Thursday, January 3, 2008

Determining Your Websites Value

Determining what your websites market value could become an important number to you. Especially if your site targets a niche audience. Of course, you wouldn't want that niche audience to be something like “ a make money on the internet” niche. That's because there is far too many of those already. You need your niche to be as unsaturated as possible. So pick a niche like bubblegum.

Of course, you need to find someone who is willing to pay the money for your site. A lot of the time this money will come from venture capitalists. Usually these types will want to consider at least three things.

They will want to know how much they have to spend to get new prospects to login and join. They will want to know how often the visitors return to the site. (Often referred to as stickiness) . There will be questions about add on services and things like premium accounts

These questions will likely be asked before there is a value put on the site. So , our next question is, how do we value a site? Some entrepreneurs say that is the site brings in say, 12k a year, then that is it's value. Other sources say to multiply the number of unique visitors to the site by about 38 dollars on a monthly basis. Average 2,00 unique visitors a month , your site is worth 76,000 dollars. Simple, right?

Right now the Google purchase of Double click is in the news for $ 3.5 billion or so. Myspace was purchased for about $ 550 million. And the list goes on.

My research indicates that sources that track website sales and analyze website traffic are putting the value at right around $ 38.00 per visitor.

The question here is, what can all this mean? It means if you have a high traffic website, the high tech buyouts are back. The potential to strike it rich with a dot com has returned. But only if you can sell it.

To sell the site you will need a lot more than 2,00 unique visitors. You are going to need on the order of 100,000 visitors per month to get them salivating. That's because lots of traffic is worth something in Internet advertising . Revenue projections for Advertising on the Internet are in excess of $ 13 billion right now for 2008. Do you want a piece of this action?

Repeating myself, targeting a niche audience is the way to go here. Don't target one that is already being targeted if at all possible. Social Sites are hot right now , but they all target the same group. The 18 to 40 group, it seems to me. This means they are competing for the same advertising revenue. Can you target a niche that has a different demographic? A place that advertisers would like to be but don't yet have a way to get to the niche? Would that be worth something? What would it be worth?

When you can get to the point that you have found a way to get your visitors to pay for unique services,you will be able to cash in also. The old format was to offer the user free access and then charge for the premium upgrade . Would it be cost effective to charge for information instead? Then again, would your users be willing to pay for it? Again , what would this be worth to you?

Determining how much your site is worth should start with all of the above variables , but there is more to it than this. Part of the reason is that the search engines change their algorithms quite regularly to boost their advertising revenue , and you have to adapt. But more on this later.

You almost have to go to school for this and there is an Internet university that I participate in.

Heres the link

Internet University Link Click Here

Matt Leitch is an aspiring Internet Marketer , Website Designer and Printer willing to help other aspiring marketers around the world.