This should give you an idea of how many other affiliate sites are out there. And it also means you’ll need to put a lot of effort into making sure people are hearing about yours.

To do this, you’ll need to focus on SEO, and securing backlinks from high-authority websites is a huge part of this. Links act as a vote of confidence in your site, so they will show search engines that you deserve to rank highly on relevant results pages.

In this article, I’ll take you through some techniques for creating a scalable link building strategy that will help you grow your affiliate marketing business, regardless of what niche you’re in.

What is link building, and why is it important?

Link building is the practice of acquiring backlinks from other websites in a bid to improve the search engine rankings of yours.

Search engines will perceive your website to be a knowledgeable and trustworthy source of information if a lot of credible websites are linking back to you. So, the more backlinks you have, the more confident those search engines will be about promoting your business.

A study by Ahrefs has shown that pages with more backlinks are ranked higher by Google and can attract a lot more traffic. And, after analyzing 11.8 million search results from Google, Backlinko found that the number one result displayed on the search engine result pages typically had 3.8 times more backlinks than the websites that came below it. So, it really can make a huge difference.

It’s very easy to get link building wrong, though, and Google regularly penalizes websites for doing so. To help you avoid that, I will highlight some common mistakes and explain exactly how you can get it right.

Common mistakes to avoid when building links

When you’re building links back to your website, some common mistakes can actually have a negative impact on your reputation and rankings. The process takes a lot of time, so you want to ensure you’re going to get the best possible results. Here are some mistakes I’ve seen people make time and time again that you’ll want to avoid at all costs.

Not properly vetting target websites

One huge link building mistake is focusing so much on building a high number of links that there isn’t enough attention being paid to the quality of those links. Not all links are created equal, so you need to ensure you’re properly vetting any websites you’re considering approaching for a link.

Always plug each target website into a specialist SEO tool like the Ahrefs Site Explorer to check the domain authority, the domain rating, the level of traffic, and what kinds of keywords it ranks for.

Check the quality of your target website’s backlink profile too, as a healthy one is going to give you the best results. Check that the website has an impressive number of backlinks from a good number of referring domains. Ideally, you should be looking for a ratio of 1:1, but this can be difficult to achieve for niche or new websites. As a general rule, as long as a website’s backlink profile includes links from a wide range of different websites, it’s likely to be natural, which is what you’re looking for. A natural backlink profile will have grown organically over time and won’t include reciprocal or paid-for links.

You should also personally inspect each website to ensure everything is high quality. The last thing you want to do is build links back to your affiliate website from spammy or low-quality domains, so do your homework before reaching out to anyone to ask for a link.

Building reciprocal links

Another example of a link building mistake that can negatively affect your website is reciprocal links, especially if they are done in excess. This refers to a situation where two websites decide to link to each other’s website, usually just for SEO purposes and not because the links are adding any sort of value for their audiences.

While it is still okay to link to relevant and authoritative sources who may decide to later give you a backlink down the line, Google’s quality guidelines say link exchanges that are done simply for the sake of cross-linking are a way to manipulate your website’s rankings and could be seen as a violation.

Some people like to engage in this form of link building because it might seem easier to do. However, it can lead to penalties from Google, so it’s best to build your links in a more strategic and valuable way.

Forgetting to check the target website’s domain authority

It is also important to check the domain authority (DA) of websites you want backlinks from. This will tell you how much authority—or value—you’re going to get from building a link on a particular website. DA is presented as a score from 1–100; 40–50 is average, 50–60 is good, and anything above 60 is excellent.

Loganix has a domain authority checker that can be used to analyze websites. Not only will you get results for DA, but you’ll get access to another important metric like the website’s domain rating (DR), which is used to measure the strength of your target website’s backlink profile based on the number and quality of its backlinks. DR is also measured on a 1–100 scale, and anything 30+ is considered good enough to build a link on.

Acquiring links from irrelevant target websites

Another factor to consider is how relevant certain websites are to your niche. Acquiring backlinks is important, but they’ll provide more value and give search engines more context about your business if you’re building them on similar or complementary websites.

For instance, if you own a travel blog where you talk about your travel experiences and all the different trips you’ve taken, a backlink from an airline website or travel magazine would be very valuable.

Not diversifying your link types

Diversifying the type of links you get for your website is a great way to make your backlink profile look more natural. One of the most common link sources for businesses is other blogs within the same niche or a complementary industry.

You can also secure links from local directories. This is a great way to build valuable and natural-looking links, because it makes perfect sense for relevant directories to recommend your business to prospective customers who are interested in what you offer. Another good source of backlinks are social media forums like Quora or Reddit, but you need to be careful when doing this. Don’t build links here in a spammy way; instead, link your website only if you feel it could help provide quality and helpful answers to someone’s query.

As you plan your link building strategy, also avoid using tactics that could hinder your SEO progress. For instance, Google looks negatively upon links that have been paid for. Instead, ask for backlinks as payment for sharing your expertise with the readerships of other websites.

Techniques for scalable link building

There are a number of different techniques that can be used to acquire quality links for your website. Here are some of the main ones you should try.

HARO

HARO stands for “Help a Reporter Out.” It’s a website that was created to connect journalists with people who can provide valuable information for their articles.

HARO is very useful, regardless of what niche you work in, as there are opportunities to share all types of expertise and insight. When you sign up on this website, you’ll soon start to receive opportunities to write quotes or provide short informational snippets that journalists can use in their work. Then, when their articles are published, you might be lucky enough to be credited with a backlink. It can be a great way to build links without having to send countless outreach emails each day.

To get the most out of HARO, sign up and indicate which kinds of industries you work in. You can then sort through any requests you receive, depending on what kinds of websites people are writing for and whether you have the necessary expertise to provide the information that’s needed.

Once you identify relevant opportunities, make sure that you construct a personalized pitch and include valuable information on the topic requested by the reporter. If they agree to use your pitch, let them know you would really appreciate it if they could also include a link back to your website.

Guest posting

When it comes to guest posting, you have to be strategic about acquiring opportunities and backlinks. As discussed earlier, Google frowns upon low-quality links, so you have to be careful to identify relevant and high-quality opportunities for your business.

One way you can do this is by putting together a list of credible and popular websites in your niche that already accept guest posts. Then, read their posting requirements and put together a personalized pitch that will grab each website’s attention.

Let them know a little bit about your background and what makes you qualified to write for them, what kind of topic you would like to cover, and when you’ll be able to get the content to them if they’re happy to work with you.

Content syndication

Content syndication is another technique that can be used to build quality backlinks for your business. It’s the process of republishing a piece of content on multiple third-party websites so a wider audience can see it. To do this, you have to find content syndication partners that are known to re-publish content.

Searching Google for these opportunities is one such way to find these partners. Simply input a search query that looks like this: “originally published on” + your niche. If you owned an affiliate website about marketing, your search query would be “originally published on” + marketing. Below is what you would see if you were to enter this query.

These websites clearly syndicate content from other bloggers, so you can now go ahead and pitch your request to them, letting them know there’s a blog post on your website that you would love them to repurpose. As we mentioned before, always make sure to personalize your pitch before contacting editors so that you have a better chance of convincing them to work with you.

Create visual content that’s shareable

To acquire more backlinks for your website, you should also try to create valuable content in visual forms like infographics and videos. This might seem complicated, but it can actually be quite simple if you use the right tools. For instance, InVideo is a video editing tool that has been specifically designed to make your life as easy as possible because it has templates that help you create professional and high-quality videos in minutes.

A study from Backlinko found that creating visual content is going to be one of the most effective ways to build backlinks in 2021. This is because infographics, diagrams, videos and more can easily be inserted into content on other websites to enhance it. Website owners will be grateful that you’ve provided them with tools to make their content more engaging, and they’ll credit you with a backlink, so everybody wins.

Just make sure that you put plenty of work into getting your visuals right. If you’re new to creating infographics, for instance, Venngage has a great guide to making them attractive and valuable, which is well worth a read before you get started.

Competitor backlink analysis

Another way to identify relevant backlink opportunities is by analyzing the backlink profiles of your competitors. Which websites have they written for, which magazines have featured them, and which blogs have they syndicated their content on?

You can use a specialist backlink analysis tool to find where most of your competitors’ backlinks are coming from, and use this information as inspiration. This will also help to ensure you’re securing links on websites that are at least as authoritative as the ones your competitors have been featured on.

Summary

Creating a link building strategy might not be the easiest thing to do, but it’s well worth it if you want to give your SEO a boost.

There are plenty of techniques you can use, from guest posting, to using HARO, to conducting an analysis of your competitors’ backlinks. It’s also important that you work slowly but steadily—it’s better to secure a few high-quality links than a lot of spammy, low-quality ones.

The post How to Create A Scalable Link Building Strategy for Your Affiliate Website appeared first on Empire Flippers.

As hundreds and thousands of brand emails continue to be fired at inboxes on a daily basis, businesses must aim at delivering a personal experience to avoid ending up in spam folders during this holiday season. The holiday season is typically cherished by brands across the globe for the opportunity it presents for skyrocketing their revenue. However, if you are unable to catch the attention of your audience in the first place, you’ll never be able to achieve this objective.

This is where segmenting your email lists comes into the picture.

According to research, segmented campaigns can increase email revenue by 760%. Email list segmentation allows businesses to divide their subscribers into different lists based on varying parameters such as:

• Interests
• Location
• Purchase history
• Position in the sales funnel

Subsequently, you can engage your customers with highly personalized and relevant emails, paving the path for increased engagement and conversions in the process.

This article will walk you through the various ways in which you can use email segmentation to boost your conversion rate, and subsequently, make the most of the upcoming holiday season!

Get Your Email List Segmentation Basics Right

When a new user finds something appealing about your services or products, they subscribe to your newsletter and communications.

Segmentation helps restate that very reason for your customers, and it does so by considering the challenges that they might have encountered during the subscription process like inadequate product information, unclear instructions for completing payments, and vague information on modifying existing subscriptions.

Overall, it renders your email campaigns with a unique value proposition and helps build unwavering and long-lasting customer relationships.

So, what do you need to get started with segmentation at a basic level?

User data

User data forms the core of email list segmentation. It may take many shapes such as:

• Location
• Gender
• Occupation
• Interests and preferences
• Past purchases
• Browsing history
• Level of engagement
• Their position in the sales funnel

You don’t need to have all of these data points in your arsenal at the same time to chalk out your segmentation strategies; any one or two would do. Don’t worry if you have scarce user data to begin with; you can always gather information and develop customer profiles as you go.

Professional sending platform

If you’re unable to figure out hassle-free ways of collecting customer contact information, a professional email marketing solution is sure to come to your rescue by integrating subscription forms with your business’s online platform. Once the necessary contact information is at your disposal, you can create different segments and target each with a unique brand of communication. However, make sure that ESPs (Email Service Provider)
integrations and features are compatible with your business before finalizing it.

Segmentation thresholds

You need to define how customers are segmented based on their actions or other criteria. To qualify into a specific segment, a customer must meet the criteria that define it. For example, let’s imagine you own an online bookstore. Suppose you have created a segment called “interested in history.” What does a visitor need to do to be classified under this segment? Do they need to make a purchase from the history section, or is browsing through the books under this section enough to qualify them? These are important calls that must be made before you sit down to make segmentation strategies.

Identify the Most Effective Segments

A rule of thumb while starting with email list segmentation is to always strive to keep things simple.

While the benefits of complex segmentation are tempting, the margin of errors they allow is extremely low. Hence, if you are new to segmentation, it is advisable that you revolve your strategies around the segments that have proven to be historically effective.
Listed below are a few of these segments for your reference.

Geographic location

This parameter works best for businesses that have outlets spread across different cities or countries. Segmenting customers based on their geographic location allows companies to send the store-related updates of a specific location only to the residents of that particular area. For example, if you have two stores in London and Hong Kong, ideally, you wouldn’t want your Hong Kong customers to receive London-related updates and vice versa. Additionally, geographic location-based segmentation allows you to create different segments for different time zones within a country, other regions of a particular city, and the like.

Purchase history

No customer wants to receive product recommendations that aren’t relevant to them. So, how do you avoid this? By segmenting your buyers based on their purchase history. If a section of your audience visits your electronics product page more than the others, then send them deals and offers relating to electronic gadgets. Likewise, if a particular segment has a furniture-rich purchase history, then sending them furniture-related product recommendations are bound to result in more conversions.

Image Source

Cart Abandonments

Abandoned carts are inevitable. While they can’t be totally done away with (unfortunately), there are measures in place that can help you minimize their occurrences and drive more sales out of them. Few steps work as effectively as email list segmentation. Creating a separate segment for users who have abandoned their carts allows you to target each one of them with personalized messaging, increasing the likelihood of converting abandoned carts into sales prospects.

Image Source

Use Different Customized Messages for Different Segments

The reason why we divide audiences into different segments is to cater to their varying interests and preferences. Should you fail to have different customized messages in store for different segments, you’ll be defeating the purpose of segmentation.

Are you wondering how to best use your content to captivate the attention of your subscribers?

Use Subject lines

Subject lines offer users a sneak peek into your emails, which speaks volumes about its importance. The more relevant your subject lines are, the greater its chances will be of registering improved open and click-through rates. Use humor, spring a surprise, provoke curiosity, use emojis—there are multiple options when it comes to sprucing up your subject lines. It all eventually boils down to using a tonality and temperament which suits your brand the best.

Use Power Words

What are power words? Simply put, they are words that inspire action. Trust, discover, understand, improve, free, bonus, learn, exclusive—you get the drift. Power words appeal directly to your subscriber’s emotions and incentivize them to take action. As a result, brands usually prefer using power words for their CTAs.

Wrapping It Up

Email list segmentation has now become a go-to tool for email marketers, and rightfully so. It not only allows them to increase their ROI but also helps them to retain a greater number of customers.

If there ever was a sure-fire way of cutting through the noise of constant daily emails, then email segmentation is it. Moreover, with the holiday season just around the corner, it’s essential that you practice email list hyper-segmentation to increase email engagement and sales during this period.

To help you get a headstart on this matter, we collaborated with our friends at Email on Acid to give rise to this neat infographic. These insights are sure to give your holiday email marketing efforts a leg up, enabling you to stand miles above your competitors.
Source: Email List Hyper-Segmentation

The post Is Driving More Conversions on Your Mind? Adopt Email List Segmentation Now appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Stories like this highlight why we keep saying we’re in the Season of the Seller. We’re seeing businesses just like this sell faster and for more money than ever before. Investors are hungry for FBA businesses with huge growth potential, and they’re snapping them up as quickly as possible.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Looking through our State of the Industry report and our mid-year wrap-up, you can see that at the end of 2020, the average sales price of Amazon FBA businesses had increased by 80% compared to 2019.

By June 2021, the data showed that the average sales price of these types of businesses had already increased by 39% from 2020.

If you’ve got a successful FBA business, it’s a great time to start thinking about your next steps and create an exit strategy.

As you’ll see, not only did the seller in this story walk away with a high 6-figure exit, but they also managed to secure an offer over their listing price. How did they do it? Let’s take a look.

The Business Built on a Bet

So, what’s involved with an $800k business that started with just $100?

To start, the seller had chosen a highly specialized niche and established a foothold on Amazon before big names in the industry entered the space. After spending a few years solely focused on Amazon, the seller expanded to other marketplaces while taking advantage of Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) service.

The seller set up a Shopify account and began listing on Walmart. To simplify their day-to-day operations, all Shopify sales were redirected to Amazon. For Walmart, orders were processed by the seller as Amazon orders at the end of each day.

The business had strong branding, which could be seen in the high number of excellent product reviews. The seller had also been proactive in protecting their brand by filing a trademark application with Amazon’s IP Accelerator service, which gave them immediate access to Amazon Brand Registry.

For brands to enroll in Brand Registry, they normally need to have been granted a trademark. A trademark in progress usually isn’t enough to gain access to Brand Registry services. To make the process easier, Amazon developed IP Accelerator.

The IP Accelerator service connects sellers with Amazon-partnered law firms for help with applying for trademarks. When a seller goes through an approved law firm, they have instant access to Brand Registry features even before their trademark application is approved.

Having great reviews and trademarks in place is important, because brand strength is one of the factors that can affect the multiple, and ultimately the overall value, of an FBA business.

This business not only had strong branding behind it, but it also had rapid growth. After confirming the average monthly net profit and taking into account other factors, such as market diversity and business age, our vetting team gave the business a final valuation of $726,366.

To List or Not to List Right Away

When the seller approached us with the idea of exiting their business, they were on the fence about listing right away. They had built up a profitable company and knew that the upcoming months would add to their revenue, making their business even more valuable.

They had tried to sell privately a few months before and had been let down by the buyer. While they were ready to move onto other projects, they weren’t sure whether it was a good move to list immediately or wait until the high season sales could be reflected in their profit and loss (P&L) sheet.

This is a dilemma we hear from a lot of sellers. On one hand, listing before an expected busy season can increase the chances of a quick sale. Buyers are looking to get back their return on investment (ROI) as quickly as possible, and buying a business that is expected to have increased profits in just a few months is an attractive option.

On the other hand, an increase in revenue can often lead to an increase in the listing price. While that can be great news to a seller on the surface, a higher listing price might take longer to attract the right buyer.

After speaking with our vetting team, the sellers accepted a valuation of $726,366 and decided to list right away to maximize their chances of a quick sale.

The Offers Roll In

The decision to list their business immediately turned out to be a smart one. Within a day of going live, the seller already had calls scheduled with five interested buyers. High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) and private equity firms alike were interested in the growth potential of the business.

After one phone call with a private equity firm, the seller received a full-price offer. They were happy with the quality of the offer, but they knew there was considerable interest from other parties and wanted to see what else was on the table.

It may seem like a bit of a gamble to leave a full-price offer waiting, but it was a smart move on the part of the seller. When a business attracts high-quality investors, a single full-price offer can lead to one or more above-price offers.

In this case, another interested private equity firm stepped in and offered $540,000 cash upfront with a $60,000 holdback to be paid after nine months. On top of this $600k, they also added a $200,000 stability payment to be paid at the end of the year as long as the average monthly revenue (AMR) per month for the remainder of the year was greater than the AMR for the year prior to closing.

In other words, as long as the business continued to show year-on-year growth, the seller would walk away with $800k in total.

Clarifying the Offer

The seller was thrilled with the offer. But they did have a few concerns. The first was whether the total amount included inventory. The second was whether the private equity firm was planning to keep the contractors who had been working with the business.

Normally, our listing price for businesses doesn’t include inventory. We even make a note of this on our marketplace listings.

Why is that?

Inventory is constantly fluctuating. The amount of inventory a seller has when listing almost certainly won’t be the same as what they have on hand when the business sells.

To simplify the process, we don’t take inventory into account when coming up with a business valuation.

When the seller got the offer, they thought it might have included the cost of inventory, which would have made it less attractive than the full-price + inventory offer they had received before.

They also wanted to know whether the contractors would be continuing with the new owners. When the business was listed, the seller left it open for the buyer to decide whether they wanted to continue working with the contractors.

After receiving the offer, they wanted to know what the buyer intended to do, because the seller decided they wanted to keep those contractor relationships intact for other businesses.

When it comes to independent contractor relationships, some buyers are willing to let part-time workers continue working with sellers as long as there are no competition concerns. Others would prefer to train their own employees and don’t want to take on the seller’s existing relationships.

The seller reached out to our sales advisors for clarification before they accepted the offer. The buyer confirmed that the offer excluded inventory and that the contractors were free to continue working with the seller.

Once these concerns were ironed out, the seller was happy to accept the offer, and the buyer started their due diligence period.

Getting to Sold

The due diligence period is particularly important to buyers. Our vetting process is thorough and extensive, but the post-offer due diligence period allows buyers to verify all the information and financial records provided by sellers.

During the due diligence period, there was one bump in the road. Earlier, I mentioned that the seller had originally tried to sell privately and had even found a buyer, but the deal fell through.

This private buyer had filed a trademark application for one of the brands before the deal fell through. The seller had no idea until they started the vetting process with us. They immediately tried to fix the situation, filing their own trademark application and sending a cease and desist letter to the former buyer.

The buyer from our marketplace wanted access to all the correspondence between the seller and the former buyer so their legal department could make sure to follow the proper procedures for getting the previous trademark application canceled.

This is one of the reasons we recommend sellers use a full-service brokerage with processes in place to protect both parties. There was nothing nefarious about what the former buyer did, but it caused complications for the seller down the road.

Using dedicated sales and migrations teams helps protect sellers by ensuring certain assets are protected until the deal closes, reducing the risk that buyers will manipulate assets, even accidentally, before everything is signed.

Likewise, these same teams work with sellers to make sure the business runs the same until it is handed over to the buyers. It’s a mutually beneficial system that helps ensure a smooth sale and transfer.

After the seller provided all the information to the buyer, it was time to finalize the deal and move on to migrating the assets.

Helping Both Buyers and Sellers

The seller had solid business experience, but this was the first time they had ever sold a business. It was understandable that they were unsure about certain steps in the process, and given their previous experience with a private buyer, they were anxious to close the deal.

This is another benefit of working with a full-service broker. Instead of just listing a business for sale and calling it a day, we have teams dedicated to making the sales process as smooth as possible for both buyers and sellers.

Our rigorous vetting process is beneficial for buyers, because they know that the businesses listed on our marketplace are high quality and have been checked out by experienced vetting advisors.

For sellers, our vetting team can provide valuable feedback during the valuation process, helping sellers understand why their businesses are worth what they are.

Once a listing goes live, our sales team is on hand for both buyers and sellers, facilitating communication, answering questions on both ends, and offering feedback on buyer-seller calls.

When an offer is made and finalized, our migrations team is ready to step in to help transfer assets, saving the buyer and seller valuable time.

Having all of these processes in place helped the seller in this situation navigate the complicated sales process. When the deal was finalized, they walked away feeling good about the offer they had negotiated and their experience listing through us.

Selling Your Amazon FBA Business

Selling a business can be an emotional process. Although sellers are often ready to move onto other projects, they’ve put a lot of time and energy into building a successful business, and they want to connect with buyers who can appreciate that work.

No two deals are the same, just as no two businesses are the same. Whether you’re a first-time seller or have several successful deals under your belt, working with a broker can ease the process, as the seller in this story found out.

If you’ve got a profitable FBA business and are wondering how much your exit could be worth, you can check out our free valuation tool. We’ve developed an algorithm based on real data to give you a solid starting point for the valuation of your business.

But if you’re ready to take the next steps and start planning your exit, it would be worth it to schedule a call with one of our business analysts. They can give you more information about the listing process and guide you on preparing your business for your big exit.

The post How $100 and a Dare Turned into an $800k FBA Exit appeared first on Empire Flippers.

With the massive increase in website demand in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry, more and more website owners are being approached by big investors.

It can come as a shock, if you weren’t previously aware that investors buy businesses, to receive such an offer and to realize that your website isn’t just a business that earns you income but an investable asset.

As assets, websites are increasing in value because of a flood of capital pouring into the online business mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry. It’s an exciting prospect to take advantage of at this time, but how can you do that best?

Aside from such surefire reasons for selling your website as needing a large sum of capital quickly, there are other things to consider when timing your exit.

Most of the conversations we see about this topic focus on how to get the highest possible price, but there’s more to timing your exit. Taking the example of needing capital quickly, the owner would have to sacrifice the maximum possible exit price in favor of a quick transaction by dropping the sale price.

In this article, we will discuss how to determine the best time to sell your business for you and how to get the highest possible sale price when you do sell.

When to Sell Now

If you have an offer on the table, it can be tempting to grab it with two hands in case you don’t receive another offer for a long time.

The fact that someone has reached out to you could be a sign you have a good website that would generate interest in the current M&A market. The best way to generate the most interest in your website is to prepare it for sale and list it on a marketplace.

When considering the market-related reasons to sell, it’s good to know that you have leverage in the deal if you sell right before your peak season. An online business buyer’s main motivation is to generate a return on investment (ROI) as soon as possible, so if they acquire your website and it goes right into peak season, their profits will increase and it will help the buyer get an ROI more quickly than if they acquired your site after peak season.

Having this leverage puts you in a good position to sell quickly and negotiate a high sale price.

We usually recommend this approach to website owners whose business is running flat, with little to no growth or decline, as they can use prospective seasonal growth as leverage to negotiate a good sale price.

Another reason to sell now is because we’re currently experiencing a season of the seller for the first time in the history of this market. The value of content sites and online businesses as a whole has increased dramatically over the past year.

A growing flood of capital is entering the market from big investors and investing firms who are aggregating brands to build huge online business portfolios. These investors are now looking for new ways to strengthen their ecommerce-focused portfolios by bolting content sites onto their ecommerce brands to act as mini media companies.

However, if you’re anticipating year-on-year growth for your business, another option is to sit through your peak season.

When to Let Your Site Sit

Another way to leverage peak season is to sit through it. If your projections show that this year’s peak season will outperform last year’s by a significant margin, then your business’ profits will increase, which will increase its valuation.

You don’t need to fear losing out on the opportunity to sell even if you turn down a current offer. There will always be buyers for online businesses. Buyer demand is increasing, as shown by the increase of verified funds on our marketplace from $1BN at this point last year to over $4.7BN at the time of writing this article.

That said, while sitting through your peak season will see your profits, valuation, and average net profit increase, you will lose the bargaining leverage of a quick ROI opportunity.

Also, it’s always possible that external factors, like Google and commission updates, will impact your site’s performance, preventing it from riding the profitable wave. It’s worth bearing that risk in mind.

If you want leverage for your deal, an upcoming peak season isn’t the only means of getting it. This leads us to a common question about timing a content site exit.

What if You’ve Just Created a Big Batch of Content?

If you have recently created new content for your website, you can wait to see if the site grows. Any resulting growth will command a higher sale price, as the site’s average net profits will have increased.

However, it’s not just net profits that affect your site’s value.

As aforementioned, the buyer’s motivation is ROI. You need to leave provide some growth prospects to help them achieve that ROI. If you wait to list your site for sale until after your site grows as a result of your content release, how will the buyer grow the site further? We recommend opting to at least hold onto some content as a buyer incentive.

If your website has a straightforward setup (i.e., it generates almost all of its traffic from SEO), most of its income is drawn from a few affiliate or display advertising networks, it doesn’t have any audience assets like an email list or a social media following, then the buyer will have to build those growth channels from scratch, delaying their ROI. In this case, it may not make sense to release all of your new content. If you do have some of these growth assets, then launching your batch of content and waiting for a profit increase makes more sense for you.

Sit or sell is the key question—but there is a third, unconventional option to consider.

Test the Market

Another option is to list your website for sale and see what happens. You can get a feel for the market demand for your website by the types of offers you get and feedback from potential buyers on the readiness of your website for sale. When going this route, it’s best to list for sale privately because with a broker, you are held to an exclusivity contract that prevents you from listing on other marketplaces.

While it does take some work to prepare your website for sale, including organizing your finances and operations, these preparations will improve your business and likely make it more profitable. They will also help clarify your website’s growth opportunities and scaling potential.

While your site is listed for sale, you can run it as normal and keep earning 100% of its profits. The only thing you really have to lose is the time taken to review offers and speak with buyers, so the gains in your website’s improvements should outweigh the loss of time.

If you are keen to consider an offer you have already received, then it’s worth knowing whether the offer reflects an accurate valuation of your business.

How to Evaluate an Offer

When we value an online business, we consider factors such as business model, age, and growth or decline, to name just a few.

If you’re not ready to go through the in-depth process of discovering the true value of your website, you can use a simple formula to get a baseline valuation figure.

Your monthly net profit should be taken from a twelve-month average, and the multiple should be a figure calculated based on the factors that determine your business’ value, including those listed in the above paragraph.

To give you an idea of the current worth of content sites, they list at 41.7X on average.

Keeping this figure in mind when assessing offers should help you navigate negotiations. However, there’s no way to say how much higher or lower a price you should accept without looking more deeply into your business. For example, if your profits had been declining considerably over the past year, your business wouldn’t be in the best position for an investor to make an ROI, which would significantly reduce your multiple.

The average value of content sites has increased considerably over the past year. In 2020, the average list multiple for content sites on our marketplace was 33.8X; a comparison to the 41.7X average in 2021 demonstrates the huge jump in content site value over the past year alone.

To give an example of just how big that jump is, a business earning $10,000 net profit per month in 2020 would have an expected valuation of $338,000. In 2021, the same business earning the same net profit would have an expected valuation closer to $417,000.

In terms of the state of the market, there’s never been a better time to sell your content site, but the most important factor to consider is your personal circumstances.

Consider Your Circumstances Before Selling

We never advise that an online business owner try to time a sale based solely on the market because it can change uncontrollably. However, planning effectively and preparing your site for sale will set your site up for the highest possible sale price whenever it is the best time for you to sell, giving you more control over your exit.

When you sell depends more on your personal circumstances than anything else. You might have a need for the capital, you’re bored of your niche, or you might not have any reason to exit right now. In any case, your circumstances should be the number one determinant of when you sell.

If you’d like some personalized advice on how to prepare your website for sale, schedule a free exit planning call with one of our expert business advisors.

The post Should You Sell Your Content Site Now or Let it Sit? appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Buyers.

After all the hard work put into getting visitors to your ecommerce website, it can be easy to overlook the last step—persuading them to purchase. In 2020, e-retail totaled over $4.2 trillion, so getting your ecommerce game right definitely pays. The trick is convincing customers that your business is the one for them.

No, you don’t need to learn mind tricks or some fancypants programming to boost your ecommerce conversion rate. All it takes is a common-sense approach to your website and a couple of quick fixes. Sounds good?

Let’s have a look at eight persuasive tips to boost your purchases and improve your browser-to-buyer conversion rates.

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1. Design a Clear, Appealing Webpage

We all know first impressions count and your website design is no different. As the first thing potential customers see, your website must be easy to navigate and attractive. If it looks too overcrowded or difficult to find your way around, visitors won’t hesitate to take their business elsewhere.

Use IoT automation technology to promote certain products to visitors, and have a range of filters available to help your browsers easily find what they’re looking for. On top of this, keep your website up to date with what’s in stock to avoid wasting customers’ time. There are few things as annoying as spending ages searching for a product just to find that it’s sold out.

2. Give Plenty of Information

As mentioned, easy navigation and a pleasing design are priorities for an ecommerce website. However, you should not compromise in giving your customers enough information. Both your images and your descriptions should provide the buyer with all the information they need. Some important details you can include are:

• Product information (product name, features, customization options)
• Price
• Discount or offers
• Call to Action (CTA)

You can also include size comparison images or product warnings, both of which create a well-honed product offering. Make sure images are high quality and allow customers to see the details; this shows you have nothing to hide.

Information regarding postage, packaging, or payment methods can also be helpful. Rather than getting partway through checkout before realizing there are multiple additional costs, be upfront and allow customers to make fully informed decisions. Difficulty in finding this information, or discovering it too late in the purchase can be a customer pain point and result in browsers, not buyers.

3. Personalize the Customer Experience

Online shopping can become hard work when customers are overloaded with choices. Of course, you want to promote as many of your products as possible, but this can be detrimental to your own business. Instead, providing browsers with a smaller selection of options based on their viewing patterns and other products they’ve recently searched for is more likely to convert them into buyers.

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Group your products into similar categories or recommend products often bought together. This shows you’re thinking about the digital customer experience as more than just a potential purchase and trying to assist customers’ specific needs. Personalized advertising can also target specific people who are likely to want what you are selling rather than taking a broad, undefined approach.

4. Use Marketing Psychology

Certain words and phrases stick in our minds, such as “one left!” or “last chance!”. These encourage browsers to get a shimmy on and buy the product before it’s too late. By creating a sense of urgency, the visitor moves from browsing to making quick decisions. Marking up items with these labels can draw particular attention to them based on human behavioral principles.

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Likewise, customers can respond to a variety of labels based on what they value. Whether they need an expert opinion from a “staff pick,” something modern and “new,” or something ethically and sustainably made, these categories can appeal to customer psychology. They can also help you in working out what other products to recommend and discovering what your buyers value most in your line of products.

5. Display Social Proof

People listen to recommendations from other people far more than those from your company. Providing social proof that your product is desirable solidifies in the buyer’s mind that this product is popular. It’s one of those psychological triggers that make us want something even more and convince buyers to make a purchase.

Whether displaying customer reviews alongside your products, showing customer ratings, or allowing buyers to “like” their favorite products, social proof is the virtual equivalent of showing up at school with the new, trendy product that everyone’s talking about. It also boosts your credibility and trustworthiness if you have a good number of reviews recommending your products.

6. Meet the Buyer Where They’re At

According to a PayPal report, 77% of recreational mobile browsers make impulse purchases. If you want those impulse purchases to be made on your website, you’d better have a website that’s optimized for mobile.

No longer is a simple webpage that looks good on a laptop screen enough. Whatever device your customers are using, you want them to have a good experience with your website.

Shopping via social media is also on the rise, with apps such as Instagram and Facebook introducing more shopping features, and the popularity of shopping apps is skyrocketing. If your target buyer is scrolling through these, you need to have a presence here too. Omnichannel marketing can help you to manage these and present your company well across any retail channels you choose.

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7. Make Your Checkout a Breeze

As the last hurdle stopping a browser from becoming a buyer, you want your checkout to be as problem-free as possible. By using auto-fill features for addresses or previously saved information, you can make your customers’ checkout experience quick and painless. Be careful not to create any barriers at this stage, such as required sign-ups or demanding non-essential information.

When taking payments, ensure your website has a variety of payment options available to suit whichever customer may come your way. Each of these must provide secure payments and promptly send receipts to customers to maintain trust with your new buyers. Whether you’re just starting your ecommerce business or you’ve been around forever, when it comes to money, everyone wants to be assured of their security.

8. Keep in Contact

It’s pretty standard practice to send email reminders for abandoned carts, and for good reason. Reminding people is a whole lot easier than finding completely new customers, as they already have an impression of your company. And if they have something in the basket, they are considering buying from you. Your reminders draw the potential customer back in and remind them of what they are missing.

Likewise, retargeted adverts can make browsers 70% more likely to become buyers on your website. So, it’s in your interest to keep targeting page viewers. The more people who give you an email address or social media follow, the easier it is for you to make contact again and continue from where they left off.

All It Takes Is a Bit of Persuasion

Whether ecommerce is new territory for you or you’ve been in the game from the start, there’s always something more to improve. Keeping your ear to the ground for the latest developments can be hard work, but making things as clear and simple for customers as possible is always a good start. How you present your website can consistently convert your browsers into buyers, using just a touch of persuasion from your end.

The post 8 Ecommerce Tips to Turn Your Store Browsers Into Buyers appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Given the amount at stake, this is normally true—especially for online deals where anonymity and scams are part of daily internet life.

As a seller, you’ve likely spent years putting your heart and soul into a business, building it up to a point where you’re ready to consider selling, and wondering if anyone would buy it. For some, the anticipation is as nerve-wracking as the day they opened their business and were waiting for their first customer.

So imagine seeing your business go live on the marketplace at the start of the day, and after coming back from your morning errands, you see a notification that someone has already sent in over a million dollars for your website. The deal is done.

5 hours and 16 minutes. This was the length of time between the new business listing going public and the buyer placing a deposit to purchase a $1,029,303 website.

This broke the record for the fastest seven-figure website ever sold. What made this even more incredible is that the buyer felt comfortable wiring more than a million dollars to us without first contacting anyone on our team. There were no initial questions for the seller and no discussion with our sales advisors.

In this case study, we’ll discuss what made this seven-figure website an attractive asset and quick grab for the buyer. We’ll then go into why our process gave this buyer the confidence to wire over seven figures within hours.

A Thriving Website from the Dot Com Era

The first part of the equation for selling this business so quickly was the unique strength of the business itself.

This was an incredibly well-aged display advertising and affiliate business that had been operating for over 20 years. It was in the highly competitive and lucrative pet care niche, had a DR of over 50, a strong backlink profile, and its traffic was spread evenly across its pages with no single page generating over 2.5% of overall site traffic.

The business saw significant growth due to a change in its display advertising network and a traffic boost from a Google algorithm update. By the time the seller was considering selling the business, it was consistently generating over eight times its monthly revenue prior to this spike.

We’ve consistently seen sellers time their exits around sales spikes. The common dilemma faced by sellers at this point is between trying to grow their business more to see if they can further increase the valuation or to cash out so they can allocate their capital and attention elsewhere.

This is a personal decision for each seller. However, we’d also recommend you speak with a business advisor to give you insight into what others have done in similar situations.

Arriving at the Valuation

The seller spent about two months working with our vetting team to organize all revenue and expense figures into a profit and loss (P&L) statement. They answered questions to help us determine the listing multiple we used in calculating the business valuation.

This took a little longer than the normal valuation timeline due to the sudden and significant growth in the business.

Together, we wanted to confirm that the revenue continued to be consistent over the coming months. We needed to be confident that this was the new baseline in order to justify calculating a valuation around this level. After reviewing the business for a couple of months, we confirmed that it was.

By the end of the vetting process, we valued the business using an eight-month net profit average rather than the commonly used twelve-month average. Given the business attributes, we were able to justify assigning a strong listing multiple and a high overall valuation.

This goes to show that our valuation tool is a great way to get started with the valuation process—but that circumstances can change and adjustments can be made to each deal during the actual vetting of the business.

The Buyer’s Perspective

A few hours after going live on the marketplace, the deal was purchased so quickly that only one other interested party had time to try to schedule a call with the seller.

As mentioned earlier, the buyer purchased this business without first requesting a discussion with anyone directly on our team. After the wire came through, we had a chance to get on our first call with the buyer, and we learned about how they made their decision.

According to the buyer, they made this purchase for two reasons: they saw an opportunity that met their predefined investment criteria, and they trusted the Empire Flippers process.

Predefined Investment Criteria and Buying Quickly

The buyer had been looking for a website within this niche for a while and didn’t want to miss the opportunity.

With the information provided by our vetting team and perhaps some additional preliminary website pre-checks of their own, the buyer was able to quickly verify that the business met their investment criteria.

Speed is also important in successful acquisitions.

Our marketplace closes a deal to the first buyer who submits their deposit. This can lead to assets being purchased quickly after being listed. We used to only see this happen with five-or six-figure businesses – it is now happening with seven-figure businesses. The game has changed.

The reason for this is that websites have become attractive purchases not only as standalone assets but also as acquisitions to supplement other business models in a portfolio. This is known as the bolt-on strategy. This has significantly increased buyer appetite and competition for higher-priced websites.

In this case, the buyer saw an opportunity that matched their predefined criteria, quickly performed their due diligence, and bought with the confidence that they were purchasing a quality business.

Trusting in the Empire Flippers Process

The buyer said they felt comfortable moving forward as quickly as they did due to their trust in the Empire Flippers process. We have years of experience in closing high-caliber deals efficiently.

It’s our vetting department that helps establish this trust in the quality of the businesses on the marketplace.

A high percentage of the businesses that we receive do not end up being listed on our marketplace due to the specific quality standards set by our vetting team. As a result, our buyers have grown to trust the quality of businesses on our marketplace.

In this case, after purchasing the business and during the asset transfer (migration) phase, the buyer felt that the business was accurately advertised, and they were excited that the business’s performance even exceeded expectations during the migration period.

The high volume of deals we complete with overwhelmingly positive feedback is yet another driving force behind this trust.

In this deal, the migration of the assets took only 22 days, and the buyer was thrilled with how seamless the transaction went overall.

Larger Deals Are Selling Faster than Ever

While this business currently holds the record for the fastest website of this size to be sold, large deals are selling faster than ever, and buyers and sellers are experiencing success stories similar to this every week with us.

In every case, these success stories started with the seller reaching out to learn about their options. If you’re considering an exit in the future, we recommend speaking with a business advisor to determine what your options are and what might be best for you.

If you’re not quite ready to schedule a call with us but would like an idea of what your business could be worth, feel free to check out our free valuation tool.

The post Case Study: The Fastest Million Dollar Website We’ve Ever Sold appeared first on Empire Flippers.

A well-thought-out strategy that represents a company’s long-term goals needs to be put in place while building solid customer relationships. This applies to almost every aspect of an e-commerce brand, especially its supply chain management. An optimized supply chain gives a business a proper foundation and ensures that its customers return time and time again.

The secret to success in e-commerce is building a seamless strategy for product development and distribution through a well-optimized supply chain.

In this guide, we will be looking at seven ways in which you can improve your e-commerce supply chain systems to ensure that your business remains profitable for years to come. Before we dive deeper into how you can improve your supply chain to maximize your profits, we will first cover some basics with regard to what an e-commerce supply chain consists of.

What Is an E-Commerce Supply Chain?

An e-commerce supply chain includes everything from product development, the sourcing of raw materials, and manufacturing to shipping logistics and information systems. All of these touchpoints should then be combined to maximize customer value and establish a competitive advantage for your product within a given niche or industry.

A well-optimized supply chain recognizes the fact that every product that is produced reaches the end user through the cumulative effort of multiple vendors and manufacturers. These alliances make up the supply chain and are interconnected through the flow of goods, services, and information.

The e-commerce supply chain consists of five sections that, when fine-tuned, create a better customer experience and improve your brand’s reputation. These sections are listed below:

• Strategizing
• Sourcing
• Manufacturing
• Logistics
• Delivery

The e-commerce supply chain represents the complete start-to-finish process of transforming your product idea into a physical item that addresses your customers’ pain points.

Online Shopping’s Impact on E-Commerce Supply Chains

Compared to the traditional supply chains for brick-and-mortar businesses—which are considered stable and predictable with regard to demand—e-commerce supply chains are far more inconsistent due to the fact that anyone, from anywhere in the world, can now order your product with the touch of a button.

Thanks to the internet and online shopping, such inconsistency has become more commonplace, as there can be a sudden drop in shopping trends or a sudden spike in sales almost overnight.

While brick-and-mortar brands might experience growth in the sales of a given product on its launch day or during a special holiday promotion, it is far less common to see a stock-out during normal operations.

The opposite can be said when we consider the impacts that the recent pandemic has had on e-commerce buying trends. For example, while doomsday prepping might have been a small niche 5–10 years ago, almost overnight, this industry experienced unpredictable growth, and many brands in this niche were unprepared to run out of stock without warning.

Why Is Having a Good Supply Chain Strategy Important in E-Commerce?

As mentioned in the example above, having a well-optimized supply chain will limit the risk of your products going completely out of stock should you find yourself in a similar situation without warning.

How well you optimize your supply chain will determine whether your business is functioning at the optimum level or whether it is on the verge of reaching a critical point of failure.

Nothing is more frustrating to a potential customer than landing on your product’s listing page after hours of research only to find out that the item they were determined to purchase is no longer available or in stock. To safeguard your brand’s reputation, let’s cover some of the ways in which you can improve your supply chain to prevent these issues occurring with you.

1. Lower Shipping Costs and Delivery Speeds

The fact that Amazon offers same-day and next-day delivery to 72% of the total U.S. population puts smaller e-commerce brands under a ton of pressure. In order to compete, e-commerce brands need to meet or exceed these expectations to stay relevant in the eyes of their customers.

For those who are just starting out, you may be asking yourself, “How can I compete with one-day shipping while keeping costs low?”

One of the best ways for an e-commerce business to expedite their shipping times while maintaining low costs is to utilize a third-party logistics (3PL) service.

Given the volumes that most 3PLs ship, they have relationships with shipping carriers that entail special pricing that most e-commerce brands don’t have access to. These 3PL providers will often pass these savings down to their customers.

In addition to lower shipping costs, a 3PL has multiple fulfillment centers, which can be used to ship your products from multiple locations that are closest to your customers. With fewer shipping zones come lower costs, and, by distributing your inventory to multiple locations, you can provide lower shipping times, which, in turn, will help you stay competitive with Amazon’s fulfillment centers.

2. Rethink Your Sourcing Strategy and Manufacturing Partners

When sourcing product manufacturers, you will most likely consider who has the lowest prices, the highest quality of goods, and the shortest lead times. Of course, it’s hard to find a manufacturer that can provide all three together.

Most e-commerce businesses will need to decide which of these three characteristics is the most important to their consumers and determine which factors will help them maintain their brand’s reputation. Below are a few questions that you should ask yourself:

Do you want to produce best-quality products?
The best-priced products?
Do you want to get your products to market fast?

Answering these questions will help you determine whether you should plan on sourcing from within the United States or overseas. If you happen to be sourcing from abroad, check whether other manufacturers lead the pack in one of the areas that you are the most concerned with. This will help you make decisions regarding which partners match your brand’s goals the best.

3. Consider Using 3PL Providers

We touched upon this in the shipping and delivery section above, but it is worth separately mentioning this here, as using a 3PL service is often a guaranteed way to improve your overall supply chain strategy.

While there are many great ways to improve your overall supply chain approach, often, one of the most beneficial changes for any e-commerce brand is to use a 3PL provider. In addition to giving you more control over shipping times and logistics costs, these providers will usually offer you far better storage options than what Amazon fulfillment centers alone can provide.

By using a 3PL service to help streamline your supply chain management, you can not only save money on storage and shipping costs but also reduce shipping lead times, which is the amount of time from when your customer orders a product to when their items reach their front door. This goes a long way in the eyes of your customer, so using these services can help improve your brand’s reputation and maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty.

4. Automate Your Paperwork and Inventory Management

If you have not already taken the leap of automating simple business processes, you may start to fall behind the curve. Most e-commerce brands that we come in contact with say that they have adopted procure-to-pay systems and artificial intelligence (AI) supplements to help transfer manual tasks to machines from humans. By freeing up your employees from redundant tasks, you give them the ability to focus on more important aspects such as customer service, returns, and other features that customers often prefer human assistance on.

Implementing automation means that product invoices can be generated and sent from the supplier’s system to the purchaser’s finance department automatically. This can be seen as an elevation of the procurement function and not a scaling-down of your back-end operations.

Moreover, AI can be used to run expenditure analysis reports before, during, and after sourcing. It can also provide demand breakdowns, market analysis, and supplier performance metrics in real time using internal and external data. This will not only help you streamline your business operations but also give you better insight into the weakest link in your supply chain and which specific aspect needs to be improved upon.

5. Maximize Your Warehouse Capacity

According to Supply Chain Dive, e-commerce sales will comprise a third of all retail sales in the next three years, as more brands (including brick-and-mortar businesses) embrace omnichannel sales. This entails an increase in demand and that competition for warehousing space will continue to grow in all types of distribution centers as well.

The ability to maximize your warehouse capacity is a must-have for any e-commerce business looking to prevent storage limitations. A few effective ways to maximize your warehouse space include seasonal storage (which is a useful method for storing products that only sell during a specific season), increasing space efficiency by extending your storage racks and reducing the width of aisles, and implementing a warehouse management system (WMS).

Adopting a WMS is a great option for those looking to maximize their storage space by using technology to suggest the best routes to pick out or store products. A WMS can also provide employees with automated pick lists that help reduce the number of errors and the amount of time wasted when collecting product orders to be shipped out to customers.

6. Implement New Technologies such as AI

As an e-commerce business, it’s important to keep up with new trends in technology, as the industry is constantly evolving. While larger brands are adopting automation through chatbots and AI to speed up certain processes, these options might not always be the right fit for you based on your products or budget.

For those who are still looking for ways to streamline their business model using technology, other relatively inexpensive tools are emerging for startups and small businesses, such as inventory scanner systems and barcode scanning technologies.

WMSs, as mentioned earlier, also offer transparency in the supply chain and help ensure that your products and materials move through your supply chain in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. A good WMS takes in consideration warehouse design, inventory tracking, picking and packaging of products, shipping, labor management, warehouse and dock management, and reporting. Many of these AI technologies are cloud-based solutions, which also integrate well with most 3PLs.

7. Focus on Client-First Customer Support

When first starting out, many business owners wouldn’t consider customer support a part of the supply chain. The simple truth that customer support is, in fact, a part of the supply chain can be seen when you consider that the sales process is not finished until the customer successfully receives their product. A recent survey conducted by Super Office reveals that 86% of customers are willing to spend more money on a product if they receive good customer service.

This is an important metric that shows why building an excellent customer support program is critical to driving your business forward.

Besides improving communication with your customers, establishing a client-first support system entails that you should also consider your customers’ feedback. This feedback can give you in-depth insights into what you’re doing right or wrong within your supply chain.

This can lead to improvements in various aspects—your website design, the product itself, or the start-to-finish shipping process—and in how the associated experience resonated with your customers.

Collecting data for analysis using surveys, interviews, and complaint reports will give you the ability to pinpoint where you need to improve your supply chain to enhance your brand’s overall performance and build a lasting reputation for years to come.

Leveraging Your Supply Chain for Exit

Regardless of whether you are just getting started with launching your first product or have been selling products for years in a brick-and-mortar store and are looking to build an omnichannel presence online, we hope that this guide will help you optimize your supply management processes.

The first step when building a successful e-commerce brand is to ensure that your supply chain strategy is well optimized, which, in turn, will give you a more stable foundation to continue to scale your business for years to come.

If you already have an e-commerce brand that you plan to fine-tune using some of the tactics we’ve covered in this guide, you may be surprised to learn that thousands of investors would be willing to pay you a large sum of money to acquire your business.

To check what your business is worth in today’s market, you can use our valuation tool to see how much you could walk away with if you choose to make an exit.

Not quite sure if now is the best time to exit your business and still looking for new ways to improve your brand before listing it for sale? Schedule an exit planning call with one of our business advisors today, and they will guide you toward improving your supply chain systems to get the most out of your business exit when the time comes.

The post 7 Ways to Improve Your E-Commerce Supply Chain appeared first on Empire Flippers.

With so many balls in the air, it’s easy to lose sight of the basics; the simple ingredients in the recipe for success.

One of these ingredients is well-written content.

Great content is often undervalued, but one seller, who was determined to champion content on their website, discovered just how valuable well-written content really is when the time came to exit their business.

This focused drive to produce informative, accurate articles helped the seller build a million-dollar content site in just three years. On top of that, the seller achieved this without having to do any link building or much SEO!

This incredible business was only on our marketplace for 10 days before being snatched up for a 45x multiple exit and an all-cash sale price of $1,007,000.
Pretty incredible right? I’m sure you’re dying to learn more about this seller’s incredible journey, so let’s dive right in!

Quality Content Is Key

Content site owners can easily get sucked in by the nuances of SEO and Google algorithms and forget about the most important aspect of content sites, which is the content itself.

Optimizing your SEO or building up a great backlink profile may bring people to your site, but well-written content is what keeps them glued to the page and encourages them to return to your site in the future.

This is a concept that SEO expert Doron Wolffberg discusses in-depth during his interview with us on The Opportunity podcast.

According to Doron, Google algorithm updates have placed a bigger emphasis on quality, focused content. This means that even though it may be more expensive to hire specialist content writers, this investment results in content that distinguishes you from your competitors and improves your engagement and conversion rates.

This not only increases the authority of your website but also makes it harder for competitors or AI content to outperform you.

It was a similar focus on quality content that helped our seller create their million-dollar business.

Creating a Business That Will Last

Back in 2018, the seller made the life-changing decision to create an online business. They had previously owned a small niche site and channeled what they had learned from the first site into the new business.

The seller had a lifelong passion for a specific branch of the hobbies niche and decided to create an informational website centered around this activity. It was important to the seller that they chose a topic they were genuinely curious about, as they knew they’d be spending many late nights working on the site and didn’t want to lose interest in it.

As an added bonus, the topic in question was in a broad, evergreen niche and had a large, addressable market.

The business made its money mainly through display advertising, with additional revenue coming in through affiliate marketing.

But it was the content that truly set it apart from other websites in its category.

Building a Million-Dollar Content Site

The seller knew from the get-go that substandard content wouldn’t cut it and made an effort to provide the most accurate information possible. They consulted numerous experts and conducted meticulous research before publishing each article.

The seller, along with another skilled writer, went on to publish over 350 articles, firmly establishing the site as an authority in its category.

This high standard of writing, driven by a genuine desire to help people, resonated with the readers, and the site grew far quicker than the seller anticipated.

The business built up a healthy audience, with 4,800 subscribers signing up for the site’s newsletter. The success of gaining almost 40,000 followers on Pinterest encouraged the seller to start a YouTube channel, which grew to over 4,000 subscribers.

In just three short years, the site was attracting over a million monthly page views and was bringing in an impressive $22,000 in monthly net profit.

The seller was passionate about building this business, but the demands of everyday life were starting to take their toll. Outside of the business, the seller had a demanding day job and was also raising a young family.

Though they were conflicted about selling the business, they recognized that sooner or later something had to give.

Satisfied with the success they had achieved thus far, the seller decided to sell the business.

Our Advisers Lend a Helping Hand

Entering the market as a first-time seller can be pretty intimidating. There are so many moving parts in the sales process, and sellers are never sure what sort of reception their business will receive from potential buyers.

This is where our vetting, sales, and migrations advisers really come into their own.

When sellers submit their businesses to Empire Flippers, our advisers guide them through every step of the process, from vetting all the way to migrations.

The seller had a very specific goal when it came to selling the business—they would not settle for anything less than a million-dollar exit.

With this goal in mind, the seller used our valuation tool to find out how much their business was worth. Though it took a couple of months for the business to reach a $1,000,000 valuation, our dedicated sales advisers stayed in close contact with the seller, advising them on how best to position their business to buyers.

When valuing a content business, we use the following formula to calculate the listing price:

In order to calculate the multiple, we take several things into consideration. We look at things like the earnings history, the business model, growth trends, the age of the business, social media, site traffic, etc.

We sold over 150 content sites in 2020. These sites achieved an average monthly multiple of around 30x–35x.

So, how did the seller achieve such a high multiple? In large part, it was due to the recent rise in aggregator spending power.

How Aggregators Are Changing the Content Game

When aggregators and high-net-worth individuals first turned their attention to online businesses, they focused largely on the Amazon FBA business model. This allowed them to rapidly grow their online empires by simply acquiring established companies instead of having to build them from the ground up.

However, as competition continues to increase within this field, these powerful entities have begun to expand their portfolios and branch out into content sites. They pair content sites with FBA brands in a similar niche and then use the content site to boost brand awareness.

The ripple effect from this shift in focus has caused an increase in the value of content sites.

This change in the content site market, coupled with the seller’s success in scaling their business, meant that we were able to offer the seller a jaw-dropping 55x pricing multiple and a listing price of $1,229,571.

The Seller Cashes In

After a call with a buyer advisor to discuss the sales process, the seller was ready to list their business on our marketplace.

The listing was unlocked by 15 interested buyers, and an offer was accepted by the seller in just 10 days!

When it comes time for a buyer to make an offer on a business, there are many deal structures that can come into play. With businesses over $1,000,000, it is very likely that a buyer will suggest an earnout.

There are a few different types of earnouts, but, at its core, an earnout is where a buyer pays a portion of the business price up front, then pays the remaining balance off over a set period of time.

Most sellers tend to prefer all-cash deals over earnouts, but finding a buyer who is willing to part with over $1,000,000 cash up front has traditionally been quite rare.

Fortunately for the seller, a variety of large brand aggregators regularly browse through our marketplace looking to expand their portfolios. Many of these aggregators have the spending power to purchase high-value businesses without the need for seller financing.

The seller’s business caught the attention of a capital-backed aggregator who, after negotiating the multiple down to 45x, put in an all-cash offer of $1,007,000 for the business.

Thrilled to meet their goal of achieving a million-dollar exit, the seller accepted the deal, stating:

“I’m delighted with the offer, and all cash is a real bonus. [The buyer] seemed like a perfect fit to take the site forward. I’ve compromised on the multiple, but I definitely think it’s a win-win deal.”

You Can Achieve a Life-Changing Exit Too

This seller’s story isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that is reserved for an elite few. You can grow your content business to this level too!

Focus on providing your readers with quality content that will keep them coming back for more. If you’re not an expert in your field, hire a specialist writer to produce informative articles for you. This will not only increase engagement and traffic but also help you stay on the good side of those pesky Google algorithm updates.

As this story demonstrated, a lot of long nights and hard work go into building a business from the ground up, but that only makes the success even sweeter.

The good news is that, while building a million-dollar business sure isn’t easy, selling it through our marketplace is simple!

If you’re ready to explore your exit options, simply register an account on our website and book a call with one of our expert sales advisers. You’ll soon be well on your way to reaping the ultimate reward from your online business—a successful exit.

The post Prioritizing Quality Content Helped This Website Owner Achieve a 45x Multiple Exit appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Well, the latter one has begun to rear its head in new ways that could lead to far less profit for entrepreneurs looking to sell their successful startups, at least if you’re an American.

The Biden Administration recently announced its plan to do a massive tax overhaul that primarily focuses on taxing the wealthy and high-net worth individuals. For most Americans, the tax policy is much to do about nothing in the sense that they won’t be affected, at least not in direct ways.

But, the person most directly affected by this new tax plan could be you.

If you’re an entrepreneur who is running a successful and profitable online business valued at over $1 million dollars, then you’re in dangerous territory. You could lose close to half of your business value to taxes when you go to sell the business.

Depending on where you live in the USA, you could pay as much as 38.3% in taxes when you sell your business under the new plan.

This tax hike is one of the highest in the history of the United States, with it only being beaten out by the capital gains taxes of the 1920s, where capital gains were taxed at 77% in the highest bracket.

This could also have far-reaching implications for business sellers in terms of liquidity and just how much they can exit for.

In this blog post, we’re going to talk about the least boring thing in the world … taxes.

Specifically, capital gains tax.

Just to be clear, what you’re going to read isn’t perfect tax advice for your business. The proposed tax plan we’ll discuss has yet to pass and the rates have changed a couple of times over the past year. If you’re unsure whether you’re filing your taxes correctly, make sure you speak to a tax advisor.

With that said, pull up a chair and a cup of coffee, and let’s dive in if you want to learn how to not lose close to half of your business’s value to taxation.

First Off, What’s the Tax Proposal Plan?

Investors around the world love holding high-conviction investments for at least a year so they can save a significant amount on taxes by holding long-term investments. Instead of paying income taxes as high as 39% on their investments, depending on income bracket, they instead will pay only 20% taxes on any investment sold that was held longer than a year.

This is the difference between short-term and long-term capital gains.

Long-term capital gains do a wonderful job of incentivizing investors to invest on value fundamentals rather than the wily short-term winds of market speculation. The vast majority of entrepreneurs who sell their businesses have owned them for longer than a year. The youngest businesses we sell on our marketplace tend to be 24–32 months old.

That’s well beyond the limit of short-term capital gains and can lead to preferential tax treatment since the value of the sale will not be taxed as an income tax.

This will largely stay true for the majority of entrepreneurs.

The problem comes for entrepreneurs with 7- and 8-figure businesses.

Under the new rules, there will be no advantage to selling the business after a year of ownership. No advantage after two years or really any length of time.

However, you could be taxed at a higher rate if you make over $1 million dollars on the sale of your business within a calendar year. That money will be taxed by the IRS as taxable income instead of capital gains regardless of how long you’ve owned the business.

Despite the potential capital gains tax increase, how much you’ll pay in capital gains taxes if and when the proposal passes legislation might not be as bad as you expect.

Capital Gains Tax to Increase to 25%

Earlier this year, Biden proposed a capital gains tax rate of 39.6%, which equaled the proposed individual tax rate hike for income at the time.

The individual top tax rate is looking to stay at 39.6%, but a recent House proposal lowered the capital gains tax rate to 25% for profits made on investments over $ 1million. What’s more, a potential retroactive date has been set for September 13, 2021. If this date stays in place after the proposal is passed, businesses sold after September 13, 2021, will be subject to the higher capital gains tax rate.

The federal income bracket a 7- or 8-figure entrepreneur finds themselves in is the highest taxed bracket. As mentioned, you will pay 25% taxes on the sale of your business if it is over a 7-figure valuation.

There’s a tax known as the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT) that we should mention, but it’s highly unlikely to affect the majority of deals on our marketplace. NIIT is a tax for individual earners with an ordinary income of over $200,000 and married couples that file jointly earning over $250,000.

The name is a bit misleading as it sounds like this is only a tax on investment income, but it is actually a tax that combines both your regular active income with your investment income. Your active and investment income is combined into what is called MAGI—Modified Adjusted Gross Income.

This would only really affect you if your deal was over the $10 million mark. NIIT adds an extra 3.8% tax from your MAGI and would bring this proposed capital gains tax to 28.8%.

For most entrepreneurs, you’ll expect to be paying the proposed 25% capital gains tax rate.

And we’re not done yet.

This is just taxation at the federal level. You have to take into account your state-level and county-level tax, too.

State-Level Taxes Could Rise Total Capital Gains Tax to 38.3%

If you live in the following states:

• Alaska
• Florida
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• South Dakota
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Washington
• Wyoming

Then you’re all good.

None of these states currently imposes a capital gains tax. You’ll still have to pay at the federal level, but no additional tax will be added based on your location.

The winds in these individual states may change, but for now, there is no extra capital gains tax you’ll need to pay if you live in one of them when you sell your business.

However, this is not the case in other states.

The increased 25% capital gains tax jumps up further when you factor in the average local capital gains taxes across all the states in the USA. On average, you’ll see your 25% tax jump up to a 29.6% capital gains tax.

This is slightly higher compared to the average of 29% under the current law.

Keep in mind that 29.6% is taking into account an average of state-level capital gains taxation. Make sure to check with your professional tax person on what your state is charging.

You could pay close to 40% of the value of your business when you go to sell based on where you live. If you’re in California or New Jersey, you’re looking at close to the top capital gains tax rate of 38.3%.

So what can be done? How can you sell your business without paying such a huge amount in taxes?

After all, you probably had pretty good plans on what you wanted to do with that money. You worked hard for it.

Let’s look at what your options are.

The Easiest Way to Avoid Getting Taxed Close to 40%

With a retroactive date currently set, you might feel like your window of opportunity has closed. If you’ve already agreed to a deal but haven’t closed it, then it’s likely you’ll exit at the lower rate of 20% since there are supposed to be some grandfathering rules for things that are already signed.

Keep in mind the timing of when the new proposal passes is not a certainty since the legislation still needs to be voted in, and who knows when that will happen.

If you were planning to sell but sat on the fence, this is still a fantastic time to sell your business.

Over the course of this year at Empire Flippers, we’ve gauged record-breaking weeks of sellers wanting to sell their business with us. They want to get through vetting and load off their profitable asset onto another buyer to preserve the wealth generation they’ll get from an exit event.

From a non-tax perspective, this is literally the best time I’ve ever seen for someone to sell an online business. With multiples and valuations higher than ever, there has never been such a frothy amount of buyer demand.

And there are more well-funded aggregators snapping up quality brands by giving those entrepreneurs a premium offer.

You can still sell your business today to accelerate your wealth-building flywheel by generating the highest capital windfall you’ve likely ever seen in a single deal. The alternative is to hold on to your business and wait it out for a potentially lower capital gains tax rate in the future.

Hold or Sell: What Are the Implications of the New Capital Gains Tax?

If you decide to hold on to your 7-figure business, then this section is for you.

Keep in mind that these tax reforms may not even pass. It will have to go through both Congress and the Senate before implementation can begin. Also, keep in mind that many of the tax hikes are replacing tax policies already set to expire already in 2025; the sunset horizon has just moved up.

This means higher taxes are almost certainly coming in one form or another, whether this new plan passes or not.

The implications of these tax changes may not affect the average person directly but will likely impact the M&A online business space in a big way.

When the new plan does pass, it likely won’t be as far off from the new proposed rate as stated. Biden’s initial proposal of 39.6% was more likely the opening salvo to get negotiations started.

There is also a chance that if it does pass, as it stands right now, that the tax plan will be short lived.

The entire premise behind raising the income tax rate and capital gains taxes is to increase tax revenues. Typically, a capital gains tax hike leads to lower tax revenues as investors refuse to sell their assets. In the 1920s example, with 70% capital gains tax, investors simply passed their assets to their heirs instead, which decreased tax revenues as a result.

Step-Up Basis under Tax Law Changes

If the step-up basis where investors can pass their assets to their heirs continues, then it is likely tax revenue will decline under the new plan. The Tax Foundation Equilibrium study found that 39.6% capital gains tax on $1 million and above would reduce overall GDP by 0.1% and reduce the federal tax revenue by $124 billion over 10 years.

To close this potential loophole in tax-free capital gains, the new tax plan also talks about limiting the step-up basis that would force a taxable event at the moment of transferring an asset to an heir. If this is limited as proposed, then there is a solid chance the federal tax revenue could increase because a major tax shelter loophole is closed.

While no one knows what might happen, this is also unlikely to happen in my personal view. At least in its current format.

The current format could create a situation where young heirs of passing parents inherit large assets that come with tax bills they have no hope to actually pay, thus forcing the heirs to sell the asset and maybe even incur an additional tax for selling. It could pass as it is, but these kinds of scenarios will likely prevent much of the original plan of reducing the step-up basis tax.

The step-up basis has only slight relation to our industry, though, as most entrepreneurs are not passing down an Amazon FBA or SaaS business to their heirs in this manner.

What is relevant is the potential advantage a buyer might get from this new tax plan.

A New Era of Opportunity for Buyers as Sellers Fear the Tax Man?

First off, you should never plan your investment around taxes. If you’re paying taxes, it is a good sign you’ve made money. Reducing taxes is a sound strategy of course, but don’t penalize yourself from having a life-changing exit due to not wanting to pay a tax bill.

If the new tax plan does happen, then there is a chance that it’ll usher in a new era of opportunity for business buyers.

Business buyers will be in a better position to do extreme earn-out deal structures. Instead of buying a $2 million business with $1.5 million paid upfront and $500,000 paid over 12 months, a buyer could use the new tax plan to incentivize a seller to take a much longer earn-out.

In this same example, a buyer might offer $800,000 up front on a $2 million business to help the seller from paying the huge capital gains tax increase for anything above $1 million. Then the following year, the buyer pays another $800,000 to $1 million, and the final part of the earn-out is paid in the third year to help the seller on their taxes.

A buyer could minimize their capital exposure as they start investing into these larger assets in bigger volumes. If sellers start agreeing to varied deal structures, then it is likely buyers who do not have a long track record of success are going to be put on the backburner when a seller is considering an offer.

A seller is far more likely to sell their 7-figure Amazon FBA business to a brand aggregator with a rock-solid reputation at operating these assets.

If the seller is taking a greater risk by extending an earn-out, they will want to have massive confidence in their buyer to make sure they get the full exit amount that was promised.

This can be a great era for well-capitalized business buyers with that solid track record, but what about sellers?

Do Sellers Lose Out?

While the tax reforms are potentially a good thing for buyers, they could be not so good for sellers from a negotiation standpoint.

If you use a $10 million Amazon FBA business instead of a $2 million business in the above example, you can see what I mean. If the seller wanted to minimize their tax bill in the same method as above, it could take them over 10 years before they are fully paid out, which is obviously a highly unreasonable time frame.

The new capital gains tax may incentivize sellers to sell right now to avoid it and in the future cap businesses at a sub $1 million valuation to avoid the highest taxable bracket. There will likely be a few sellers here, though I wouldn’t recommend doing this even if the tax plan passes as it stands.

The reason why I wouldn’t recommend this is that even at a higher capital gains tax, you will likely have more money in your pocket even when you pay the tax by selling a 7-figure business. You’ll have cash in your account that you can immediately reinvest instead of trying to build a bunch of smaller businesses to sell at a later date and avoid the capital gains tax increase.

Also, as mentioned earlier, there is a strong chance that if the tax plan passes “as-is” that it could end up being a short-lived plan due to declining federal tax revenue and pressure on political representatives by the business community to adapt or iterate on the plan to be less aggressive.

Of course, no one has a crystal ball here, and anything could happen.

There is no telling whether the tax plan really will pass, if it will pass in its current incarnation, or if it will be a long-lived tax that we will have to deal with for the foreseeable future.

What we do know is that if you want to have the best chance to minimize your future tax burden as a 7-figure seller, then right now could be the best time to sell your business.

The post A New Tax Plan Creates Urgency for Entrepreneurs to Sell Their Business Today appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Digital entrepreneurs tend to be pretty savvy when it comes to understanding how websites work. For a new digital investor, it can be uncomfortable dealing with a website seller who has the power to trash your investment with nefarious tactics.

While it’s hard to know whether a digital entrepreneur you’re looking to do a deal with is a scam artist or an untrustworthy person, you do have the power to quickly identify any red flags that should urge you to renegotiate the deal and clarify some areas or walk away from the deal completely.

When you make a private deal, you should certainly do thorough due diligence to make sure a website isn’t a scam. There are services that can carry out due diligence on websites and help you with this process if you don’t have the expertise. However, bear in mind that, no matter which service you use, it’s your responsibility to decide if the investment is right for you.

Another option is to purchase through a brokerage like us, because we have a vetting team that screens out scam websites.

If you decide to do it alone, look for the obvious signs. You can do a lot of this research using search engine optimization (SEO) tools like Ahrefs, so if you’d like to do a deep dive into this topic, create a free account and follow along as you read this article.

Digging into the SEO Structure to Uncover Red Flags

The growth foundations of a website are built on its SEO structure. It’s these foundations that cement the website within Google and, thus, in the niche in which it operates.

An integral part of a website’s SEO structure is backlinks.

Think of backlinks as the doors and windows of the house that is your website. They connect the house to the rest of the neighborhood; that is, they connect your website to the online neighborhood within Google’s search engine.

Google’s algorithm assesses your website’s backlinks when positioning it in search results, for quality but also for any signs of attempts to manipulate the algorithm.

With SEO tools, you can look at the areas Google assesses and spot anything out of sorts.

Pre-Check 1: Referring Domains

A referring domain is a domain that is linking to a website, in other words, one that is “referencing” a website.

Over time, a website starts to get other websites linking to it as it becomes more well-known in the niche. This is similar to when you move to a new neighborhood, and after a while, the neighbors start waving to you.

This increase in the number of referring domains should, in theory, roughly correlate with the growth of the website because the more traffic the website is getting, the more other websites in the niche become aware of it, and the more they start linking to it.

For empireflippers.com, the increase in referring domains has been gradual over the past two years.

When looking at this data for the website you’d like to acquire, if you notice any big spikes or dips in the number of referring domains, then that is something to bring up to the seller.

It doesn’t necessarily mean the seller has done anything nefarious or against Google’s policies. For example, a spike could be due to a post going viral. However, it could be nefarious, so ask the seller what happened at this time. If they are closed off about the topic or are unwilling to share details, then that could be a red flag.

Another important factor is where these links are coming from.

Pre-Check 2: Homepage Backlinks

Homepage backlinks are backlinks from homepages of other websites.

Because they come from the main page of the website, these links strongly improve the reputation of a website in Google’s eyes. A good way to think about it is to compare a celebrity replying to your comment on Instagram to them messaging you directly.

If the website you’re looking to buy has a considerable number of these links, it likely means the seller has paid for the backlink, or they own the website that’s linking to them.

Either way, if you find that a vast majority of links come from one domain, it could be a red flag.

Ask the seller about this, and if they own the other domain, make sure it is included in the sale, or make a clear agreement as part of the sale that the links will be kept in place; otherwise, after you acquire the website, the seller could remove all of those links and sink your website’s rankings overnight.

If the seller has carried out a paid deal to acquire these links, then you should learn more about the terms of this deal and decide whether you want to take on the risk of having the majority of your website’s SEO reliant on one domain.

The next step in the pre-check phase is to look a bit closer at the types of links the website has acquired.

Pre-Check 3: Dofollow and Nofollow Links

There are two main types of backlinks: dofollow and nofollow.

Domains with a certain level of authority within Google also have a level of power. This power allows authoritative domains to help trusted websites receive a better ranking from Google through backlinks.

For example, if The New York Times website links to a small publication website, that’s a sign that the publication is a good source of information, so Google will apply some of the NYT website’s authority to the smaller website. This is the reasoning behind “link juice,” a common term in the SEO industry.

A website has the option to signal to Google that it trusts the website it’s linking to by giving juice to the link. This type of link is called a dofollow link.

However, not all links are full of juice.

Websites only have a limited amount of authority, and if they add too many dofollow links to their website, it will hurt its own performance. That’s why dofollow links are such a strong ranking factor.

If a website doesn’t want to give up any of its authority, but would like to link to another website—maybe an article has been posted that includes some data from an external source and the website owner would like to link to that source—they create a nofollow link.

These types of links are on almost all websites, but what you want to look out for is a high number of dofollows coming from one domain because the website’s rankings in Google will be heavily reliant on that domain.

Similar to homepage links, the domain is likely owned by the seller, as there are few cases where an external domain would link so heavily to one website. The only other real explanation is that the seller has carried out some sort of paid deal with the owner of the other domain.

This is something to be discussed with the seller further.

While you’re checking the sources of backlinks, you also want to check the country code top-level domains (CCTLDs).

Pre-Check 4: CCTLD Distribution

A CCTLD is a placeholder that indicates in which country the domain operates. The most common example is .com for the US.

If the website you’re looking at is a US website, then you would expect the vast majority of domains that refer to that website to be .com domains, right? This is what the CCTLD distribution looks like for our website.

If the majority of CCTLDs referring to the website come from other countries, that’s a red flag. This is something you should bring up with the seller as it could be a sign of nefarious activity.

The next pre-check is to assess how the backlinks are presented on the referring websites.

Pre-Check 5: Anchor Text

Usually, when a website links to another, the link is embedded in the text through anchor text.

For example, if I were to link to a website about anchor text, then I would embed the link in a word like “anchor text.” If a brand is particularly well known, like Nike, then I would likely use the word Nike in the text and link through that word. This type of linking fits in with the context of the content topic, as opposed to linking to a pet care website by simply copying and pasting its full URL.

When assessing the anchor links that refer to a website, check that they are related to the website’s niche. Below is an example of the anchor texts that refer to our website.

The majority of these pre-checks are related to backlinks, as they are a key element in SEO and the security of a website’s earnings.

The rest of the pre-checks are focused on other areas that Google assesses.

Keywords, Domains, and Traffic

Pre-Check 6: Keywords

The keywords, or put simply, search queries, a website ranks for are important to the SEO structure. These are the bricks of the home; if a website stops ranking for too many of the keywords it targets, then the house will eventually collapse as it loses all of its bricks. Similarly, when targeting keywords, you are collecting those bricks to build your home (i.e., your website presence on Google).

To establish a strong authority within Google’s search engine, it’s important to rank for keywords relevant to the website’s niche. For example, good keywords that a website focused on dog training can rank for are “dog training” and “how to train my dog.”

The keywords a website ranks for are signs of its SEO strength. The keyword examples above will be searched for a lot, so if your website ranks on page one for these types of keywords, then Google considers the content you’re sharing to be some of the best content on the subject available.

A problem arises when a website ranks for irrelevant keywords. If the same dog training website was ranking for keywords like “used car parts”, that’s a sign that the website is targeting the wrong audience.

Pre-Check 7: 301 Redirects

A 301 redirect is a domain that is used to redirect the user to a different domain. You might have seen this for a brand that has changed its name. It might keep the old branded domain, but when people search for the old one, they are redirected to the brand’s new domain.

These types of links are common and aren’t usually causes for concern.

The only time you should be concerned is if you find a 301 redirect the seller hasn’t told you about. That redirect link will be a big influencer in the website’s SEO, so you need to make sure the redirect is included in the sale; otherwise, the seller could take down the redirect after selling the website to you and impact its traffic.

Pre-Check 8: Expired Domains

An expired domain is simply one that is no longer being used.

A quick way to see whether the domain for the website you’d like to purchase is expired is to use a tool like waybackmachine.com. With this tool, you can search the history of the domain and the websites it was associated with. Simply select a date on the calendar when the domain was active, and it will show you screenshots of what the website looked like at that time.

Looking at the gaps on the timeline above, you can see when the domain expired.

If you see that the domain has periods of expiration, be aware that the content from previous websites might be unrelated to the current website that the domain is associated with.

Having an expired domain is a big benefit with a risk.

An expired domain is powered by the backlink profile it has built up. Because that profile was built up on the previous website, there are risks of the links being taken down by websites as it becomes apparent that the content for the domain has changed. Also, Google can recognize this change and penalize the website because technically the domain was associated with a different website with different content.

Pre-Check 9: Traffic

Traffic history is a strong indicator of a website’s viability as an investment. A good traffic history is a sign that a website has a strong SEO structure and is well-established within the niche. If the website you’re evaluating has a consistent trend of gradual growth, then that is the gold standard.

Take notice of spikes and dips. You should always question the seller about these, but some of the common reasons for a spike in traffic include:

• a piece of content going viral
• the website receiving a strong backlink that suddenly drives a lot of traffic
• a Google update
• a jump in ranking

Some common reasons for a dip in traffic is the opposite of the above changes.

These changes are normal and generally not causes for concern. If the website has been penalized by Google, or the seller has carried out some risky tactics to drive a ton of traffic to the website, like a mass purchase of backlinks, these are red flags.

Overall, when assessing a website as an investment, you should be aware of the fundamentals of how content websites and search engines work together to help keep you safe.

Awareness of the above factors should increase your chances of avoiding acquiring a dud website or one from an untrustworthy seller.

Where to Find Websites for Sale

So, where do you find a good website to buy? You might already have a website in mind. If so, please bear in mind the above advice before diving in.

Otherwise, if you’re searching for a good website investment, there are specific places where many websites are listed for sale.

Communities

First, there are online communities dedicated to the sales and acquisitions of websites and other online businesses. In these communities, you’ll find website sellers to connect with, and if you are knowledgeable about websites and how they operate as online businesses, you can potentially find a good website to acquire.

However, these are not places for a newbie buyer.

Acquiring a website is a complex process with a lot of hurdles that can trip up a deal. One of those hurdles is negotiating a fair price with the seller. If you don’t have experience with online business valuation or negotiation, then this will be a difficult part of the acquisition process.

On the search side, these communities are largely unregulated, so you don’t know what types of websites you’re looking at. The advice in this article​​ can be helpful in preventing you from looking further into an unworthy website, but it can’t prevent you from failing with an acquisition if you decide to go ahead—that’s where acquisition experience comes into play.

Communities are the Wild West, but there are some places closer to home.

Marketplaces

Second, we have marketplaces, which are more convenient for finding websites for sale, since the websites are listed with key information. You can search through the catalogue to find a website that’s within your budget and fits other acquisition criteria.

For example, on our marketplace, you can filter searches and save search filters to narrow in on your ideal website within minutes, instead of the hours or days it would take searching the web.

While marketplaces aren’t as wild as communities, most aren’t regulated, so you are still fully responsible for vetting websites: be aware that scam artists still operate in these areas.

What marketplaces lack is a brokerage to keep them more business-friendly.

Brokerages

The best and easiest way to find websites for sale, especially if you’ve never acquired a website before, is through a brokerage. This is because the broker already has websites for sale in their pipeline and they can connect you with the owners of those websites quickly.

Usually, a broker helps the seller with the valuation of their website, which makes it easier for all parties to agree on a good deal.

That said, not all brokers value websites effectively and some promise the world to sellers just to get them in their books. Having a basic understanding of how websites are valued will help you avoid overpaying.

At Empire Flippers, we have dedicated teams at all stages of the buying and selling process. This means the websites we have are of the highest quality and are ready for acquisition, which we will carry out for you in terms of handing over the website assets to you and even collecting the funds.

The services that brokerages offer do come at a fee; but that fee is charged to the seller, and even they are likely to make more money than they would if they sold privately. A broker knows how to value their website in the best possible way, so sellers won’t have to worry about their websites being mispriced and bought for less than they’re worth.

When buying your first website, leveraging the resources and experience of a broker to help you make the right deal is a good way to go.

Finding Your Ideal Website

Hopefully this article has prepared you to make a safe website investment.

If you do opt to go for a private purchase, then please be careful and bear the nine pre-checks in mind at all steps of the process. Although they aren’t foolproof, they will help reduce your chances of going deeper into an illegitimate website and potentially ending up with a doomed investment.

If you’d like to see what websites we currently have available, register for a free account and use our search filters to find a website that fits your buying criteria in minutes.

The post Buying Your First Website: 9 Safety Checks to Keep You Out of Trouble appeared first on Empire Flippers.