Top 7 Website Acquisition Strategies for Making Money
Before you head to Flippa or any other popular website trading portal, you should pause and give a good thought to what exactly you’re looking from the acquired website and how it’ll fit into your online business strategy? Following are 7 good strategies you can use to make money from your website acquisition:
Website acquisition solely for the purpose of quick flipping
Possibly the riskiest website acquisition strategy, you must adopt this only if you’re confident about your skill of picking up underperforming properties having huge post-renovation and/or post-marketing return potential.
Try locating some e-commerce portals selling products that have an already established off-line market, but haven’t yet picked up steam in the online world. The current owners may not be good at online marketing or SEO to make their asset worthwhile enough for them.
The idea is to buy such website, tweak a few things (on-site and/or off-site) here and there and then sell it for a good profit in a short timeframe. Timing is very important here as you can gain an early mover advantage by preparing and selling your website right when the market for its products starts gaining momentum.
Buying a website only for its domain name
Quite obviously, you’d not be too concerned about such website’s existing content and would pick it up only for its URL. Imagine if you had bought blogger.com or MP3.com a few years ago! What kind of returns you would’ve enjoyed!
You need to be particularly good at predicting market trends and see the future value of domain names to bank on such acquisition strategy. Basically, you should have an eye for a website’s true market potential before others realize it.
So, put your thinking cap on and keep yourself up-to-date with the world around you. That’s the best way to gauge market movements.
Purchasing community-based websites
There may be a good chunk of websites out there that were primarily built with a nonprofit intent and only for niche audiences.
Such websites are normally the creation of hobbyists and fans whose sole aim is to get people with the same mindset on a single platform. Their websites may have grown so much that they may be finding it difficult to meet the bandwidth costs. Such owners are normally not good at website monetization. This is where you can step in and bank on the eyeballs their websites are getting.
However, be careful as certain forum communities can be extremely difficult to monetize. Pick up such websites only if their community demographics promise good AdSense revenue potential or good value proposition for the advertisers.
You can also pick them up exclusively for marketing certain affiliate products or even your own products/services.
Buying websites solely with the intention of a takeover or a merger
This can work as an extremely good acquisition strategy if you’re in a marketplace where you can get a bigger chunk of the market share by either taking over or merging with a competitor’s website. You can gain an enviable market dominance by successfully implementing this strategy! For instance, smaller hosting service providers are often bought or merged by bigger hosting businesses in the website hosting market space.
Buying a website only for its advertising revenue potential
In this scenario, your idea of buying a particular website will only be based on making the most of its advertising revenue potential. You should be willing to put in hard work to increase its traffic flow and improve its advertisements’ performance. Try locating websites that although have very good content, aren’t optimized the best way to generate ad revenue.
After you’ve bought one such site, you can further leverage it by repacking and republishing its content in creative ways. Perhaps by creating information product/s from it, via article marketing or by giving it away as a free information product to your already existing email list.
Buying a website with an already popular keyword profile, or at least a promising one
Regardless of how many algorithm updates Google comes out with, we can never deny the importance keywords hold when it comes to the search engine traffic. If you’re good at picking up market trends, you can lay your hands on some valuable online properties before they come into everyone else’s notice. To do this successfully, you’ll have to hone your skills of identifying websites with keyword rich content which may soon have great market relevance.
Buying a website which is already receiving targeted traffic related to your own product/service
When you buy such websites, you can direct its existing traffic to your own product/service via a sales page, email list or aggressive advertising. It is easily one of the quickest ways to increase your customer base, provided you’re confident about the traffic’s quality. Avoid falling for high traffic websites whose visitors’ profile don’t fall in line with your product/service line or overall revenue strategy.
