Internet Marketing the Simple Way

Posts Tagged ‘Traffic’

Probably you have a game plan on what you want to do with the blog that you are going to buy. You might want to hold on to it or flip it for a profit. You may keep in mind that the buying and selling a blog are a lot like buying and selling any property or investment in a business because there is the value in the property itself and the revenue potential.

Value can be found in the money it generates, the content, traffic it attracts more audience, and the potential it holds. In general, the older the blog is the more attractive it will be. It is not only because it is more favored in SEO circles, but also because its history. When looking at an older blog, the main things to check out are stability growth. You want to see the steady growth of audience, content, and traffic growth. Be sensitive to random spikes and dips. Be concerned if the blog has changed hands a lot.

Here are 10 points you should consider when buying a blog.  They are plan, valuations, audience, content, search ranking, traffic, inbound links, brand, profit, and design.

Plan: Game plan is important strategy to make money. If buy a blog for the income, you need to know how to improve the blog before going into bidding war. If you are looking to flip, you need to be more aggressive in gaining a lower purchase price and be absolutely sure you can add value to it because you profit when you buy, not when you sell it at the peak value. You need to know how much more you could make by adding value both when buying and selling. Tip: When you are looking at a large amount, consider using escrow.

Valuations: How much is the blog is really worth? Other party or parties will value the same blog very differently from how you arrive at a valuation. Don’t be surprised because valuations are subjective and also largely depend on what you are in the deal to achieve. There is no single standard way to value any site. The most common valuation method is based on a multiple of monthly income while taking other factors into account.

Audience: Audiences and niches are important to a valuation. If your audience is super targeted and high-value, full of rich people, your blog will value at a higher price than if you have a small unidentifiable audience of freebie hunters. A blog with registered users, email subscribers, well-frequented forums, and RSS counts have high value. Email lists can be sold off separately.

Content: Every blog needs a good content. In terms of talent, ideas, time or money, great content is expensive no matter how you look at it. Pinning down a dollar value is very hard to do. Where the content was acquired is as important as the quality. You need to know you have ownership of what you are buying. Do not buy a blog if you suspect there are plagiarized, automated or free or private-label articles. You can end up with a lot of liability if you do. And do not overlook how to continue generating good content. You have to ask yourself, “Can you find replacement bloggers?

Search Ranking: You want to buy a blog that is a top ranking on Google. Search rankings are valuable rankings that you are looking for because a lot of people are search for keywords used on your blog. The higher the search rank the higher the price of a blog would be. Never buy a blog because it ranks for many phrases unless those keywords are much sought after. Remember, a search phrase is useful only if people actually each using those keywords and you do so something valuable with the traffic.

Traffic: A blog that attract thousands of visitors month after month extremely valuable. You want to verify that traffic and make sure it is from a reliable source. Ideally, you want a lot of traffic from a variety sources and spread over several places on your blog. Make sure the sellers will not inflate their figures. Sometimes traffic is misleading because of the way the stats are gathered or because they have been pumping the traffic artificially. You need to see reliable stats, not their log analysis. You may want a copy of the logs and analyze them yourself if the only stats available are from the logs.

Inbound Links: Some blogs are bought because of the SEO benefits because of the inbound links. A valuable prospect is a good spread of quality natural links, featuring no link-farmed, fake, or bought links.

Brand: Branding can work both ways: in your favor or against you. A respected and famous brand can be worth a lot of money, but readers might also loyal to the old owner, or the brand might have peaked with no room for improvement.

Profit: You want to get a blog that shows a profit because it will get most attention. Make sure you take revenue figures and you are not taking on liability.  After the determining the profit, you need to find out the followings:

Is that easy to earn that much?

Can you really earn that?

Where the heck does the profit come from?

Can the profits change over time?

How easy is that to grow that profit?

What other potential and revenue sources are there?

Design: You need to look at the design and ask yourself, “Is the design custom of off-the-shelf?” A brilliant custom theme has resale value.

What do you think?

I love to hear your thoughts.  Please leave your comment below!

Do you know that there is advantages and disadvantages on everything that you choose, even a blog? You know that there is someone who is selling the blog. Otherwise¸ you can not buy it. Right? Why would someone buy a blog rather than starting a new one of his own?

Three Advantages of buying a blog. They are time, traffic, and audience.

Time: Time is the main reason of buying a blog. You know that starting a blog and building traffic an audience takes a lot of time and effort. Buying probably gives you a quick way to shorten the time. Buying gives you a head start if you enter a market with a lot of completion.

Traffic: Traffic is taking time to build. With the best technique, it still takes time and skill to grow and attract more audience. Yes, you can buy traffic through advertising and paying consultants, but you may find that an existing blog might have great traffic already and at affordable price. When you buy a blog, you are buying a proven concept on top of the design, programming, and subscribers. The niche research has been done for you and you have some indications of how successful the blog will be.

Audience: It is related to traffic. The more traffic you have the more audience you are going to get. You need to learn some SEO techniques or hire a web master to do this part. The most concern is how to keep repeating audience and add more to it.

In my opinion, what you might be buying is the potential, just like you are buying a house. People buy blogs in order to refurbish them and sell them for a profit. They buy them because they have a predictable profit where everything has already been worked out, and they just want to keep it running and reap the benefits.

Disadvantages of buying a blog

Everything has a down side. Buying an existing blog is not always entirely free of problems. There are

3 (three) main points you need to consider.

Cost: Starting a blog is cheap, but buying one can be expensive. You have to look at it like an investment. All investments can go up or down and history can not really predict the future. History is not reliable indicator of future performance.

Competition: You have to know who your main competitors are and be prepared to out perform them. Otherwise, you are out of business. You may have to look at the market share of your niche to see the downside if you do not improve the traffic. You must keep tapped on the market news.

Audience: You might start with the existing audience. How you retain their loyalty depends on your approach and how open-minded the readers are. Usually, the subscribers do not always take to new writer because the new guy is not who they signed on to read. May be they do not like the style of writing. You might want to work out a deal with all parties so that you can keep the old writer for a while until the audience settles in.

In my opinion, try to mitigate any risks you identify as much as possible. In order to do that, you have to do research (due diligence) by looking into both the seller and the site. Like buying a car, a blog has many interdependent moving parts. You must know how it works or know the expert who will help you as needed. You may need a third or fourth opinion on buying a particular blog. It helps, but you never know exactly what you have bought until it is yours.

What do you think?

I am glad you dropped by my blog.  I love to hear your thoughts.  Please leave your comment below.

Imagine you got a free hosted blog with WordPress or Blogger dot com.  You were so happy because you can get your blog up and run within minutes.  However, when you look at your blog url, you are not satisfied with it because of the extension such as http://kaffirleaves.wordpress.com.  Before you are getting into this disappointment as I did, I would like to discuss the pros and cons of having either hosted and self-hosted blog.

Hosted Blog Platforms

Pros:

Free: There are many places that you can sign up for a free blog as long as you have an email account such as Google email account.  There are many more websites that you can get a free blog.  Here are some of them: livejournal, Bravernet, Myownjournal, Bloglines, TypePad. There are a lot more out there.

Quick and easy: Most of them can be setup with a basic default template within minutes.  The setup is just a matter of filling a couple fields with your options and picking a template design.  Ideally, you do not need to know much about the technological behind blogging.

Simple to run: Once you are done with the setup, hosted blogs are very easy to run.  You will obviously need to learn some basics and that is all to it because these days most platforms are very user-friendly.  Posting the blog is just a matter of filling a few text boxes and clicking “Publish” button.

Update: You do not have to worry about it because when the blog format changes, it will upgrade automatically.  You do not have to upload any software.

SEO and Traffic: You do not need to do anything about it.  Many hosted blog platforms are already linked and attracted search engine attention and traffic.  For example, the hubpages is one of them.

Cons

Less features: You have a limited options that they allow you to have.  It can be a problem or may not a problem to you.  Most hosted service give you a fewer choices.

Basic design limitation: When it is free, you end up having a blog that is similar to one another.  The default templates are the same and get used all over the places.  And you do not have a control over your look and feel of your blog.

Ownership: You do not have the ownership of your blog.  Even though you own the content, but they can hijack your url at anytime they want.  You are at the mercy of the platform in terms of whether your blog is working or not.

Generic URL: With the hosted platforms, you do not get a professional blog url.  Anybody can tell whether you are a professional or not by looking at your url.

Moving challenge: If some day you want to transfer your blog to another platform, you face a problem with retaining your traffic and audience.

Self-hosted Blog Platforms

Pros

Control: You have full control over web design.  You do not have to stick with the basic template as well as the theme.  You can either pick your free download or paid themes that you prefer.  That is the great way to make your blog look fantastic.

Adaptability: This is a unique feature that self-hosted blog, such as WordPress, does provide more ability on top of the basic WordPress installation.

Free Platforms: You can use popular one for free even though you have to pay for the domain name and hosting fees.

URL: You have a professional look of your url, plus the brand and your domain is easy to remember.

Cons

Complicated setup: It depends on your technical ability, but at least you involve with arranging hosting, domain name, and blog installation.

There are some hosts that provide “one-click” WordPress installation.  One of them is Bluehost.

Cost: Even though using the blog platform is free, but you have to pay for cost of the having your own domain name and hosting fees.  Hosting fees could be monthly or yearly.  If you get a lot of traffic, then all of these costs can not be significant.

SEO and Traffic: You are on your own in terms of SEO and traffic.  You have to do a lot of work to generate traffic.  You need to submit your blog to major search engines and do what is necessary to get either free (organic) or paid traffic.  You need to do the advertisement for yourself.  Unless you have some money, then you can hire a webmaster to do this part.

What do you think?

I am glad you dropped by my blog and I love to hear your thoughts. So please leave your comment below.

Before I talk about the Yahoo Answers, if I have left anything out or you know of any other way to get more traffic, then please share with the audience/readers by leaving a comment below.

What is Yahoo Answers?

Yahoo Answers is a community where you can submit any questions or answers to those questions asked by other members.  You will earn 2 points for answering each question, and 10 points if your answer is chosen to be the best answer by multiple votes.  However, it will cost you 5 points per question that you ask.  Anyway, it is a way to share of knowledge, help others, and earn points based on quality of your answer.

How Does it Drive Traffic to Your Blog?

If you answer to a question at the Yahoo Answers and you leave the URL link to your website, the person who asks the question would go to your website and finds the answer(s) or tips to the question.  However, if your answer is the best one, there are going to be more than one person goes to your site.  This happens when other searchers who had the same question as the person who posted the question at Yahoo Answers, googled the same keyword related to your answered.  There will be a lot of people would go to your site.  The more people go to your site, the more traffic you are going to get, not to mention the back links.

What Do You Have to Do to Get Traffic from Yahoo Answers?

1. Open a Yahoo Answers account if you do not have a Yahoo email account.  Pay close attention to your profile.  Fill out as much information as you can.  Include your best photo so that your profile looks like real people.
2. Next, click “Answer”, go to category section under “all categories” and click the category that is related to your keyword niche or your blog.  Or you can go to the advanced search of Yahoo Answers, enter your keywords into the keyword field.  Select  “Questions” under search keyword match in.  Select category.  Then select “Open questions—best answer has not chosen” and click “Search” button.
3. Lastly, answer them and leave your URL link back to your website for more detail.  Sooner or later, you will see more traffic coming from the Yahoo Answers if you keep answering to the questions related to your keyword niche of your blog every day.

Tips:

1. When you answer those questions, give a brief explanation and convince the person who asked the question that he would get more detail by clicking the link to your website.
2. Put your effort to provide the great answer so that you have a chance to be selected as the best answer.  And when your content makes to the top of all the answers, you will get a continue traffic from that question.
3. When you give the link, make sure it is going to blog post that answers to the related question, not to the index/main page.  If the person got the answer, he surely would  probe around to see what is your site about.

Note: Do not leave a link to your sales page because it may consider as a span and you can have your account suspended.  It is a good way to use this site and stay within their terms and policies while continuing to build your reputation as an expert in your particular field.

So, is it Worth Your Time?

In my opinion, it is worth it even though it takes a lot of time, but you gain more than the traffic to your site.  You lean what is the hot topic that people are talking about.  Moreover, you can add another blog post about that hot topic and you can continue to get more traffic to your blog.

What Do You Think?

I love to hear your thoughts about this blog post.  So please leave your comment below.

If I have left anything out or you know of any other way to boost traffic quickly then please share with the audience/readers by leaving a comment below.

In the previous series, I covered pacing a comment on other blogs, subscribing to those blogs’ RSS feed, joining a couple of forums in part 1 series and pinging a blog & using RSS feed in part 2 series.  In this series, I am going to talk about StubleUpon.

6- StumbleUpon

There are more than 25 social networking sites (social media sites) available in the cyberspace, but here I am going to talk about just StumbleUpon–an intelligent browsing tool for discovering and sharing sites. It is a free intelligent browsing tool for those purposes.  You can find websites related to your interest.  It also helps you find some thing or tools that you might never search for.

The StumbleUpon tool bar makes stumbling the sites easier and it can bring more traffic to your site after you are good at stumbling your posts or pages.  You can use it as a form of social bookmarking.  Using StumbleUpon is one of many ways to get them exposed to the outside world.  Even though it is not a direct targeted traffic, but it definitely generates a lot of page views and backlinks.

How do you stumble and increase traffic?

First of all, you need to open a StumbleUpon (SU) account.  If you do not have one, click here to join StumbleUpon.

Next stumble some pages of your blog.  Here is my recommendation.  Do not stumble quite a lot of them at one time because your friends might get bored of receiving all of them from the same person.  They might ignore your pages and feel those pages annoy them after a while.   I know that you want to increase your traffic, but do not overdo it.  Please consider others and keep stumbling to a minimum in one day.

Another tip when you stumble.  Always try to make as many friends as possible.  Share your interesting subject to other people who have the same interest as you do.  Remember that people who have the like kind of interest tend to flog together.  Like attracts like!

If someone stumbles your post, visit his/her site.  Check out his/her profile and write a short message to thank that person.  You can also stumble his/her profile which is a good way to build a bond with SU community and gain exposure.

Also do not just stumble your only blogs.  Try to stumble other people’s blogs that are in same niche as you.  This way would not make your friends bore with all pages from your blog.  Different bloggers have different styles of writing.

Anyway, I am glad you dropped by my blog and hope your learned a few tips on how to drive traffic to your blog.

Upcoming post–“8 Ways to Boost Traffic to Your blog”, part 4

You will learn about what a Tweeter is all about, signing up for an account with Tweeter, and ways to tweet your blog effectively so that you get more traffic to your blog.  Subscribe to my RSS feed now to keep on learning about the other 2 ways to boost more traffic to your blog if you just got a blog and needed more traffic badly.

What do you think?

I would love to hear your thoughts so please leave a comment below before you click away.