South West eCommerce

You may have noticed that we had steered clear of buying into sites until now.  We’ve always thought that it’s a good way to grow the business, but it’s very difficult to do your due diligence in buying a site.  Having taken a big hit early in our development, we’d decided to steer clear until we could afford to actually visit the owner and see how a site works, and results over time.

Some time ago we went down one of the routes we suggest is valuable for building a business.  We checked Market Samurai and found a search term for a niche that looked reasonably valuable to consider, given that it had high levels of searches and low levels of competition.

That should translate to traffic, and all you need to turn that to cash is a reasonable product.  Again, we went to one of our affiliate programs (commission monster in this case), and found a product that would pay us a sum worth making the sale for, and that seemed to be enough to say “this is a business niche that we should be able to build to a reasonable level”.

Something that the tools recommend is getting the search term into your domain name, and at that point the system broke down.  We went through the domains available and found that they’d all been taken.  They pretty much all seemed to be working at one level or another, but we approached a couple of the owners and found that no one was amenable to the sale.

Given that there are many, many opportunities out there and we’re already working hard, we decided to let that one go, and the idea went onto the back burner.  Several weeks ago though, a domain owner contacted us.  Last year they weren’t interested in selling, this year things have changed.  The domain has been ticking over making a few sales a month as an affiliate site.  We looked at it, and found that it’s presentation was OK but not great, and checking the rankings found that with a fairly small number of backlinks it was ranking at the top of google for the search term we wanted on some days.  Other days it was nowhere.

We’ve got some good tools and we should be able to build the project into something that ranks at the top on a lot more days than it does.  What’s made this enough to become Site R in our next monthly report for you is that it’s sitting there already ranking.  Sure, the ranking isn’t good enough at present because it’s very patchy, but we’ve got the tools and knowledge to make it something.  What the previous owner has done is enough to save us several months of time, and right now, time is a commodity that’s pretty hard to come by.

By most reasonable standards, this site wasn’t worth paying the purchase price for.  It seems that about six months gross profit is what people would be prepared to pay, yet we thought that this was worth taking for something more like 24 months.  There were a few factors. 

Firstly, the domain and site together were inexpensive.  If the whole arrangement were to crash and burn, the cost has been low.

Second, and more important, we’d identified the niche as something worth doing and as a working site, it represented a significant saving in terms of both time involved in the building, and elapsed time while the rankings improve.

In short, the purchase of this site represents a discount on building the site up from scratch and a fast track to the point where we expect it to start paying.

Like everything else in this venture, we’re putting it out there.  Can we do better than the previous owner?  Watch us and see.