All Entries Tagged With: "Website"

How Do You Determine Selling Price?

I sometimes like to read Aaron Wall’s blog. And sometimes I don’t. He’s a guy whose insights range from brilliant to ridiculous. At times he whines (as in when he takes on Google for some supposed injustice) and borders on pedantic immaturity. Then there are times when I actually learn something and enjoy reading every sentence right down to the last line. This post on fake website buyers is one of those posts that I thought was near genius.

Last year I put up a blog for sale and had the privilege of selling it fairly quickly. I was actually hoping that I’d find a local buyer since it was a local geotargeted website. But a buyer is a buyer.

The offer came in from an investor in Europe. He looks for websites with value and turns them into passive income machines. That’s cool with me. Everyone has their own method of making money. A few years ago when I was into real estate investing I knew other investors who were flippers, others who were landlords and some who were into other types of investing. As long as it’s legal, cool.

I know I priced my blog low. I know it for two reasons. First, it sold quickly. And secondly, the buyer didn’t balk at the price. No quibbles, no questions, he just said “I’ll take it; your price is fair.” That, to me, means I priced it low. I probably could have got twice as much for it as I did.

My buyer wasn’t shady. He didn’t ask me for any analytics data and I don’t think I’d have given it to him if he had. My goal was to sell the site and I knew I had it priced fairly (What I didn’t know was that I’d priced it so low). So my question to you is, What criteria do you use to price your websites when you sell them? What do you base your asking price on? Is it traffic value or do you evaluate your web properties on search engine rankings or income it has produced? Maybe it’s a combination of these. Let’s discuss.

How Important Is Owning Your Personal Name As A Domain Name?

More and more I’m seeing people buy up their name as an URL (ie. JohnSmith.com, MarthaBartha.net, etc.). Is this just for the sake of vanity or is there a real purpose to it?

By way of full disclosure, I have an URL that represents my name. I went for AllenTaylor.com, but it was already taken. Therefore, I settled for the more specific AllenLeeTaylor.com, using my middle name. I’ve seen some people take their name with a .me extension.

I do think there is a good reason for doing this. For me, it’s a matter of reputation management, but that’s not all. I also believe it’s a good branding tool, particularly for creative people.

In terms of reputation management, you’ll have a better chance at ranking for your name as a keyword if you use your name as a domain name. Google now will only rank a couple of pages per domain for any keyword search term. If the search term is your name then what will searchers find? Your company site should be at the top of the list and you’ll likely have a few social networks on the list as well. A personal domain name should be on that list too.

If you have three social networks, your company website, a blog and your own personal domain name then that’s a potential 12 top spots on Google. Since there are only 10 page 1 listings this increases your chances of being at the top pretty considerably. That’s effective reputation management.

But how about personal branding? I’m a writer. I write SEO content, ghostwrite blogs and write fiction and poetry. I have also worked as a journalist. A personal domain name with a CV and portfolio is a good marketing tool. While I still have to develop my domain name, I am looking forward to the day that it is actually drawing in some new business and fans. That day should not be far off.

On personal domain names, you can count me in favor. I’m sold.

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How Important Is Blogging For SEO?

Since I’ve started blogging I’ve seen blogs go from very important for search engine ranking factors to somewhat important. Let me explain how I’m using these two phrases:

• Very important means influential in multiple ways with no negatives.
• Somewhat important means influential in multiple ways with some negatives.

I still believe blogging is important for SEO. Add a blog to your website and blog to it every day and you will improve your site’s search engine rankings. It’s almost a guarantee. But, there are some practices that used to not count against you that will now count against you if you engage in them. And there are other practices that do not benefit you as well as they used to.

Examples: When I first started blogging it was common to see three sites enter into a three-way reciprocal link circle and all of them benefited. You can’t do that any more. Also, blogs within a network could all link to each other and all of them benefited. That, too, has ceased to be a benefit.

Granted, the above examples apply to static websites too, but bloggers were using those methods very extensively and suddenly the rewards were not there any more. Blogging then lost some of its luster because many SEOs started multiple blogs for the purpose of link building. Google killed it.

So, to what extent does blogging still help you with your SEO? Does an off site blog proffer any benefits? How about some discussion …

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