You have a great idea and product, and you would be rather pleased if people knew about it. You´re probably going to be interested in coordinating a marketing campaign, and since at least the turn of the 21st century, this has meant establishing a highly visible, engaging website for your brand – whatever it may be.
Though perhaps simple in concept, any entrepreneur with even the slightest measure of relevant experience will tell exactly the same story…
There is a colossal quantity of behind-the-scenes legwork in the creation and maintenance of an online platform that is capable of successfully marketing, well… just about anything.
The marketing slog
It should go without saying – the creative content that presents a brand to its audience is vital to the success of any venture. Portraying your brand in a sleek and attractive manner through various mediums is an art unto itself, and often is responsible for turning what would otherwise be a simple click-and-forget into the creation of a new customer.
However, what use is any of that alluring, persuasive content if an audience cannot be drawn to view it? According to a recent Google think-tank, some products require upwards of 900 multi-channel impressions before an audience member undergoes conversion into a customer.
The true power of digital marketing lies in its ability to cultivate this level of consistent viewership and engagement, ensuring your brand reaches as many potentially interested eyes as possible. Any well-orchestrated marketing campaign will utilise every available tool in achieving such visibility for its web content. This means consorting with the oft-misunderstood art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), among more surface-level measures like social media marketing, product retargeting, and the slightly more traditional though nonetheless effective emailing list.
It is clear that building and growing a website from the ground up is an uncertain and laborious process – representing not only an enormous amount of effort and expense but time. Companies that provide experienced SEO services often give an estimated time-frame of around six months until the results of their digital marketing services can begin to be observed – and that´s only when the work is done by experts. For some enterprises, such an undertaking simply is not viable. The costs involved in the hiring of specialist talent, before beginning to mention other expenditures, can very quickly become unmanageable.
3 Ways buying a website can help
There is, however, an alternative. In recent years, rising to meet surging demand, there has been a wide proliferation of online marketplaces, auctioning of already-profitable websites to interested investors. Such an approach near-instantly solves some of the aforementioned problems, removing many of the barriers to entry that any new enterprise must overcome.
As ever-greater numbers are discovering, taking a moment to explore the possible advantages of buying an existing website could just save you a lot of time and money. In the second half of this article, we´re going to attempt such an exploration – paying close attention to the differences buying an existing domain can make in getting your product out there.
1. Building the website
Before anything else at all, you´re going to need a website to act as home and platform to your brand. In the year 2020, there are many solutions to the question of website design. The reality is that they are either going to be expensive, time-consuming, overly restrictive, or some mixture of the three.
Even for a team of professionals, constructing a new site with the infrastructure required to support a solid marketing effort would present a challenge. The prospect of doing so as a layman represents a herculean task – with many pitfalls, hidden traps and a great deal at stake if something were to go awry.
Opting instead to buy an established website diminishes this concern, as you will be the owner of an already provably functional website. Not only are you saved from anxiety about back-end functionality, but these sites may also come already laden with desirable, optimised content to keep an audience reading (and buying).
2. Conducting an SEO campaign
Search Engine Optimisation, put most simply, is the process of improving the visibility of your website to search engines – Google, for example. A domain properly optimised in this regard would appear higher in the list of returned results for any relevant search, driving natural traffic toward your site and aiding the growth of your brand´s audience without paid advertisement.
Last year, 39% of all global ecommerce traffic began with a query to a search engine. This in mind, it is difficult to overstate the importance of good SEO to online marketing. It seems most businesses concur, with SEO often accounting for the largest share of a typical marketing budget.
Most techniques involved in SEO are predicated on an intimate understanding of the inner algorithmic workings through which search engines return results. A little complex, in other words. At the risk of oversimplification, found at the very heart of the practice is a metric named ´Domain Authority´. This metric is determined by attempting to approximate how likely a search engine´s algorithm is to identify a given website as useful or important, therefore placing it among the first few results. Though certainly another oversimplification, SEO´s general purpose is to boost this ranking by giving your website more of the features that search engines look out for.
One such tracked feature is the number and quality of links to the domain from other websites. Link building, common in SEO work, constitutes the development and curation of these links. Without the proper resources, contacts, or knowledge, convincing link building can be an astonishingly tedious task. With the purchase of an established website, link building will be more or less already complete, saving you a potentially costly headache.
It can take months upon months to build authority for any website, and it can be difficult to know how much of a difference you are making without a deep knowledge of data analytics. All the while, traffic will be passing you by, flocking to the content of your competitors with greater authority.
Unfortunately for the aspiring digital entrepreneur, newly minted websites also suffer a heavy penalty to their domain authority, due simply to their age. There is no remedy for this other than time. This another common issue solved with the purchase of an existing website, allowing search engines to take your site seriously from day one.
3. Curating a mailing list
One of the first realms to be conquered by digital marketers, mailing lists have been a constant in marketing campaigns for longer than many of us have been alive.
If they´re still around, it is because they work. According to Oberlo, a popular Shopify plugin, every dollar spent on email marketing has an incredible average return of 32$.
We live in a time in which the consumer has come to expect a more familiar relationship with the brands that they support than ever before, and this has spurred targeted email advertising to enter its Renascence.
Data analytics suggests that 92% of first-time visitors to a website do not intend to make any kind of purchase. It would seem that the order of the day is to build a stronger, more personal bond with your brand´s audience, motivating them to return often and driving sales.
Cultivating a list of individuals invested in a brand to this level is no easy task, and many never manage to amass such a dedicated core of subscribers. In investing in an existing website, this uncertainty evaporates. Pre-collated emailing lists are more often than not included in the sale of an online business, leaving all of the nervous guesswork aside.
Maintaining this posse of subscribers also helps to prevent an overreliance on SEO services in keeping your website popular. As search algorithms undergo updates, the criteria for deciding which results to return can alter, and this may cause a drastic and unexpected drop-off in traffic if you´re caught unaware. As with any investment, it pays to diversify.
Conclusion
When considering the merits and feasibility of acquiring an existing online business, it can help to draw a parallel to the acquisition of a traditional, physical business. So much of the uncertainly and insecurity inherent to starting an enterprise can be avoided, as you enter the market afloat a vessel that has already proven itself seaworthy.
The wealth of data and information provided by many of the marketplaces about their hosted offerings gives invaluable insight into the circumstance and health of any prospective investment, letting you know exactly what to expect and where you stand.