I’m constantly scanning the web looking for sites to buy. Out of all the markets available be it stock, foreign currency, vegetable, or fish, the Internet is definitely my favorite. Purchasing smaller sites to supplement your income or rolling them into a larger pre-existing business can be a great growth strategy.

The Plan…

I was talking with Joe about what I’d do if I did buy another blog site with the intention of rolling it into WhyDoWork. We had a chat about what we both thought were the key elements to extract from the new purchase so I thought it might be helpful to share and work on a checklist and strategy together through a series of posts on the topic. One example of a purchase gone bad that comes to mind is CashQuests.com. If you take a look at the traffic after the sale, it’s pretty clear things didn’t go as smoothly as expected with that site going from popular destination to barely on the map. I’m hoping that the solution to problem acquisitions like this can be a collaborative process, so if you have ideas and opinions please chime in with a comment and I’ll work it into the plan.

The Checklist

We’re going to skip through the whole valuation process of a site and get right to how to manage the post-purchase process. Assume that the site you’ve just bought has some kind of CMS (with content of course), RSS feeds, and web stats tracking. There’s a few core activities you’ll need to be successful:

  • Analysis of ‘What’s Hot’

    • This will involve looking at the past performance of the site from a web traffic, social media, and linking perspective.

  • .htaccess (redirection) Mastery

    • You will need to do for .htaccess what Mr. Miyagi did for the karate kid. This is one of the most important pieces of the process.

  • RSS Transfer and Migration

    • A delicate piece in the puzzle, you’ll need to get all the RSS subscribers from the old site onto your feeds.

  • Put your PR Hat On

    • It’s going to be difficult to get subscribers to remain active with the new RSS feeds and whatever other changes you decide to make without some TLC (not the 90s R&B group) but some honesty, care, and respect during migration.

  • Make Long Term Plans

    • When you’ve completed the above tasks you should be well on your way to a successful migration. Deciding what to do with the old site and domain is the last step. You may want to keep parts of the site up, you may want to redirect everything to your new site, or even copy portions across; it all depends on what is going to contribute to your success in a greater capacity.

What’s Next?

I’m going to break out each of the main points above in a separate post to avoid writing a novel now. In the end we’ll have a solid migration plan for acquiring new sites that I’m going to use myself. If you want to contribute, feel free by leaving comments. The first post on the topic will be a detailed look at what you should be doing from an analytical standpoint to determine what to do with the traffic from the newly purchased site. Stay tuned! :)

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