Take More Risks

In the past week I’ve been exploring a number of ways to boost my income quickly. Most of my efforts have been concentrated into Gothic Fairies, my spoof Goth blog, which is just over 6 months old. Googlebot seems to be very reluctant to index the site and when it does it normally stops at the front page, so it can take around a fortnight for it recognise new content I’ve created. Most times it won’t index all of the pages correctly which is really frustrating. So what’s the answer?

I’ve shifted my priority from creating content on Gothic Fairies to Drunken Hero. Why? Well Drunken Hero is over 2 and a half years old, is PR5 and ranks well for a lot of competitive phases. If I were to write and publish an article now, I’m pretty sure that the post would appear in Google’s index within 48 hours. This means that I can create some momentum and maximise my return on investment quickly.

Since Gothic Fairies is still in the Google Sandbox it may take another few months for it to start well for popular keyphrases. In the meantime I’m going to continue to create a steady flow of content on each site and let the link popularity of Drunken Hero boost Gothic Fairies.

Now the question is, should you start off with a new domain or buy an old website? It depends of course upon your motifs. If you’re more interested in creating a high ROI over a short period of time by all means consider buying an existing website.

Whilst the inital outlay will always be more than starting afresh, you often have a platform from which to take the site to the next level. The only problem is it might be difficult identifying with the previous owners branding, requiring an adjustment in your approach to copywriting

There are risks involved obviously, which is why it’s important to carry out extensive research on the domain beforehand. Here are few pointers to help you get started.

• Always ask the owner why they are selling their website. Have they taken it as far as they can? Is it in decline? Is it difficult to maintain? If you owned the website why would you want to sell it?
• Ask to see several screenshots of the sites referrals. Some traders will sell websites whose only form of traffic is from sites within their network. Shortly after the sale the seller will remove the link, leaving you with an inactive site.
• Verify that the links are genuine by performing a link:www.domain.com search within Google. Alternatively you could try out the Page Strength SEO or Blog Juice Calculator to check the websites popularity.

The biggest problem is finding a website that’s in your niche. That’s why it can be a great idea to make a “Want to buy” request over on Digitalpoint’s Site Sales Forum. From here you can describe what type of website your after and it’s ideal specifications (Pagerank, link popularity, domain age etc).

Alternatively you could try emailing the webmasters of inactive sites asking if they’re interested in selling their site. The only problem is many of the owners will not have much knowledge about transferring websites and may therefore be reluctant to accept your offer.

On the flip side, you could just land a bargain if they’ve lost all interest in their website. Try a Google Search for something like “there will be no more updates”, “this is my final update” to find pages like this, they are out there and it’s just a case of being inventive with your search terms.

From now on I’ll definitely give more thought to buying an old website than starting afresh. I just can’t bear spending 6-9 months ranking for absolutely nothing any longer!