Here at EricPorat.com, our goal is to share Eric Porat’s experiences and tips from nearly two decades of successful digital investment. The mistakes he’s made, the successes he’s achieved, and most importantly, what he’s learned from all of it along the way.
As you may know, Eric Porat went from starting a website from scratch in 2005 to selling it three years later with over 70,000 monthly visitors. Since then, he’s bought and sold over 70 websites for over half a million dollars.
Long story short, there’s something we can learn from Eric Porat’s experiences, especially when it comes to digital investment. Here is Part 4 of his guide to website flipping, Expert Tips for Website Flipping.
In our last edition, Part 3, we left off just as we were about to start talking in-depth about the skills you need to buy and sell websites, and more importantly the key process of the most important step in website investment.
IMPROVING YOUR WEBSITE!
Before we talk about IMPROVING YOUR WEBSITE once you buy it, let’s dive right in and begin to talk about the skills and resources you need to buy and sell websites and make a reasonable profit.
If you aren’t set up with these skills, there’s no point getting started!
Keep in mind, if you’re doing everything yourself, these skills are critical. As an investor though, you can always outsource the management part to a team or agency of professionals, if you have the financial means to do so. That requires some level of research though because there are tons of poorly-run teams waiting to take your hard-earned cash.
It’s best if you can do all the work yourself, or at least have the knowledge to oversee it and make sure things are all adding up properly!
THE SKILLS YOU NEED
Lead Generation
Attracting customers to your site and getting them through the sales funnel (if that’s your site’s goal) is entirely separate from SEO (which we’ll talk about next). It requires a mix of organic and paid marketing methods. Lead generation is all about creating leads to maximize the chances of securing a person as a customer going forward. The aim of lead generation is to stoke the fire, to draw the viewers in, step by step by step by step. Like we mentioned, it’s something that occurs as a mixture of organic and paid marketing, a hybrid of the two techniques is required. This is a more site-specific skill, so it may not be necessary for you.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You need SEO to drive organic traffic from Google and other search engines. SEO means ranking highly on Google, typically for various keywords relevant to your niche. For example, if you’re running a site that focuses on tech and gadgets and makes income via affiliate sales, keyphrases you might want to target could be “new cellphone tech” or “best home gadgets,” for example. If you were writing a post about a specific product, say a wireless phone charger, maybe “wireless charger” would be a great keyword.
The two things to remember with SEO keyword research is you want a low KD (keyword difficulty) and a high search volume (the number of people searching for that keyword per month). KD, meanwhile, refers to how difficult it is to rank for a given keyword. So you want keywords that don’t have a ton of competition but that do have a ton of people searching for them. We’ll go more in-depth into SEO in Part 5.
Long story short, focus on SEO. Without SEO, it’s basically impossible to establish a profitable online business that earns passive income and has reliable and diverse traffic.
Content Marketing
Establishing oneself as an expert in the industry is critical to growing an online business, and part of that is publishing content that’s relevant, professional, and organic. This ties into SEO as well, but content marketing is its own arm in and of itself.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Turning your visitors into customers, which then gets you more clicks on your affiliate links or more purchases of your product, is the key to improving your site’s profitability, at least if your model is based around sales or affiliate marketing. So it’s imperative that you can do this and do it well.
WHATS NEXT?
This isn’t really all you need to know to run a website, obviously, but it’s a start. And remember, website investment is a long-term investment that pays off big time, overtime. So don’t be afraid to learn as you go, both on your own and from others. Once you own the site and start building it, it’s like making a pyramid, brick by brick by brick. It becomes sturdier and sturdier.
Passive income increases and flows diversify, traffic increases, and diversifies, and everything becomes more and more stable. You’ll get there.
Eric Porat’s experiences and story have a lot more to teach us. Before we get into the key stages of IMPROVEMENT, let’s talk about…
The Mentality
Website investment features fast returns, at least compared to traditional real estate investment, but it’s not an easy game. You have to work long and hard on development, and as we discussed above, there are myriad skills you need to be proficient in.
None of that matters though… if you don’t have the guts to see it through. Website investment requires you to not just be technically savvy, but mentally savvy.
“Until you can manage your mind, do not expect to manage money.”
Warren Buffet said that, and Eric Porat agrees. To not only run successful websites but improve them, you need to be able to manage myriad avenues of profit and work. You need to run SEO, you need to run blogging, you need to run CRO, and so on. You have to be someone who is a leader and a risk-taker, but you also have to be logical and have the discipline to do the legwork to find the right site, grow your site, and hold out for a good sale.
For our fifth and final part of this guide PART 5, GO HERE. We’ll talk about exactly how to improve a website, so you can sell for maximum profit!
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