Purchasing a website depending on Adsense earnings?
October 6, 2007
Stumble it!I have been reading many forums that have sections to sell their websites, and their first question before buying or being interested to buy the site is “How much you earn in adsense?”. The process of both parties is simple, give a screenshot for proofs of adsense earnings and the trade is done. But those sellers came after months and claim that their adsense earnings are not the same comparing with the last owner. Why?
From my point of view, buying a site from their adsense earnings is the worst thing you can do. Let’s make an example, the last owner has his adsense ID and advertisers already bought from that site. When the new owner came and change his Adsense ID the advertisers that have bought (site targetting) advertising through the old account will be disabled. So your earnings will be down for the same reason.
On Which factors you have to focuss when you buy a site?
Personally, I will focuss on how well ranked is the site in search engines and how quickly the “article” (In case is a blog) is spidered and ranked with their respective keyword then I will monetize the blog as I want. In Googlelady, when I published the 49 tips adwords and Nexx Hoting articles were indexed in Google after few minutes and at the top of the first page of the results. Why is this important? Because you are getting “free” traffic from search engines and in case you are doing affiliate marketing with your site, you will sell a lot without paying any PPC campaign. By the way, this is a tip for those that like to buy reviews from sites. If you want to get a review from a site focuss mainly in how well is ranked the specific blog and not only the traffic (in case you want to be well ranked or you don’t have the money to pay a SEO company). A good example was for Nexx Hosting interview. The same company Nexx was not ranked at the top with the keyword: nexx hosting. After the interview and review were published they have been ranked well but not better than the interview and review that I made (till now) and you know competing with a big company is difficult because they have the right budget to pay thousands for SEO and backlinks. So made a screenshot just for proofs:
In conclusion, buying a blog/site depending only in adsense earnings can be waste of time and waste of money from your investment. Before you buy a site ask yourself:
- Do you know anything about seo?
- Best ways to monetise your site?
- New content?
- How to spot problems with your site?
As important as checking the bona fides of the dollars claimed, is realising unless you are a professional webmaster with good seo skills, your bottom line is going to start to slide, real fast. In case you want to continue to buy sites depending on adsense earnings here are some tips:
- Use some instant messaging tool to communicate with a seller.
- Ask him/her to provide a snapshot of some report.
- After received, ask same report in another view (for example sorted by another column).
- If seller provided real account data then new snapshot must be provided in max 1 minute, and both snapshots have to be consistent.
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Posted in Affiliate Marketing / PPC, Search Engine Optimization, Webmasters
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October 6th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Nice post, Google Lady.
Even though I make a living from running Adsense on my sites, I’d be hesitant to buy a site from someone who just posted Adsense earnings too. So many people build those MFA template style sites, buy/trade for non-search-engine-based traffic, inflate their earnings, and then try to sell them for much more than they’re worth.
IMO, you’re a lot better off buying a site that doesn’t have Adsense on it all (or it’s very poorly placed), because then you know you can make improvements and earn back your investment quickly.
The best place to look for these kind of sites is not in webmaster forums but just by looking at what’s out there in your niche (then you can add links to it from your existing sites and also you know it’s a topic you’re interested in). If you see something that is a quality, established site but is under-monetized, email the webmaster and make an offer. This can be especially effective if you see they haven’t been updating the site much lately. They may be thrilled to get an offer for it.
October 6th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Hey Annie,
You just gave the best tip to buy website, thanks a lot for your input (and love your comments). Keep them coming!
October 7th, 2007 at 6:14 am
I think Adsense earnings have their place in determining website value but only very broadly speaking. I suppose I use Adsense earning figures in the same way that I use page rank in terms of link quality.
October 7th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Hey
Everyone has is own opinion but my opinion both are useless, it doesn’t mean that if your pagerank is higher you will be ranked higher. I saw many times sites that have pagerank 4 are ranked at the top #1 and pagerank 6 #2.
October 8th, 2007 at 2:03 am
I personally would look at the PR of the site, it’s keywords and how they rank on search engines and also the sites traffic. I wouldn’t look at the adsense earnings at all.
January 5th, 2008 at 9:43 am
[...] That is also wrong focussing just with adsense earnings. On October I wrote an article about Purchasing a website depending on Adsense earnings? and mentioned some good points in case you are one of them. But buying or selling a blog is more [...]