I’m a silver mogul. You should do what I say and buy my tapes!

When I was at the D.I. (a thrift store like the Salvation Army) I get this idea to look in the silverware box to see if I can see some actual SILVER. And I found some! Two pieces. $0.75 each. You can see my big payday from my finds above.

(True “silver”ware is 92.5% silver. You can know it’s sterling because it’ll either say “sterling”, “.925″ or simply “925″ on it. Don’t be fooled by silver plating! If it doesn’t have these marks, it probably isn’t sterling silverware.)

It’s fun to find deals, buy things under market value, even if it’s two pieces of silverware.

In our last post, we discussed how we can replace our existing income, dollar for dollar. But I don’t have that kind of cash laying around. And I don’t want to go into debt either (although we all make exceptions!). How can we replace our income for LESS than dollar for dollar?

We know that theoretically, market value for revenue generating websites is 12X monthly earnings, so basically you pay a dollar for a dollar’s annual income. But what if you could buy sites for MUCH less than market? What if you could buy revenue generating sites for dimes on the dollar?

What if you could find silver at the thrift store?

To find deals, we have to find existing sites that are getting good search engine traffic, that are not monetized or under-monetized. They don’t know what they’ve got. We try to estimate, as best we can, the value of the website. And we see what they’ll sell it for. If it’s a deal - we buy, if not, we keep looking. Its’ that simple.

Crochet Patterns

The following is an example of a failed attempt. But remember, we’re supposed to have several of these failures every week. We’re supposed to be sending out three of these a day.

Who is slightly less likely to monetize their sites? I asked myself. I came up with crochet, knitting and cross-stitch websites.

So we search for “crochet pattern” on Google. We find CrochetPatternCentral.com. Ok. So we start to look around. No Adsense. No Amazon or other affiliates. We see a couple static image banners on the side(old school). There’s no newsletter capture. But! Look in the lower right hand corner. We see the ExtremeTracking.com stats. We click on them and what do we see?

This crochet guru isn’t monetizing about 120,000 unique visitors a month. That’s 1.4 million visitors a year. These aren’t generally repeat visitors, this isn’t a community. It’s a resource for crochet patterns online. 1.4 million potential clients.

I contacted the owner (guess what happens when you search for knitting patterns? KnittingPatternCentral.com - owned by the same woman.) And sent the following email:

“Hi,

Can we talk? I would be interested in purchasing CPC. I could
even pay you to continue running it.

Please let me know if we could possibly discuss?

Austin Long”

Whatever your preference, I suggest avoiding prices. If the person has pie in the sky hopes, it’s not going to help things if you mention a low price. And if you have a site worth a lot, like CrochetPatternCentral.com, you don’t necessarily want to offer $5k, when she may have taken $800.

She responded, and we discussed it. It comes down to that she doesn’t want to sell the site because she gets too much satisfaction from running it, and has made too many friends. I ended up giving her a reasonable number in hopes of having her greed (or was it mine) win out, but she just enjoys it too much.

Later, I offered to help her monetize her site, figuring why not? Since she wasn’t going to sell to me, and it wouldn’t take too much effort to create a lot more value. She turned me down. She says she doesn’t want to change her site at all. Not even the Rockabilly picture front and center.

But by then, I knew that being #1 for crochet pattern on google was good for 1.4 million visitors a year. So then I started looking at other crochet pattern sites down the list. I guessed that with some work, several of the sites on the first page of the results could unseat CrochetPatternCentral.com - with some decent effort. So then I email then. And it goes on.

Whether it’s crochet, or motorcycles, or Disneyland, or gun repair, you find a site that has the traffic, but isn’t making any revenue. You make an offer.

By contacting these webmasters directly, you avoid paying market prices at places like Sedo.com, Sitepoint.com, or forums.DigitalPoint.com. There is some guesswork involved - as marketplace listed websites at least make revenue and traffic claims - but if you can guesstimate a site’s traffic based on their search engine results, and you’re already offering low offers directly, I think your risks are low.

Because I own another Disneyland related website, I often check out the competition. I visited DisneylandPostcards.com recently, and saw that the webmaster had a sign that said “This website is closing…” He took $500 for it.

It is #12 for Disneyland on Yahoo, #23 on Google. But of course, #1 for Disneyland Postcards. And if you go to ebay and check out Disneyland Postcards, there’s a good group of Disneyland postcard collectors. Almost every postcard that comes up for bid sells, with some going for hundreds of dollars. Why not capture their emails, have a buy/sell section? OR, what about changing it entirely so that the “Disneyland Postcards” are articles about Disneyland? With a little more work, could it be on the first page for “Disneyland” on Google?

So far, I haven’t done anything with it, including linking to my main Disneyland site(another benefit). If it wasn’t for the time I spend posting here, perhaps I could get to work on it?

One last note. Although we want to buy sites directly, we want to SELL them at the marketplace. Saturday I sold RealEstateSalesLeads.net at Sitepoint, and I was happy with what I got (Buy It Now price within 2 hours). I had built that one myself, earned adsense for a couple years, then sold when it got to #2 for the targeted search term (Real Estate Leads). It wasn’t one of the sites that made me feel warm and fuzzy at night, and it had reached its peak, so I sold. I’m not saying this to boast, obviously this is no big deal to a lot of people, but… sure felt good!

So what next? Do a brainstorm of things you’re interested in, things your significant other might be interested in, or that you think wouldn’t be monetized. Google them and see if you don’t see some that aren’t living up to their potential. Let’s start getting some NOs, on our way towards that yes.

Let’s find silver where others aren’t looking.

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