Buying A Website (Part 2) – Negotiations and Making The Purchase

Where To Find Good Established Websites To Buy

There are a few places that I go to check different websites for sale. Before I give you those websites let me recommend the best way to find a website to purchase.

Choose the industry you want to have a website in. Do a Google search for one of your top key phrases. Go through all the websites on page 2 or 3 of the search results. Those should be your top candidates. They have done all of the preliminary work for you but are probably not making much money because they can’t get to page one in their rankings.

For example if I wanted to own a website in the wrinkle cream vertical I would use one of the free keyword search tools and look up popular key phrases in that vertical. Let’s say I choose the phrase “anti wrinkle cream”. I would then go to Google and search that term. Then I would go to the 3rd or 4th pages of results and look at all of the websites there. Those are the best candidates for websites to purchase.

Choose a couple of sites you wouldn’t mind owning or websites that you see just need a few changes and you can make some good improvements. Once you have found one you like send the owner an email asking to buy the site.

You can even look on page one of the search results and offer to buy one of those websites but they price will most likely be higher because they are probably making money. Then again you can always fine steals if you actively look.

Here is a good template email you can use to gauge the interest of a site owner. I have used this exact email to start the process and eventually successfully purchase websites.

Subject line: I’m interested in making an offer to buy websitename.com

My name is your name and I am currently planning on making a few acquisitions in the (name of industry) vertical and I was wondering if you would ever considered selling www.websitename.com.

I know this email is out of the blue, but let me assure you that I’m a serious buyer who isn’t looking to waste anyone’s time with below market offers. If you’re at all interested, please get back to me, as I’m available during regular business hours at the number below, or anytime here at my email email@youremail.com.

Thanks,

Your Signature Goes Here

Feel free to take this email and reword it to fit your needs. I just included it so you could see an example of an effective email to get a site owner to respond and take you seriously.

Once you have started correspondence with them, you need to find out from them the 10 questions I mentioned above before making an offer. Many of the questions you can answer without talking to the person. Some of them you will need answered by the owner. For this I have included a second email you can use.

Here is a secondary email I have used to get the information I need in order to make a real offer.

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I would love to get some more information from you before I make you an official offer.

How old is the website?

How many unique visitors did the site get in the last 3 months? How about for the last 12 months?

What is the site’s income for the last 3 months? Income for the last 12 months?

Thanks for your help on this.

Adam White
555-555-5555
name@youremail.com

Once the website owner has answered these questions you can look at the responses and then determine the price you are willing to offer.

What To Offer
How much you should offer when you are buying a website can be a difficult thing to decide. In the brick and mortar business world you can typically expect to pay 3 years of net income for a business. The internet business world is a little different. A standard going rate is about 10-12 months of net income. If the website is a “Prosperly” website you can pay much more.

If you find a Prosperly website that you want to buy you should still start off by offering a typical amount of 10-12 months net income. If they don’t bite then you need to evaluate what the site is worth to you and up your offer if you feel like you should. Sometimes you have to use your own judgment when making an offer and throw the standard website purchase rules out the window.

I recently found a website that was on page 3 of Google for one of the main terms in the industry I was looking at. The site was ugly and not optimized for search engines like it could be. I went through this process of emailing the owner and then he told me that in the last 12 months the site had made a grand total of $16.37. So based on the standard 12 month income mark the site was worth $20 at the most.

I knew this was a Prosperly website and that the owner of the site would ignore me if I came in with an offer below $100. I offered him $200. He turned down the offer because the reward for him wasn’t high enough to get him to part with the site. I finally asked him what it would take to part with the site and he said $500. I took the deal immediately. Even though the final sale price was 25 years worth of income based on what the site was currently making, I was confident that I could turn the website into an automated machine making $500 every day. So the $500 sale price to me was almost laughable.

I got the website, did a complete redesign (but kept all of the old file names the same) and started adding a ton of content. The day the site was re-indexed after my changes (1 week after I got full ownership) it shot up to page 2 of Google for one of the biggest key phrases. The website immediately started getting traffic and making money. After a couple of weeks the site was making about $100 a day.

I know that deciding what to pay for a website can be difficult, just make sure you are pretty confident you can make back whatever the final sales price is in one year.

Here are some other places to buy and sell websites:

http://www.websitebroker.com – Make sure that you check the date the site was listed because they have a lot of old crap on there that is long since sold.

Read Part 1 of Buying A Website