMOZ.....I love DMOZ it just doesnt love me...I cant seem to get indexed there.

[clickprofits]

A lot of people set up sites just to earn adsense revenue (Google Ads) - basically create a site around a topic, with lots of pages of good interesting content and then eventually when it is indexed by the search engines and linked to by other sites it will hopefully attract enough traffic to provide income from people clicking on the ads. Over time this would provide evidence of an earnings stream and add value to the site. (Although there is no guarantee that the site will continue to retain good search engine rankings and traffic, so buying a site like this would not be risk free). If there was new content added on a regular basis, as well as a newsletter/mailing list with a decent number of subscribers then this would 'add value' too.

Beware though of sites which are just web templates (no content) populated with affiliate links (often sold on ebay). These will usually have little, if any traffic and would be unilkely to bring you an income unless you either bought visitors via ppc (Google Adwords, Overture, etc) or added sufficient quality content and then worked on getting inbound links from other good quality, relevant sites in order get decent traffic. Might as well purchase a low cost template, a domain name and do it yourself...

You might do well and build up a site like CheatPlanet [www.cheatplanet.com] which was bought by Future Network (UK magazine publishers) for $8.7m!! Just goes to show what is possible if you build a very popular content site which then becomes desirable to a larger company. Cheatplanet is a computer games cheats and tips site - but most of their content is created (for free) by their visitors - an interesting business model. Some interesting figures:

".............www.cheatplanet.com attracts 6.1 million unique visitors per month, of which 40% are from outside the US. Because Cheat Planet's content is reader-generated and has a longer shelf life than news or reviews, it requires limited editorial input and therefore has operated on high profit margins. For the year ended 31 December 2004, Cheat Planet's revenues were $0.9m and pre-tax profits exceeded $0.8m........".

Of course the hard part is building that great content site which attracts such huge visitor numbers, but it shows the power of finding a niche and then becoming 'THE destination site' for that subject (dominate your niche). And the concept of your users creating most of your content is a very powerful one which can allow a site to grow much bigger with minimal work and financial input by the owner/s. This creates a 'snowball' effect where the site grows bigger almost by itself and of course the bigger it becomes, the more useful content it contains and the more visitors it attracts...

Cheat Planet was lauched 8 years ago - so you do need to think long term with this strategy.... still 8.7 million dollars works out at over $1 million a year, plus the site was making a good profit before it was sold (0.8 million in 2004).

[Ravenfire]

I have google ads on mine but again, I earn pennies from that. How do you get the traffic to your site to start earning more??

[clickprofits]

I have google ads on mine but again, I earn pennies from that. How do you get the traffic to your site to start earning more??

Lots and lots of pages of good quality content, a popular forum perhaps, lots of links to your site from other 'on topic' quality websites, good seo... you would need to rank well for lots of popular keyword phrases... :wink:

[Ravenfire]

Working hard at all of those so hopefully I will get there eventually

Thanks

[clickprofits]

I am sure you will - it just takes hard work and time. Try and get listed in the Yahoo directory and Dmoz as well (as suggested above) as this well help your pagerank and therefore should help your google rankings.

There are some good adsense tips here:
http://www.wolf-howl.com/2005/07/google-adsense-tips-tricks-and-secrets.html

[DarrenH]

Hi

If your site leans this way, a weblog or RSS feed wouldn't go a miss either.

I'd only set up a weblog if you can commit the time to writing new content for it though.

You could start off with a weblog hosted a www.blogger.com, but one hosted on your site would be better to maintain the consistent look and feel.

Has worked well for my own sites.

Darren[/code][/url]

[clickprofits]

Re: Getting listed in the Open Directory (dmoz.org) I got this tip from Michael Campbell's free newsletter:

"And if you still can't get into OPD, my friends tell me that the easiest way is to go after your city editor and make friends with them. Instead of trying to go after "internet marketing" and waiting for up to two years to get listed, approach it from the angle of "your town" and get listed in your local geographical area. The PR that gets transferred to your site is nearly identical".