How to Revive a Zombie Company
Like many other businesses, websites aren’t immune to the zombie company syndrome. Yet, these seemingly dead-in-the-water websites can be a cheap acquisition for investors (or future owners) if you know how to revive them.
What are Zombie Companies?
Zombie companies are those which barely make enough to pay the bills. There is revenue, but only enough to cover operations and service what debt might be present. Because they’re stuck in a rut, it can be challenging to make sufficient changes to move the business forward.
Like most businesses in the real world, websites can turn into zombies as well. We’ve seen this happen many times, and eventually, once-proud Internet properties disappear or redirect towards another landing page.
These websites can be a good acquisition for investors who know what they’re doing. So long as you have the necessary skills, simply buy and flip the site – or who knows, turn it into a profitable operation.
6 Ways to Revive a Zombie Company
While there’s a possibility of reviving any zombie company or website, the priority should go towards the right ones. That means websites with the potential for high traffic and revenue. Often, these will be eCommerce websites.
Here are some ways you can boost earnings or build a more robust traffic stream;
1. Improve Content Strategies
Content is one of the most important anchors for any website. You’ll need to reconsider the content strategy if you’ve acquired one that seems to be languishing in web traffic. To enhance the content, work in two key areas; strengthening existing content and building new content.
Effective web content has distinct characteristics that make it so formidable and keenly picked up by search engines. Content produced should be:
Comprehensive – Make sure your articles are at least 800 words in length. As the keyword difficulty increases, you’ll likely need more. The idea is to provide your potential audience with a one-stop piece to learn everything they need about the targeted topic.
Readable – Avoid lengthy sentences, use simple language, and learn to describe rather than state specifications. We often need to address a broad audience, and the easier your content can be read and understood, the better it will be.
Updated – Some parts of even evergreen content need refreshing occasionally to keep up with the times. Run through your content base to ensure that you’re making tweaks. At the very least, data needs updating, or you might even have to re-skew it if too much time has passed.
Optimized – Having the most comprehensive content alone isn’t sufficient if you don’t employ the proper optimization strategies. Make sure you’re formatting for the right objectives and have a good spread of targeted keywords.
Follow the Funnel – Your content pieces are standalone and need to fit into your overall sales funnel. Ensure you’re directing visitors towards specific pages with your content to ensure maximum effectiveness of your “sales” pages.
2. Inbound Conversion Optimization
While website owners frequently worry about the volume of visitors they’re getting, paying attention to conversion rates is also important. Web hosting costs money, and it’s a waste of resources to build a strong stream of poorly converting traffic.
Focus on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to more efficiently turn traffic into money. For this, you’ll need to look into many areas such as website performance, effective landing page designs, visitor retargeting, and more.
Thankfully, there are many tools in the web master’s armory that can help with this. For example, use a tool like JMeter to stress test your website and see how many visitors it can effectively support.
From there, work out the numbers to see what percentage conversion rates would be a minimum necessity, then work towards increasing your numbers. Be aware, though, that average conversion rates will differ for various industry segments and markets.
eCommerce websites should convert at a range of 4% – 6%; while those in the catering and restaurants segment may see conversion rates as high as 10%.
3. Move Towards International SEO
If you’ve taken over a zombie business with significant but stagnant traffic volumes, a shift towards international Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may yield surprising results. Most website owners target traffic with content in their native language due to familiarity.
Increasing the scope of geo-targeting is one way of quickly multiplying traffic with just a little extra effort. You can use an auto-translator to generate new content while adding localization signals to indicate support for these languages.
For example, hreflang tags, international-friendly URL structure, subdirectories for each country supported, and more.
To do your background research, make sure you use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for investigations to avoid search engine bias. You can easily pick up a top-quality one like NordVPN for a little more than what a cup of Starbucks costs each month.
The most popular search engine globally is Google, but it isn’t the only one by far. In some markets, specific search engines have a dominating influence, and targeting these may be necessary. One good example is China, where Baidu, a domestic search engine, has a more significant influence. It commands over 80% market share for China web search. These inherent variations can be substantially influencing depending on which areas you’re targeting.
4. Join an Affiliate Marketing Program
Regardless of what you’re selling, you’ll need content to build traffic organically. Since that’s the case, you might as well increase earnings potential by participating in affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing brings revenue when you refer leads towards specific products.
It doesn’t cost you anything and can be an additional source of income. Of course, make sure you don’t choose affiliate schemes that may cannibalize your traffic.
5. Expand Advertising Revenue Channels
Aside from affiliate marketing, ads are another potential revenue stream to consider, especially since you’ll be beefing up your web traffic. Since there’s going to be an additional load on your server, you may as well maximize your earnings potential.
You can consider various advertising models, including ad engines like Google Adsense or direct partnerships with specific brands. The latter can be profitable for both sides, especially if your content is relevant in a particular niche.
To give you an idea of how direct advertising works, think about a fixed banner for a specific brand that’s sold directly to the brand. The banner can be placed in regular hotspots such as leaderboards or embedded within select content pieces for a more surgical effect.
Ad engines are fast to hop on board with but yield much less financial gain. They also tend to burden the user experience and may impact the overall performance of your website.
Be cautious, though, as each of these revenue channels has its pros and cons. Direct advertising requires more time and effort but can result in considerably higher profit margin.
6. Increase Your Marketing Channels
Aside from joining affiliate marketing schemes, creating your own is another way of increasing your marketing potential. By building an affiliate program, you offer potential partners a slice of the pay for all leads they refer.
That isn’t the only way you can expand the scope of your marketing channels. There are other avenues up for consideration. For example, run a social media campaign on select platforms, email marketing campaigns, engaging in outreach programs, and more.
Regardless of which marketing channels you decide on, the most critical avenue will always be content marketing. Your website is the ideal channel, and you won’t have any problems disseminating content in various forms.
Managing the various marketing channels under your purview will be a demanding task. It will be impossible to track, manage, and accurately assess each of them without the aid of some tools. Thankfully many of these channels have integrated tools that can help.
For example, if social media marketing is a priority for you, consider a tool like Buffer. It’s capable of scheduling content for multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, and more.
Remember that creating and sharing isn’t the only thing you need to handle. All marketing channels need monitoring to ensure you meet desired objectives.
Final Thoughts
Zombie companies are a portion of the economy that few want to look at or discuss. They occupy a small but present space in the global economy. They are also often overlooked since investors tend to focus on numbers and rarely like to take risks.
Zombie websites, though, are an exciting proposition. By all accounts, domain age counts when assessing the authority of websites. The right website will also have some level of traffic or content and merely needs a focused mind with the right know-how to turn around.
