Site flipping article on Sitepoint

My Sitepoint article about flipping websites is up.

Give it a read!

I’d love to have any feedback, either here or there in the comments.

And, what should I write about next!

Ideas are cheap, implimentation is expensive

This thought came from a conversation at our SEO Meetup on Tuesday this week.  I talk to a lot of interesting people who show up at the meetups.  It’s a rare opportunity for me to interact face-to-face with people who are interested in similar topics.  There really aren’t that many of us that think SEO is a fascinating topic!

I think that a lot of the people who are in the SEO industry, who are doing it solo, suffer from a similar affliction.  Heavy on the ideas, light on the implementation.  I know that applies to me.  I can come up with a dozen great ideas in a day.  A great idea for a company isn’t worth much.  To me at least.  The value lies in the implementation.

What good is an idea if you can’t get it off the ground?  I can’t count the number of great ideas that I’ve had over the years.  Sometimes I go as far as registering a domain for the idea.  I have a hundred domains that have a great idea behind it.  When exactly I think I’ll have time to build a hundred businesses, I don’t know.  No answer to that question.  It astonishes me when I meet people who do the same thing.

What’s the solution?  I think for me that there’s a ceiling that I’ve reached.  Working solo has been a lot of fun.  Too much fun. It offers a flexibility that cannot be rivaled.  To get to the next level, though, I think that I need to be part of a team.  I’m not sure what team.  Sometimes I think that it doesn’t even matter what the idea behind the business is, I could add value to anything.  It does though.  Matter, that is.  It has to be something I could be passionate about.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Maine, a favorite professor told me that it isn’t enough to have talent.  You need to have a passion for what you’re doing.  My passion didn’t lie in becoming an academic.  I had a passion for doing research.  I didn’t have a passion for teaching, or the politics in academia.

When I launched the Small Business Forum, I was passionate about it.  It disappoints me that the investor that I sold it to doesn’t have the same passion.  He hasn’t brought it to the next level.  But, I don’t believe I could have brought it to the next level by myself.  Wearing many hats is part of being an entrepeneur.  Wearing many hats stifles passion.

Adam McFarland has a passion for his venture, Sports Lizard.  He also started a venture with some friends, but I think that’s less of a passion, and more of a calculated venture aimed at making money.  Is a passion enough?

I don’t think passion is enough.  Maybe it was for the professor at UMaine.  He has a tenured position; he doesn’t need to worry about where next month’s mortgage is coming from.  Most of us entrepreneurs do worry.

Shared passion, a good idea, and implementation are what lead to entrepreneurial success.

Onebox makes baby cry

I clicked on a link to Onebox.com today, because it was recommended on a discussion list I’m on.  I had my two week old baby, Lidia, with me.  When you click on the site, it starts a flash file that has an annoying song playing along with a voice that makes babies cry like they’ve never cried before in their short lives.

I’m quick with the off-button on my speakers, but it did take me a couple of seconds to get it.  Too late, though, the damage was done.  She’s probably scarred for life, she’ll never use Onebox.   Of course I’m joking about that, but it is a horrible noise and voice and it did scare her and she did cry.

The point, though, is that web designers put so little thought into their sites.  Exactly what does Onebox think that their flash intro does to enhance their customer experience?  I’d really like to know that.  And, exactly who are these idiot designers that think that flash has to have stupid music, and why do they drill it down your throat instead of asking first?

So, if you’re developing a site now, forget the flash with the stupid sounds.  If you have a site that does this, remove the flash.  It really sucks.  You don’t need it.  It annoys people.  It makes babies cry.

Lidia Davis

Lidia Davis – born February 22, 2007

Protecting yourself when buying a website – PageRank

This is part of a series I’m writing about safety in website purchasing.  As the market grows, so will fraud.  When I started buying and selling websites, I pretty much knew everyone in marketplaces like Sitepoint.  Now, there are so many people jumping into the market every day, it’s impossible for me to keep track of who’s a player and who’s a scammer.

You’ll often see PageRank listed as a key feature of a website.  Particularly, when the index page, or other pages on the site are showing a PageRank of six or higher in the toolbar.  This can influence how much people will pay for a website.  This is particularly so when a significant portion of a website’s revenue comes from selling text link ads.

How can we verify whether the PageRank is solid?  Well, in most cases, fake PageRank is easily discovered.  The first thing you want to do is go into Yahoo! Site Explorer and see where a site’s backlinks are.   Type in the site url, and click ‘Explore URL’ and have a look through the results.  Use the url for my blog as an example, http://www.petertdavis.net
The first thing you’ll see is what pages Site Explorer recognizes on the site.  Just verify that this is in line with your expectations for the site.  My blog shows just over 800 pages, and that’s pretty much what I’d expect.  Then, click the ‘Inlinks’ and see what that lists.  You’ll notice it gives a number, which is how many backlinks Site Explorer thinks the site has.  What that means is, any page on any website that contains a link to any page on the site you’re examining.

Is the number of Inlinks Site Explorer shows in the range you expected?  If you’re looking at a site being sold as a PageRank 7, and Site Explorer shows a dozen or less Inlinks, that should throw up a red flag.  This blog shows over ten thousand Inlinks, and that would be a strong indicator that the PageRank of this domain is solid.

In addition to looking at the raw number of Inlinks, next you’d browse through to see the diversity of the Inlinks.  Are they all coming from a small group of domains, or are there many different domains?  You want to make sure that the links are diversified, and not all coming from websites that the seller controls.  It’s a common trick that all of the PageRank is coming from the sellers own website, and if you have no guarantee that those links will remain in place, you can expect to see a drop in PageRank very soon.  I call this “Inbred PageRank.”
More serious than Inbred PageRank is hijacked PageRank.  This doesn’t happen so much anymore, but during 2005 and 2006, I saw dozens of examples of a supposed high-PageRank site being sold, but the PageRank was hijacked from another domain.  I won’t explain how it’s done, that’s easy enough to find out, but I’ll explain how to detect it.

What you need to do is start going to the sites listed in the Inlinks list, and verify that the link actually exists.  Under normal conditions, you will find pages in the Inlinks list that no longer have the link.  This is normal.  Expect it.  However, if you can’t find the link on any of the pages, that’s bad.

The more you’re investing in a site, the more of the Inlinks list you want to examine.  You can discover some interesting things.  Perhaps there is a single large source of PageRank, and all the others are minor.  You’ll know that your PageRank is heavily dependent on a single source.  That’s a risk you need to know about when you’re buying a site.  What you hope to find is a diversity of types of sites and strength of PageRank in the Inlinks.  You don’t want to find that only, or primarily the Inlinks are from directories.  You want to see links from content and resource pages as well.

This should give you a primer on what to look for when the site you’re buying includes an attractive PageRank.  Even when you’re buying a lower PageRank site, you may want to give a look at the Inlinks in Site Explorer.  It does give you an insight into what type of marketing the owner has done for the website.  Good luck!