🌴 Niche Investment for Growth
Website investment growth, expired domain strategy, finding value, pricing debates, and more below.
Welcome to Website Investing Weekly, bringing you up-to-date with what’s going on in the world of website investing and alternative related asset classes.
Quick Update:
Did you miss something last Friday? For those of you who regularly listen to our podcast, you might have noticed that we didn't publish last Friday.
That's because our podcast episodes will now be uploaded every two weeks.
If you're in the mood for a little inside knowledge right now, then check out our chat with Colin Ma.
Colin has grown a portfolio of sites and also works with us to find and vet our Digital Asset Deals inside the community.
Watch out for our next episode - coming to you this Friday.
🌱 Investing in a Growing Market
Eric Porat built his first website from scratch in 2005. It had no traffic so he began experimenting with various methods to optimize his site, and he noted and measured every result.
It was a painstaking process of trial and error.
Within three years, Porat had grown his first website to more than 70,000 visits per month. Shortly after, he received an offer to sell it.
This led him to realize that instead of building a website from scratch, it would be far more effective to purchase small and medium websites that already had traffic and then improve upon them.
Since then, Porat has bought and sold over 50 websites for more than $600,000.
Websites aren't the only digital asset that interest Porat.
In 2018, he acquired GeoIQ which is a leading analytics platform for advertisers. He also started Vayg Media, whose business model involved leasing subdomains from authoritative websites.
Another venture, launched 2 years ago, was an e-commerce technology project. In September 2020, after less than two years, Porat sold this project for a large, undisclosed sum.
Flippa has just published Part 1 of an article authored by Porat. In it, he outlines his website investment tips including how he targets niches and the importance of SEO.
You'll find his insights here.
⏰ Expired Domain Strategy
The problem with expired domains is separating the good ones from the bad ones.
As of today, ExpiredDomains.net have over 3 million domains showing on their site, and many domain investors recommend their service.
Elliot Silver from DomainInvesting.com decided to try the expired domains platform to see if it offered any benefit to his own investment strategy.
In an article this week, he states:
From my perspective, the advantage to using ExpiredDomains.net for searches rather than directly on the marketplace platforms is there are so many more metrics I can choose to search in the filter section.
We agree that there are many different search options for investors who focus on different areas of the domain investment space.
The website is free to use so take a look for yourself here.
📈 See Value Where Others Don’t
Yaro Starak is the founder of Blog Mastermind and the co-founder of Inbox Done.
On Flippa's latest episode of The Exit Podcast, he sat down with Steve McGarry to talk about his experiences buying and selling websites over the past 20 years.
Starak started out with a hobby blog website called Magic: The Gathering, which he grew and eventually sold for three times its annual revenue.
That's when he realised that he could make a living from doing what he enjoyed and at the same time build saleable assets that were attractive to potential buyers.
He says:
...it was again another eye-opening moment that not just can I sell these assets, but a website is a piece of property, but it’s not just that, it’s potentially a new customer source for an existing business or a new revenue stream as a new startup business you buy.
In this conversation, Starak covers his early years, the barriers to overcome when buying and selling sites, and speaks briefly about his current ventures.
SPONSORED LINK
🦄 SEOs with Skin in the Game
Smash Digital - a growth agency, filled to the brim with unicorn images and SEO memes.
A team of SEOs with actual skin in the game, ranking their own portfolio of profitable businesses, and offering the exact same services to clients.
An agency with so much link juice you’ll need a mop and bucket to clean it all up.
😕 Domain Pricing Debates
Brad Mugford said:
If you take a domain priced at $2,500 and price it at $500 it is not 5x more likely to sell from my experience.
Mugford is a domain investor who runs DataCube.com.
(Incidentally, DataCube.com is the 68th oldest domain name ever registered).
There is endless debate about how to price a domain name. Raymond Hackney of tldinvestors.com shared his thoughts on how pricing is a source of frustration for buyers and sellers.
Among other observations, he noted:
It makes sense to get a broad sense of what your peers are doing. But make sure they are your peers.
See what else he had to say in last week's article on this topic.
🎞️ They Own You - Remember?
If you use YouTube to promote your website and content, you're probably aware that, 3 days ago, they updated their Terms of Service.
The changes are outlined on their help forum and explain that ads can now be played on any videos, even when the uploader isn't eligible to receive any revenue from it.
What does this mean for you?
If you're a member of the YouTube Partner Program then the new monetization terms state:
...any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties. If required by law, Google will withhold taxes from such payments.
If you're not in the partner program, YouTube now has the right to place ads on your videos, but you won't be eligible for any revenue generated by those ads.
Naturally, there has been a mostly negative response to these announcements. Currently, this is rolling out only in the US and will become worldwide in 2021.
As regular viewers of content creators who have small channels, then joining YouTube Premium may be our only option.
Perhaps this is yet another reason for the change?
What do you think?
🍿 Investing Snacks 🍿
↣ ↣ Building Authority
In this short video, Doug Cunnington talks to fellow YouTuber, Leon Angus, about building an authority site.
Angus currently has 4 websites and he documents his journey to grow these sites on his YouTube channel. Angus gives niche site and SEO tips, as well as providing "how tos" and tutorials covering a broad range of topics.
If you’d like to know more about Leon’s progression to full-time affiliate marketing, then see Doug’s interview with Leon here.
↣ ↣ Reasonable Is for Losers!
Here's a short commentary from Elliot Silver on inquiries seeking a “reasonable” price to buy a domain name.
↣ ↣ Link Building
About 6 weeks ago, Spencer Haws hired Niche Website Builders to build some links to one of his websites.
This 'Shotgun Skyscraper Link Building' campaign involved publishing a skyscraper article on Spencer's site and then beginning an outreach process to attract links.
In this podcast, Haws goes behind the scenes to discuss the outreach method used by Niche Website Builders, and to ask how long he will wait before seeing any significant results.
↣ ↣ Every Website Statistic You Need
Need a few website statistics for your digital marketing efforts in 2021?
QuickSprout just released "100 of the most important statistics and facts about the Internet." Click here to see them all.
That’s it for this Monday.
🙋How did we do this week?
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Cheers!
Juliet