Sellers love to get you to imagine the future potential of the website they are trying to sell because they know you will pay a lot more if you see great potential. They regularly make claims similar to the following:
• You can easily double the sales of this website by publishing two new articles per week.
• This website is seriously under-monitized. You can make a lot more money by adding new ad networks.
• I’ll give you the plan I wrote to grow the website ten fold.
• I have never done any SEO on this website. If you do a little bit of SEO, the site’s traffic is sure to take off.
• We only sell a hundred products. There are thousands of other products you can sell to increase revenue.
• I’ve never tried to make money with this website. It has always just been a hobby for me.
• What the website really needs is some promotion on social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. Then it will go viral.
• If you buy this website at the buy-it-now price, I’ll give you the exact strategies I have used to get one million visitors per month to my other websites.
So you, in turn, may ask the logical question: “If the site has so much potential, why haven’t you taken advantage of it?”
And the real answer may be any of the following:
• The seller has already tried everything he can think of to make more money or get more traffic, but he lacks the skills to make it happen.
• The amount of work to make the website grow is more than the seller wants to invest because the probability for success is low.
• The website doesn’t actually have much potential to grow.
• The website does have potential and the seller knows that, but for his own reasons, the seller has decided to invest his time and resources in other activities.
Are there websites for sale that have potential for much greater earnings? Absolutely. Every business model and revenue source has “low-hanging fruit,” easy things you can change to make more money or attract more customers. Let’s look at some classic examples of low-hanging fruit. There are thousands of them.
Advertising Revenue:
1. Use of a low-paying ad network instead of a high-paying one
2. Bad placement of ads on the pages
3. Bad sizing of ads on the pages
4. Ineffective colors or borders
5. Not taking advantage of media ads
6. Not making ad space available to private bidders (relying on contextual ads only)
7. Not taking advantage of responsive ad units for varying device sizes
8. No utilization, or underutilization, of digital product sales or affiliate sales
9. Failure to capture traffic as prospects
10. Overuse of ad space on web real estate
11. Too many distractions
Search Engine Optimization:
1. Bad title tags
2. Missing meta descriptions
3. Limited internal linking
4. Limited incoming backlinks
5. Unmanaged 404 errors
6. Duplicate content
7. Light content
8. No keyword strategy
9. No social network promotion
10. No use of schema markup tags
eCommerce:
1. Product descriptions copied from manufacturer’s site
2. Product images copied from manufacturer’s site
3. Limited use of sales, discounts, and coupons
4. Unappealing site design
5. Bad user experience
7. Weak customer support
8. No free shipping
9. Weak product selection
10. Lack of product profitability analysis
11. No advertising or ineffective advertising
12. Difficult search and navigation in the website
Affiliate Sales:
1. Low-converting sales copy
2. Visually unappealing
3. Poor product selection
4. Leaks in sales funnel
5. Not taking full advantage of email list
6. Underperforming emails
7. No focus on sales to previous buyers
Leads Sales:
1. Single-lead buyer
2. Untested prices for leads
3. Weak advertising strategy
4. Unexplored sources for leads
5. Leads not qualified
Services:
1. Exceptionally low or exceptionally high prices
2. No evidence of testing different prices
3. No pricing tiers
4. Lack of automation
5. High-priced service providers
6. Low-converting sales copy
8. No advertising
9. No testimonials
When you identify a piece of low-hanging fruit and are confident that making changes to the website could definitely improve its financial performance, then you have concluded that the website has potential beyond its current performance. Potential must be quantified. Exactly how much more will the website earn if you increase prices by 20%? Exactly how many more visitors will the website receive if you make much-needed SEO tweaks? How much money will these additional visitors earn you?
Changes you make to improve a website have the potential of helping or harming. Therefore, for each opportunity you identify, you need to estimate a range of possible impact. For example, you might conclude that a change in pricing could yield a 40% improvement in sales as a best-case or a 15% reduction in sales as a worst-case scenario.
Obviously, you will be making a guess here, but you need to quantify the guess so that you can determine whether the hidden potential of the website will increase the price you are willing to pay.