Since I get questions all the time from Prosperly readers I have decided to put all of these questions and answers to your internet marketing queries into one place because if one person wants to know I am sure many of you would like to know.
Question:
Adam,
First off, love the prosperly.com website – great info!
I had a question regarding legal issues when purchasing a website. I’m in the market to buy 1-2 websites to start building my website portfolio, but I’ve never actually purchased a website yet. So needless to say, I want to make sure that I do it right the first time!
My question is, should I have the seller sign a purchase agreement/NDA/etc- to help protect my investment, or is it really not necessary when using a an escrow service like escrow.com? Do you use contracts with your purchases?
I’ve been thinking about buying the “reusable” website contract kit from Sitepoint for $97, see it here: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/webcontracts1/. Do you think that would be a smart investment, or a waste of $97?
If you could help me out, that would be awesome!
Thanks, and good luck to you.
Joe
Answer:
Joe, thanks for the great questions. I’m glad you like the site. In answer to your questions, we have made many purchases and we have never used a purchase agreement or NDA. It couldn’t hurt you to do so but we have found that just using Escrow.com has been enough for us.
I hope that helps.
Question:
Adam,
I have a great idea – I think. I have a couple questions though.
1. The domain name I want is taken, but not active. How do I get it?
2. I was looking to see if there are any sites that already provide the same service I plan to, and there is. Only one though, and it’s not big yet – and I don’t think they are doing it the right way. Is this a problem? Would it be a good idea to buy their site or start from scratch?
I’m completely green to this process, so your advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike
Answer:
Mike, thanks for the questions.
In order to get a domain name that is taken but not active you need to find out who the owner of the domain is and contact them to see if they will sell to you. You can do this by doing a WHOIS lookup. Go to whois.net and search the domain you want and it should return a contact email and phone number for the owner.
If you only have one competitor that is always a great thing. If they already have an established site and there are obvious things you can do to make their site better, then they are a perfect candidate to buy their website. If they refuse then hopefully it won’t be too hard to compete with them.
Question:
Adam,
I know that your preferred business model is affiliated sites, but are there some sites/vendors that are easier to establish affiliate relationships with?
Thanks again for your help.
–Richard
Answer:
Richard, A lot of companies already have affiliate programs up and running. Those are the ones we usually work with. If you have an insider relationship it usually works out to be more lucrative. For example, one of the affiliate sites we run we know the owner of the products and he actually created a product just for us and gives us a 50% cut for each sale of that product.
Question:
Hi Adam,
I am new to this whole web site ownership thing. I just bought a website from godaddy and have built my site. I am not ranking however in any search resuls. It has been about a month since the website started. Do you have something that talks about the best way for a brand new site to get noticed by google and the other search engines. When using Mozilla’s rank checker I am invisible to the major search engines. Even when I search for the name of my website I am still nowhere to be found.
Any ideas on how I can get noticed?
Thanks,
David
Answer:
David, thanks for emailing. Here is a good resource for you:
http://www.prosperly.com/2008/seo-101/
Hope that helps.
If you have your own questions please feel free to email them to me. I am glad to do as many posts like this one to get all of your internet marketing questions answered.
