If you are not nepotistic in your marketing some of your best content will go unnoticed, especially if you write at a level that is beyond most of your readers. Many of the people who are popular are not popular just because of content quality...there are so many nepotistic partnerships that go unspoke of that it is quite scary. Anyway, here is a brilliant post by Andy Hagans about how to sell a site for a million dollars. He is a friend, and the link may be nepotistic, but I am surprised that it got so little traction for how great it is. I guess more bloggers want to be told their blog is worth a million than want to learn how to get those million dollars in hand. To each their own.

You can tell that he is writing from his experience and learning while he is actively doing what he is talking about. That is typically where the best ideas come from...when you escape ideals and theory and talk about the trends you see right now and what is working for you right now.

If you have a site where it takes little effort to update it then the number of pages a site has is not a big factor, but if you are buying a website that is sold as an authority the number of pages is a crucial factor to consider.

Less is More:

More is better is not always true. The two most recent interesting looking sites I have seen for sale recently have been non-appealing because they have SO MUCH CONTENT for their traffic stream. A friend of mine has a 20 page website that gets 1,500 uniques a day. In the same vertical a site with 20,000 pages is getting less than double that traffic stream.

Is the 20,000 page site an authority site? If it is, it is one that has a bad content management system, duplicate content issues, and internal architecture problems. I could clean those problems up an increase traffic, but if the first thing you have to do when you buy an asset is to gut a large chunk of it then you might be just as good off starting from scratch.

Why Less is More:

I don't mind buying smaller sites that I can extend out. One friend of mine runs an AdSense site that was about 30 pages a year ago and made $600 a month. As he extended it out to a 1,000 page website (while marketing it to keep building authority along with content) the traffic went up 40 fold and the earnings went from $600 a month to $750 a day.

That 20 page website I mentioned above is being fine tuned to earn more right now. If it was extended to rank for a couple related terms that are not yet heavily targeted it could double its earnings by adding another 10 pages of content to the website.

Track Your Growth:

The last thing you want to do is add so much low value content that you spread your link authority so thin that you best earning pages no longer rank. As you add new pages make sure you consider their effect on your supplemental ratio, and how your internal link structure is flowing link authority toward your key pages.

If you are building your own site make sure you track traffic streams and earnings and base your internal architecture around maximizing those while keeping the site looking legitimate. If you test something and it does not perform suppress its roll in the site navigation while building more authority. Keep testing extending the site in other potentially profitable directions.

Getting Rid of the Garbage:

If you buy a site off someone else you are buying

• the domain name

• the brand
• the site age
• the link authority
• the content
• the traffic and revenue streams
• any upside potential you see that the market does not see (and thus does not value)

If you buy a site which has limited earnings for its size, when gutting out the bad content you need to first see what is worth keeping. The easiest way to do that is

• track conversions to see what pages are profitable

• see what pages have quality backlinks (using Yahoo! Site Explorer, or maybe sign up for Google Sitemaps)
• look for pages with surprisingly large traffic streams or other indications that they could become self reinforcing authorities that garner recurring links.

Some of the content may also be valuable, but just underperforming because the site has so much more content then authority. In that case, don't gut useful original content, just ensure that you focus more effort on building the site's authority before you bulk up the site with more content pages that won't get indexed or ranked.

When looking at the difference between a profitable business model and an unprofitable one you really need to look at the math. I recently ran many graphic ads that I bought through Google on a CPM site targeting basis. Here is a look at one campaign:
Notice that the 468 by 60 got a much lower click-through rate than the text ad or other image ad. Why? Some of it may have been up to ad positioning, but part of it is also due to 468 by 60 being the default banner ad size. If it looks like an ad people ignore it.

Just like the 468x60 banners are being worn out, many sites are selling overpriced 125x125 ad buttons. These are not selling because they offer great value, they are selling because the trend started at a few popular sites, and it is easy for the publisher to ask for a lot without giving away too much value.

Low value sites that feature targeted ads as the content (with in content text links) will earn more than high value content which has obvious ad units located in obvious ad spots.

And just how people grow sick of advertising they also grow sick and tired of abused methods and formats, such as:

• pop ups and other intrusive ads

• red headlines
• squeeze pages
• sensational headlines

If you want to make your marketing successful, leverage techniques that are not perceived as being overused and abused to members of your target market. Rather than formatting your ads like ads turn them into content that is formatted like other content people trust and get people talking about it.

As more large trusted publishers launch ad networks will this force Google to rethink their authority heavy algorithms and ad quality scores that benefit these growing arbitrage plays? Or is Google promoting many small ad networks to spread the portion of the pie that they don't control really thin? Shopping sites like Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, BizRate, and NextTag already dominate Google's organic search results and paid listings.

Ask.com just announced their contextual ad network.

Amazon.com just had a solid quarter, and is selling ads directly via ClickRiver.

Why are ads on Wikipedia unthinkable? Because Jimmy Wales is gathering authority and content, waiting for his search project to launch. Don't be surprised if the Wikipedia contains ads soon after Wikisaria's ad program launches.

How many ad networks will online marketers be willing to sign up for?

If you think the web is full of spam now, wait until you see what it looks like when all the large brands put ads in the content, and when shady publishers have a dozen different distributed ad networks to chose from.

I went to the city with my girlfriend today. When we ate lunch we were both surprised by how happy the waiter was, then we realized all the waiters were happy. Last night we grabbed a late night snack. We overheard our waiter saying "bus boys taking the tips. need to have their damn thumbs broken."

Both waiters were serving food. Why was one group so happy while the other was so sad? The first was in an upscale trendy part of town that likely tips well. The later was at a Denny's that was so sketchy that they even have Brinks security guards at night. When a person is new to business and struggling to get by they will take just about any business they can get, but as they satisfy those needs they move away from things that inspire thumb breaking anger toward things that aid happiness. Who you work with and for is just as important as what your goals are.