Blog: 12 Due Diligence Tips before Buying a Blog

June 18th, 2010 |

Author: admin

As you know that prevention is better that treatment, you should do due diligent before paying your hard earned money for a blog or website. Here are my 14 tips for you to use before buying a blog.

Keyword research: Use SEMrush.com. The free version one is fine and it will show you the top 10 keywords a site is ranking for and some approximate traffic. You can cross check it against any stats that are provided by the seller.

Find out how the competition is like in the search results. If the site is targeted at particular keywords, but it is not already ranking well, you are better find out how hard is it going to be to rank for those keywords. Also take a look at the SEOQuake Firefox plugin.

Google Analytics report: Request for Google Analytics report, especially a video walk through showing revenue statements.

History: Use Wayback Machine to see the history of the site. Make sure you’re not buying something with a dark past!

Backlink: Use SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer, a great tool for checking out the quality of a website’s backlinks, to check the backlink profile.

Transfer process: Ask the seller how the site will be transferred to your hosting account. You want to make sure if you are going to manage the transfer or the seller will help you.

Site Design: If the site your purchasing doesn’t use an open source CMS, ask the seller what provision there is for support. And try to verify ownership by crosschecking the result from Whois against some proof of ID.

Traffic: Find out where the traffic is coming from. You want to make sure you know if the if most of the traffic is PPC or if it’s coming from other websites the seller owns.

Trademark: To Check for trademark infringement on the domain name, use uspto for an initial check. Make sure you do a very thorough trademark check if Wayback Machine suggests the site was owned by someone in the past.

Content: Use Copyscape to check content and make sure it is original.

Contract: If you are dealing with a significant level of risk, consider getting the lawyers drawn up a contract of sale.

Profit: Make sure the site does have a history of regular profits or do not buy it. It’s very difficult to make money with a new site than most sellers will have you believe. If you’re new to buying a blog or site, restrict your purchasing to a site that’s got a proven business model.

Claims of potential: Don’t trust claims of claims of “potential”. And don’t take the seller’s opinion on anything. It’s a business decision. Get the facts, not a glossed up version of them.

I hope these 12 tips would arm you with knowledge that is a good start to consider before buying a blog.

What do you think?

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