I always love Yaro Starak’s flag blog, the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com.
I even more ‘attached’ to his writings due the fact that he is into web property investment (although he already sold some of his web properties, such as SmallBusinessBranding.com – to focus to his new online venture.)
I clearly inspired by his writing because I consider myself as a noob in this area – I currently have several web properties that one of them is the cash cow. I believe that just like the ol’ real estate, your intuition and experience in valuing a property is important.
Yaro, one of the pro-blogger (a.k.a a famous, authority blogger, on the Net) that invest in web properties, as he wrote in his article, never lost money on a website investment. Therefore, it’s a great way to cut your learning curve in web properties business by following his lead.
His latest article, How to Invest in Websites in Your Spare Time, is one of his articles that I’ve been waiting for long. You should check it out.
My favourite ‘insider’ tips from him, taken from the article I mention above, is as follow (summarised for the purpose of this blog):
Look for sites that grow organically
…My strategy has always been to find low maintenance sites, however it’s important to also consider the potential for organic growth…
I’ve advocated investing in forums… they tend to sustain themselves with little work beyond moderation… generally if you have a base of a few hundred regular forum participants (that’s daily participants – not just registered members), they will create content and bring in new readers without you needing to do anything at all.
…Buying established forums is great – creating one from nothing is challenging and time consuming.
Blogs can make good investments, especially if you are buying one with an established writer or a team of writers and an established readership… Blogs live and die based on continuous content and if you don’t find a way to keep the flow of new ideas coming, you might regret the purchase.
…If you find niche sites with a history of stable traffic targeting markets that, given things remain stable, should continue to grow with the natural growth rare of the Internet, then you may have found yourself a good buy.
I’ve stayed away from sites that sell products as their monetization method (like a site that sells an ebook) or sites that depend heavily on paid for traffic like Google AdWords… Niche sites that monetize with affiliate products are fine though since you don’t actually manage the products yourself.
…I always recommend you gravitate towards projects you have enthusiasm form and understand the model, so don’t follow my lead blindly – make up your own mind.
Great tips, huh?
Forums – THAT would be the next goal in my list :)
Ivan Widjaya
Do you Yaro? ;)