Case study time!

I just love buying dead websites. You get all the benefits of an established history (OK, I mean links!) but you get to shape the site how you want it to look. You get to create the content, its structure, and also the linking structure, which is another important concern.

I recently completed the purchase of a domain without any content on it and I thought it would be beneficial to go through the steps I took to get my hands on it.

Finding A Website To Buy

This is the tedious and menial task that doesn't tax your brain - only your patience. It involves really searching for a prospective website to buy. It helped that I knew precisely what niche the site had to be in, but there was still a lot of leg work to be done.

Here are the steps:

• Search for website.
• Get the site's contact details. Ideally, you should use the ones displayed on the site itself as they are obviously the owner's preferred channel. If there are none on the site, check the WHOIS details and get them that way.
• Send a polite email to the contact asking whether the site/domain in question is for sale. Be personal and don't send generic email content.
• Move on to the next one. Don't wait for a response to the email you just sent before continuing your search as most "cold calls" like this are met with silence or a "no thanks". And that's understandable.

In my case, searching Google for subject x didn't produce much, as I'd expected. If a site is ranking, the chances are high that someone is actively maintaining the site and/or sees it as valuable.

I then trawled dmoz looking for sites about subject x that looked uncared for. Not much there either.

However, when we investigate the incoming links to any sites we find (either from dmoz, Google etc) things start getting interesting. Like branches on a tree, potential sites to buy start... errr... branching out. Often, linking sites appear to have been abandoned and these are the sites we need to find. Incoming links can be found using Yahoo! Site Explorer. In addition to the incoming links, you can also check the site's outgoing links. Many sites make this easy for you by publishing a "links" page, on which you can find links to similar sites. All these linking and linked sites need investigating.

Eventually, after performing this time consuming research I found my site. Although there was no content published on the domain there was a plethora of inbound links and many (maybe 100) links from .edu sites. These .edu sites were reputable and the corresponding links like they were very valuable indeed. Bingo!  I checked the Wayback Machine to confirm that the site really was in the niche I thought it was. Because it was, I knew that the links would retain their value. Inbound links are much more useful if they are from related sites so I needed to be sure that in putting my brand new content on the domain, I wouldn't be divorcing it from its links.

Making Contact

As there was no contact page, I found the contact details using the WHOIS. I sent an email that went something like this:

Hi xxxxx

I followed a link to xxxxxx.com only to discover that the site was down. Is it possible that you might like to sell this site?

I know that you used to publish content about xxxx here, and this is an area of interest to me. For this reason, I think your old site is an ideal home for content I'd like to write - and I'd love to buy the site from you. Is this something you would consider?

Kind regards

As I mentioned earlier, usually such emails don't get much of a response, but this one did. Albeit a cautious respones. I sent this email on 17th September 2009 and the owner replied on the same day to enquire whether it was just the domain name I was interested in. I replied immediately with a "yes" and then didn't hear from the owner for a week. I then sent a gentle reminder asking whether the owner had an idea of how much they wanted for the domain.

A month and a half went by, and still no reply. I'd read someone's advice about buying in the past, and they'd suggested that he who names the price first loses. Nonetheless, I had to find some way to get the owner to engage with me and enter discussions, so I sent another email with an offer. In it, I also tried to allay any fears the owner might have had about the security of such a transaction. It went like this:

Hi xxx

I'm still interested in buying this domain if you no longer need it. I'd like to offer you $500 for it.

If you have any concerns about performing such a transaction, please let me know and I'll explain how we can proceed in a secure way that protects both buyer and seller. I've used Escrow.com a couple of times in the past and found it ideal for domain purchases.

Kind regards

To this email I received a reply indicating strong interest! Yay! Throw caution to the wind and name your price!

Buying The Domain

I explained the different stages involved in the escrow transaction and the owner quickly set up an account with escrow.com. We commenced the proceedings. Six days after the escrow transaction was initiated, I was the proud owner of a domain with huge potential. It took 3 months from sending the initial email to taking posession of the domain. In my book, that's not too bad.

In closing the deal, I thanked the previous owner for making it such a smooth transaction and added something important. I requested that if the seller had any other domains for sale, they contact me as I would be interested in looking them over. I also told them that I would be prepared to pay them a referral fee should they send other sellers my way. In this transaction worth $500, I proved that I was trustworthy. The seller hopefully will have no qualms in the future about referring friends to me who wish to sell their websites, in return for a percentage of the sale price. Finding eligible sites to buy is hard enough, so it would be criminal to ignore this opportunity.

Stay tuned for renovating a dead website, the next part of this case study. That stage is where the good stuff starts!