Buying websites online
I’ve been spending some time recently looking at the possibility of buying a couple of website businesses. Why? Well, I want to expand my portfolio but quite frankly, I am too lazy to start something from scratch! // Buying an established business means I can pick up a site which has an existing customer base and income stream without doing the hard work of building the site and doing the initial marketing (which is quite often the hardest bit). What I have discovered is that even finding a suitable website business to buy is an absolute nightmare! Although there are plenty of sites up for sale, you’ve really got to sort though the rubbish to find a gem. Not only that but there seem to be a lot of people out there who are quite prepared to try and mislead buyers if they think they can get away with it. Fortunately I have a wealth of online experience built up over 13+ years so I am probably better placed than many people to pick up on the areas where sellers may have been less than honest. Let me give you some examples of the type of thing I have seen
A Common Online Business Mistake
// One of the most common online business mistakes I see (and have seen over the past 10 or so years) is when individuals put all their eggs into one basket and concentrate on just one online business and one online income stream. For me this has never been an ideal option and quite frankly, in my opinion, it is risky beyond belief! The Internet changes at an alarming rate and what works today may not work tomorrow. Believe me, I have owned websites which were earning £3000 a month on Friday but due to a Google update were down to £300 a month by the following Monday! At the time, if that had been my only website and my only source of income, I would have been seriously worried. As it was, the site was only one of several which I owned at the time and although it was incredibly irritating/frustrating/annoying, it wasn’t the end of the World and I wasn’t going to lose my house over it. I have said it before and I will say it again, it is far better to have multiple streams of income. I would always prefer to have ten websites each earning
How the South Africa World Cup could affect your business…
// In case you hadn’t noticed, the World Cup has started! Now, I personally have very little absolutely no interest in football whatsoever BUT despite this, the World Cup could affect the profitability of my businesses over the next few weeks… Football, in the UK at least, is one thing that will drag people from their computers to in front of the television and if people are not in front of their computers, they are not spending money with me (or you). Therefore, if you are planning any kind of promotion or launch over the World Cup period you would do well to ensure that it doesn’t coincide with one of the major matches. Even if you don’t run an online business, it is possible that the World Cup could affect you. Do you sell on eBay? Do you buy on eBay? If so, avoid posting auctions which will end during a match and if you are buying, lookout for auctions which DO end during a match as there is every possibility that you could grab yourself a bargain. And don’t think this is just a bit of theory on my part, I learnt the hard way some years ago
Jeez, it’s easy setting up an online business these days!
// Seriously, how much easier can it get?! I started my online ‘journey’ in 1998 and getting an online business or website up and running was a totally different experience to today. My first ‘product’ (if you can call it that!) was something which went onto become an eBook. However back then, I had no idea what an eBook was and I certainly wasn’t aware of the fact that you could buy software to create one. Thus my first eBook was little more than a text file (which went onto become a Word document)! It looked cheap and scrappy and to be fair, it was BUT the content was solid and that was the most important thing and my poorly presented text file sold by the bucketload. When I eventually decided that there must be a better way of presenting the information I was selling, it took me days of Googling (actually I probably wasn’t even using Google back then so perhaps that should be AOLing or Yahooing) to find the one piece of software that would do what I wanted. Search for ‘eBook software’ now and Google is jammed full of the stuff! Not only that but today you
TheUKTrader.co.uk – what’s it all about?
// Over the years, I have written and published countless articles, podcasts, ebooks and other info-products covering various topics related to Internet marketing. Indeed, I have been generating an income online since 1998 and the Internet has provided me with my sole income since 2001. Although none of my main income-generating websites are in the Internet marketing field, I have over the years spent a fair bit of time helping other people to set up their own businesses both online and in the offline world. For the past couple of years I have taken a bit of a backseat from my online businesses and have basically let them tick over with minimal input from me. Any work that I was doing to help other people start businesses pretty much came to a complete stop in 2008 when I stepped back and decided to take a break from Internet marketing for a year or two. Now though, fully refreshed, I am ready to get back into the game again and one of my first projects was to give TheUKTrader site a bit of an overhaul. TheUKTrader was originally my main wholesale website and operated with considerable success from 2002 to around
