Are you too lazy to avoid being scammed?

Mar

admin

Buying Websites

Lazy When buying an established website the first 2 questions that come to mind are

How much money does the website make?
How many visitors does the site receive?

So when the person selling the website tells you that the site makes $2000 a month and has 23,000 visitors per month, do you believe them? I hope not.

The website has many highly successful scam artist. Why? Because people are either too trusting or too lazy. I always find it amusing when I consider human behavior. If you earn $20 an hour it would take you 25 hours of hard work to earn $500. But when that same person buys a $500 established website for example, they would be luck to do 25 minutes of work researching their investment. That is bad business and all it takes is little bit of extra work you can become more confident in your potential investment. So here are some questions you should ask, and some things you should consider when trying to answer to two most important questions above.

How much money does the website make?

Always a tough one to verify but there are ways that it can be done (at least to a certain extent). The first factor you must know is the websites source of income. If its affiliate sales, PPC advertising or any type of income monitored by a third party then this is relatively simple. You just need a guest login for the third party account (google adsense, clickbank etc) so you can view their unaltered financials.

If they accept payment on their website via paypal, credit card or any other online processors you should also request a guest login to their payment processor stats. Again you can get a view of their financials including number of sales made and the size of the sales.

If though their income is derived by a method, which they control, then essentially they can control whatever figures they want to disclose. So this one needs some common sense and logic applied. You need to evaluate certain aspects of their site and come up with your own conclusion.

How many visitors do they get? (I will cover how to find this out next)
How long are visitors on the site?
How many visitors does the sales page receive?
Does the sites products/services seem feasible in their ability to be sold
Does the sites copy suggest an average conversion rate
Would you buy this product/service?
Does the site look legitimate enough to create sales?

This will lead to a rough estimate on your part. Whilst it is an estimate it is still a better option than taking the estimate of the website seller. In addition you should request to view the related bank statements of the website to see deposited income from the website.

How many Visitors does the site get?

This information is easier to find. Every website should have a stats program that records all the essential statistics of the website. If the site doesn’t or the seller is unwilling to provide login into these statistics then move along because you are buying a scam. However don’t just look at total visitors and think you have got the entire picture. There are several ways to inflate these figures and several things to check to see if the figures are irrelevant or not.

Length of time on browsing the site. If 90% of visitors are on the site then the traffic is worthless. People buying traffic generally get traffic with no interest of the site, no chance of buying anything and will only be on the site for a few seconds.

Source of the traffic. Personally I prefer sites that receive most of their traffic from search engines. Assuming the search terms are relevant the traffic is free and targeted and only requires a little work to keep the search results high. If most of the traffic comes from bookmarks/direct then I have to ask the question is that legitimate traffic? If the site doesn’t seem to be an authority or a site that most people would bookmark or recognize then the chances of people typing in their address direct is very small and the traffic may be from another source that is not beneficial to the site. Lastly a check of the external links traffic to see if any are paid promotion or completely irrelevant allows you to know if the traffic is relevant or will still be there after you have purchased the website.

All legitimate owners trying to maximize their sales amount will be happy to do that little extra work to provide potential buyers the information they need to make a proper informed decision. If they are unwilling to then obviously they have something to hide like poor visitors or poor sales and you can find that out easily by doing a little extra work.

Good luck with your investments.

Adam Diver

Please dont forget to bookmark this page if you enjoyed it. Your effort really goes a long way in promoting the site: