How do you buy non seo traffic sites?

[DomainMagnate]

The only decent sites I see that don't get most of their traffic from seo are either sites with purchased traffic or some kind of new products with all the sales from newsletters etc. What type of non seo traffic sites do you guys buy and consider low risk?

[fabdomains]

A very good question! And not one I can answer as I have never bought a site without Google traffic.
However, what I would do is probably run the domain through a really good backlinks checker, eg SEO Spyglass, and see what links the site has incoming. You would imagine that a site with good traffic outside of G would have lots of good links from high traffic forums, blogs, social media accounts etc. I'd then compare this to as much web stats data as the website vendor is willing to let you in on.

[akirk]

One of mine has high traffic from wikipedia... So traffic can easily come from anywhere
Alasdair

[flipfilter]

I personally favour sites that have around a third of their traffic from search (usually Google) and the other two thirds from 'other methods' as this usually means

1) You can scale quicker in the early days on the assumption the 'other methods' are easier to control and scale than grass roots SEO and

2) There's usually scope for long term improvement through growing the amount of organic search traffic.

The Other Methods I tend to look for are

a) Sites that have at least 6 months history with profitable display Ad buys. This means they have their own banners (which will only be effective for so long in terms of CTR, but usually give a template of what works well), they've worked out which sites and demographics work best and often they have direct buy relationships with smaller publishers.

b) Sites which get a lot of their traffic from affiliate or partner sales, but NOT sites in the IM niche (simply because burn out tends to be a problem and it's hard to monitor how many people the offer has already been mailed to as there's a lot of overlap from list to list).

c) Sites with CPA strategies should fall into this list, but personally I wouldn't buy one as most tend to be in the health market and I neither understand nor fully believe in the products being sold.

d) Sites that have pure viral growth - very rare and more common with games and social apps - here's an example - https://flippa.com/auctions/2634514


Justin

[DomainMagnate]

Sites with long history of profitable ad buys seem like a good idea, but I'd still consider it higher risk than seo assuming there is usually a very limited number of sources for ad buys. Do you have any interesting samples from some recent flippa auctions?

Sites that get a huge chunk of traffic from links and wikipedia are great, but lets be honest here, those are usually top quality and are extremely rare.

I've also purchased some sites with affiliate traffic before, but that didn't go very well - a totally different area of expertise.

[Clinton]

Long history of ad buys is common for sites selling or giving away web templates, for example. Another area is B2B - like VoIP or CRM software - where it's a lot easier to make money from ads as the players tend to be big companies that have have professionals handling their media purchases. I would personally consider sites with this earning profile as relatively low risk.

[flipfilter]

Another area is B2B - like VoIP or CRM software - where it's a lot easier to make money from ads as the players tend to be big companies that have have professionals handling their media purchases. I would personally consider sites with this earning profile as relatively low risk.

I think Clinton has screen monitoring software installed on my machine - that was pretty much what I was about to say! I'll see if I can find the original listing that I saw doing it well (unlikely as I see so many and this was a couple months ago) but I remember one site bought ads as an affiliate for Grasshopper (Small Business Hosted Telecoms).

I would say that there's a huge number of sources for Ad buys for a service like small business Telecoms. If you consider the demographic, there's so many small - medium sites still to be exploited - even this forum could potentially be one as I assume many of us work from multiple locations.

[DomainMagnate]

Long history of ad buys is common for sites selling or giving away web templates, for example. Another area is B2B - like VoIP or CRM software - where it's a lot easier to make money from ads as the players tend to be big companies that have have professionals handling their media purchases. I would personally consider sites with this earning profile as relatively low risk.

Not sure I understand this model, could you link to some sample sites on flippa?
Wouldn't these sites still rely mainly on seo traffic, just get their revenue from direct ad sales? Or do they buy ad traffic and then sell ad space, seem elaborate.

[flipfilter]

Not sure I understand this model, could you link to some sample sites on flippa?
Wouldn't these sites still rely mainly on seo traffic, just get their revenue from direct ad sales? Or do they buy ad traffic and then sell ad space, seem elaborate.

Here's an example of a site which I had a few years back, that might help explain the idea better:

The site was an affiliate site for those 'Get rock hard abs' type of products (I can tell you the secret and save you some money .... exercise like a maniac and dont eat cakes). At the time (well before Panda) I had six articles and a few greyhat links, so the site wasn't doing too well in the SERPS. There were other affiliates in the same space whose ran ads and their ads always appeared, so I figured the campaign was most likely making money and shamelessly copied it. I used a basic scraper to find all their ads over several networks and experimented with different creatives over different sites but all targetting that same demographic of 18 - 25 males.

To find the sites to advertise on I'd generally use Alexa and Quantcast for the demographic profile, Google's 'related: ' search function or tools provided by some of the ad networks. After running an ad on a high traffic site for a few days, you immediately get a feel for which ads work and which dont in addition to which sites send good traffic and which ones dont too.

Eventually, it's a simple cost per visitor -> conversion rate -> average profit per visitor that will tell you which campaigns to keep running and which ones to drop but this often comes with a few expensive mistakes. I see a site for sale where the owner knows both its creatives and ad locations well enough to be profitable long term then I know they have a scalable to blueprint to grow the business - find more sites with an identical user demographic and run either the same, or slightly modified ads on their to get more signups / sales.

So for example, if a site is currently profitable running adverts on the Experienced People blog, then I would assume the same adverts would work well on the FlipFilter blog if the product and the adverts are the same. There's no guarantee, but it usually works out.

[Clinton]

DM, let's say you have a good page on CAD software. It's on a site that has good signals - Alexa rank, PR, lots of edu backlinks, long standing Wikipedia mentions etc.

It doesn't matter whether you have any traffic to that page at all, resellers of CAD software would pay several hundred dollars a year to have a single text link embedded in the content. They see SEO value in it.