Back toward the end of the real estate boom I was working on a project with a guy that was an absolute master when it came to buying and flipping real estate. He had perfected an evaluation system that basically made it easy enough for almost the layman to go to a house, fill out the spreadsheet, and have it pump out a thumbs-up/thumbs-down on the house.

He bought and sold 90 houses (clearing about $7k on each) in 2004, 120 houses in 2005, and 185 houses in 2006 (also, in 2006 he was clearing about $12k per house — mainly because he could be pickier).

He spent the vast majority of his time evaluating potential deals. He was always evaluating deals. He had a special phone he carried with him that he affectionately called the bat phone. Since they were paying for leads, and leads came on a round-robin system to him as a franchisee through that phone, he ALWAYS had it with him.

What’s your bat phone? And are you spending the majority of your time on tasks that only YOU can do, that are adding value to your internet business?

We spend the vast majority of our time evaluating websites for sale, potential industries to get into (and then related websites for sale), and contacting websites that aren’t even listed for sale (more on that later). Also, when you can focus on one simple success metric, it makes it that much easier to have that laser-like focus.

If this was your first holiday season as an internet business owner you might have been surprised at what you saw. For some industries traffic and sales always spikes during the holiday season. For other industries you can see a big drop off in traffic and sales.

So if my traffic dropped, should I worry?

I wouldn’t worry at all if that is normal for your industry. If you don’t know what is normal for your industry then you should assume that a drop is normal. It is definitely not a time to panic. Just roll with the punches.

That is why we preach that you should focus on revenue per visitor because that is the thing that you can control. So in times of natural traffic fluctuation you just need to watch that number and you will be able to tell if you should worry.

For example, let’s say that I run a website that normally gets 30,000 visitors a month and the revenue per visitor is $0.50. Then I notice that during the holidays my traffic dropped to 15,000 visitors but my revenue per visitor is still $0.50. Yes I made less money because I had less traffic but losing holiday traffic was out of my control. I still converted the visitors I had at the same level.

So again the key number to focus on is not traffic but revenue per visitor. If you don’t see your traffic start to come back in January then you may want to make sure your search engine rankings are where they were before and compare other traffic sources as well to make sure you aren’t missing something.

As you begin to buy more websites your portfolio will obviously grow. If you’re careful, your total time invested will remain about the same (there is ALWAYS an incremental time cost when adding to your portfolio unless you just let a site grow moribund and die).

If you really want to run a successful online business you need to make sure you’re focused on the things that matter most. At Prosperly we have a laser-like focus on one metric only:

Revenue per Visitor

One of our employee’s job every morning is to run the previous days stats, calculate the total income derived from all sources for each business and then divide that by the unique visitors.

Each industry is different. Some have a naturally high revenue per visitor, others aren’t so high (though still highly profitable because traffic acquisition is easier — obviously).

One thing this has done for us at Prosperly is really help us recognize what is in our control. We can control revenue per visitor much more readily than we can our rankings in the search engines. We control revenue per visitor more than any other aspect of our sites because we have complete control over the site.

There have been times where we’ve made changes to a site and then watched our income fluctuate (up or down) — growing antsy with the change. Was it right? Will this be more profitable? We didn’t always focus on traffic AND revenue (which revenue per visitor is). So we’d see a dip in profits and be worried that a site change was unsuccessful. In reality, visitors had fluxed.

Now, realize that when you’re simply looking at one site day in and day out, it’s easy to monitor several metrics separately (conversion rate, revenue, traffic, search engine rankings for key phrases, etc.). However, as I mentioned above, your portfolio growth will necessitate that you dial those metrics down to one (maximum two) that truly matter. As you become dialed in on the metric that determines your online business success, you’ll see decisions are made more quickly, with better outcomes.

Getting into the internet business world can be a daunting task. I realize there is a lot to learn in order to feel comfortable and make a good living online. As I have helped people get started by buying their first website I have realized that a step by step “things you need to do” is in order. Hence this post.

So you and the website owner have agreed on a price. Here is what you need to do to get the website transferred so you have full ownership.

1. Pay for the website. - It seems like an obvious first step but there are always worries that the person may take your money and never transfer you the site. This can be a big concern especially if you contacted them out of the blue so I would recommend that you always use Escrow.com. This is the fail safe way to buy a website without any risk. They do charge a small fee to use their service but when your shelling out a lot of money it’s better to be safe than sorry.
2. Get the domain transferred to you. After you have paid, Escrow.com takes your money and holds it. Then they contact the website owner to transfer the domain. You need to contact the seller directly to find out where they have registered the domain. If they have registered the domain through a registrar you have never used before, you need to go to that registrar and sign up for a free account. Then they can transfer you the domain. This is such a common practice that most registrars have a simple process to do this.
3. Get the files transferred to you. After you have received confirmation that the domain has been transferred, the website owner will try to get you to release the funds with Escrow.com. IMPORTANT: Do not release the money to the person until they have emailed you all of the files for the site. They need to send you a zip file that has all of the website files that way you have full control of the website. Now you can release the funds through Escrow.
4. Set up hosting. You have two options on how you want to set up hosting for the site. Some website owners were hosting their websites themselves and offer to continue to host the site for you for a monthly fee. I personally would rather have the website completely under my control so what I do is go to my favorite hosting company and sign up for a new hosting plan. I then upload all of the files they sent me to the new host. Then  I go to wherever the domain is registered and change the DNS settings to point to the new host. The hosting company can give you the DNS settings you need. If some of this sounds confusing the hosting companies should be able to guide you through the process.
5. Make Improvements. Once you have the website under your full control it is time to go in and make SEO improvements as well as internet marketing improvements that will increase the amount of money you make from the site.

Good luck in your website buying journey!

Last night I was playing the Wii with my kids and we were taking turns playing the home run derby on Wii Sports.  My boys are young (7 and 6 years old) and they did pretty good but after watching them go round after round trying to hit home runs I decided to give it a try. I must have developed the rythm of the pitches subconsciously because I took my turn and of the 10 pitches they threw me here is the result:

My boys went crazy after I hit the 10th homerun. They thought it was the coolest thing in the world and wanted me to leave the screen up until my wife got home so they could show her. I knew that would be a couple of hours so I comprimised and took that photo of it. It was all they could talk about for 30 minutes and they kept on giving me high fives, so much so that my 2 year old daughter started giving me high fives.

I realize this post doesn’t have much to do with internet marketing but as you can read in my about page, my family is very important to me and my success.