Sellers Love To Tell You About Their Site's Potential

Sellers love telling you their site has 'potential'. Many believe that this potential increases the value of their site. What they don't tell you is that it's your hard work, money and skill that are required to make that site realise its potential. The seller may claim that the buyer only has to do x, y and z and the site will be turned into a cash spitting machine. The problem with this selling point is that if it was really that easy, surely the seller would already have done it. It's more likely that the seller has already tried and failed with x, y, and z. Or hasn't tried it because they have no conviction that their kookie x, y, z idea would work anyway.

Sometimes it's the buyer who recognises a site's potential and amends his or her valuation accordingly. For example, I think that the funny clean joke site in this auction has potential. I can see simple improvements that can be made very quickly. Here are some.

Improve The Look And Feel Of The Site

This site looks like it's right out of the 90's. Let's face it, it looks awful. It's boring and the colours are flat. Fortunately for the buyer, the platform being used is WordPress. If you have a developer's license for premium WordPress themes like Woo Themes, you can slap a professionally designed theme onto as many WordPress blogs as your heart desires. If you don't have a developer's license, there are other professionally designed themes available that are free. Revolution is one.

In a matter of minutes, the new owner can transform this dreary site into something special.

Adsense Blending

At the moment, the adsense blending on this site is poor. Because the styling of the theme is so disjointed, everything stands out and it's hard to make the adverts blend in. Actually, applying a premium theme will help the adsense blending on this site as there will at last be some coherence. It will be possible to make the ads look like they belong; like they are a part of the design. The ads are prominent... But look at this.

You can see that the current owner has botched an attempt to make the joke titles + description look similar to the adsense. The title has the same colour and underline as the adsense title, which is good, but it's far too big. The new owner would want to get into the CSS for the theme and decrease the size of that font. Also, for all you CSS aficionado's out there, I reckon the letter-spacing on the paragraph style could do with a reduction too. If the new owner wants to get really anal about this, they can group those joke titles + descriptions into groups of 4 and space them a little more for that authentic adsense feel. Those joke hungry schoolkids just won't no where to click.

Funny Jokes Keyword Research

You know what? Let's help the new owner out with a little keyword research. This site is relying on organic search to drive its traffic, but I'm wondering whether that is simply by accident. Whether it was by default or by design, it may be time to take a fresh look at what people are really searching for. I'm only going to do a bit of rough and ready keyword research because - hey, it ain't my site!

My crystal ball tells me that the following phrases have little competition, but some decent search counts. At least, the search counts are high enough to warrant an extra page targeting those phrases.

The search counts are monthly values taken from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If you don't know what significance the numbers in this table have, you need to read my Rough And Ready Guide To Keyword Research. But mercy me! I've not written it yet. Stay tooned.

I've only listed two new phrases that should be targeted, simply to demonstrate that there is some additional SEO work to be done that would probably lead to an increase in organic search traffic. All the SEO savvy new owner needs to do is create new categories titled "short jokes" and "funny stories" and then fill them.

In Summary

When assessing whether that site really is a good catch, it makes sense to not just gush over what revenue the site is currently making, but to consider what improvements you can make to the site. Think about what you can do to increase traffic. Is it possible to monetise the site better? Also, put your paranoid hat on and check with archive.org that your proposed changes haven't already been tried by the current owner. If you see in the wayback machine that your spangly new adsense colour scheme has already been tried, it probably didn't work. It's possible that the owner is deliberately displaying badly placed and horrendously blended ads to make you think that there's something you can do straight away to improve on their amateurish monetisation efforts.

Update: Evidently someone was able to see the potential in this site as it sold within 24 hours for $2,500.