The Hidden Value Of Your Online Work
“I’ve decided to shelve my site for awhile because the new job is taking up all of my time. I’m even considering deleting most of my pages and I may not renew my domain.”
When I learned that a friend was planning to shutter his website, I wasn’t too surprised. He launched his first site in 2004 and soon after we exchanged links, shared tips, and I even sold one of my domains to him. Later, when his “real job” took off, he sold everything that he had except for his original, flagship site.
“Good for him,” I thought when I read his note, but then it quickly occurred to me that this move would actually be bad for him. The “bad” wasn’t the new job which was paying him quite well and providing what his family needed, rather removing the last vestige of his online presence was a move that I didn’t agree with. I quickly wrote back and encouraged him to rethink his strategy.
To make a case for keeping his site, I shared the following bit of advice with him. These tips are something I routinely mull over whenever I consider selling a site or closing down a slow performer:
How old are you? Your domain name, that is. My friend Brian’s site was established in Spring 2004, making it four years old. In that time, he has accumulated a lot of backlinks including some from a handful of .gov and .edu sites. Though his site currently has less than 60 pages to it, many of these pages have been around for three or more years and nearly all have received PageRank. Clearly, the search engines recognize that there is some value to his site as the inner pages are ranked and have inbound links.
How deep is your love? Relating to the backlink issue, Brian’s site is linked out to several authority sites and a few of those link back to his site. His links appear naturally and they are the types of links readers would find valuable, complementing his pages and making for good “further reading” material.
Should you sell instead? In almost all cases I would instruct the person who no longer wants to manage a site to simply sell it. Although Brian’s site was never much of an income producer, all of the material on his site is original and written by him. Many buyers will look at monthly income and simply offer 6-18 times the average monthly ad income amount for a site, but the age of the domain, number of pages, and the quality of the backlinks demonstrates that this is a poor way to calculate its worth. Definitely, his site has an intrinsic value that the average buyer would not recognize. I suggested that he consider offering it to one of his business partners if he absolutely had to dispose of it.
After considering my points, there were a couple of other things which Brian hadn’t thought of which eventually convinced him that shuttering or selling his site wasn’t in his best interest:
Careers change, a site is a valuable marketing tool. Like so many people these days, I rarely send out a resume. Why? Because, this site is the best example of what I can do for a customer. Brian realized that although he loved his job, having an online presence would allow him to maintain his visibility, a good idea whether his career takes an unexpected turn or not. With companies merging, downsizing, going out of business, or otherwise changing, his passion for his work could eventually cool. An attractive and informative website can be the best personal marketing and networking tool for anyone.
Good hosting is cheap these days. The cost for keeping his site running is negligible as he uses shared hosting. Domain registration and annual hosting fees cost him about $60 annually, not much money to make this an issue. To manage his site in his spare time, he’ll be deleting several outdated pages and redirecting the search engines to other pages on his site. I encouraged him to set aside a few hours monthly to regularly tweak his remaining pages which should keep his site fresh going forward.
Just about every site has value based on its age, content, links, authority, income, and more. The hidden value is often what we don’t immediately recognize, the personal marketing angle that would take months, perhaps years to replace if a treasured site is sold or shut down.
Matt | Buy/Sell/Trade/Launch, Linking Strategies, Personal Marketing, SEO Tools
He shouldn’t sell the site.Gov backlinks,4+ age domain…it’s really good.I had the same problem with one of my sites:didn’t had enough time to update it,so I just let it age there…A couple of months later I started to write again for the site and I’m getting pretty good $.
Fringes last blog post..Fringe - New Pictures
Fringe, then you know exactly my point. Even if you cannot keep up with the site for awhile, it’ll still retain most of the linking arrangements, be found in the search engines, and be worth more as it ages.
Looks like you and Brian are working out a similar path.
Good thing you were able to convince him to hold on to his site. .gov and .org backlinks are precious and difficult to achieve. It could take years to regain what he’s established for a new site.
It’s been a realization for many that there is very little loyalty to employees from companies these days. One can swiftly have the rug pulled out from under them with shuffles of management and company direction when they felt they had a solid career placement.
In today’s world, people make a number of career moves in their lifetime. What you’re doing now may not be where your interests lie 5 or 10 years down the road. So a well-established online presence should not be something you would want to readily dispose of.
I don’t think I would ever be able to sell of my domain to anyone else..
I heartily agree! Even if he only updates once a month,or even less frequently, a site with that much going for it would remain viable and valuable.
Whatever your friend decides to do, at some time in the future someone might search for him on the web, either for business or more social reasons.
Having an authority site gives you the option to link to your other web presence and give those sites a boost in the SERPs - reputation management.
There are quite a few Andy Beards in the world, some of them quite notable.
I have enough juice that if I wanted too, only search results related to me would appear in the first 20 or 30 results on Google.
At the end of the day a future employer isn’t looking for all your notable achievements on the web (well not always) but just to see if you are a genuine person.
Andy Beards last blog post..Stompernet Site Seer - Ripped Apart
Thanks for sharing this helpful tips.We all should follow your tips.You tell us the detail for improve a site.Its really heavy helpful.If anybody start as per your instruction he must success.