TreyMarkel

When it comes to business assets, most people think of a commercial building, equipment of some kind, accounts receivables or maybe a bit of inventory. With the world-wide-web and social media taking off like a rocket ship, there is another form of asset that can add value to a small business or any business for that matter. Though this asset may not be tangible, it may be worth way more than your commercial building or inventory.

MySpace.com sold to News Corp. for some insane amount like $580 million. Why would News Corp. want to buy a social networking website that nobody uses? We all know thatFacebook pushed MySpace off the map a long time ago. So why the purchase? At the point when News Corp. purchased MySpace, MySpace had a database of over 50 million users. (This number is skeptical but it proves the point) News Corp. however, didn’t seem to care much about the software but more about the users and all their contact information. News Corp. now had the opportunity to market to over 50 million youngsters and compete with organizations like MTV in a younger demographic. Now, MySpace was one of those companies that took off with overwhelming success. The social networking epidemic in high schools all across the country spread like a wild-fire. Unless your telling me your starting the next Facebook, your company isn’t going to have such rapid growth. However, creating a website asset like MySpace isn’t hard to do.

Anyone can turn on Google Adwords and place themselves on the first page of Google for a certain keyword. I call this buying your website visitors. The problem with this is once you turn Google Adwords off, your traffic goes to zero. What can a website have that can show measurable long-term value to any investor?

Blog and Newsletter Subscribers – There are organizations out there that have hundreds of thousands of people and businesses subscribed to their newsletter or blog. Every time that company posts a new blog it will be automatically sent to these subscribers branding the organization and pushing a message. You can’t buy this kind of audience.

Twitter Followers – If you have a good message and you are adding value to the world-wide-web then an abundance of Twitter followers is inevitable. Not only adding your own thoughts and opinions to the web but also promoting other businesses thoughts and opinions will add value not only to the web but to your website asset and brand as well.

LinkedIn Connections – We have all heard the phrase “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” An investor will want to know what kind of relationships you have in your industry. Are these relationships revenue generating relationships? LinkedIn is a great way to start relationships and to reboot old relationships. This also holds true for Twitter. Do you have relationships on Twitter that when you post a tweet, someone else will re-tweet that post?

Facebook Fans – Like any pro athlete or famous rock band, they rely on their fans for their revenue.  The more CD’s or tickets the fans buy, the more money the athlete or rock band generates.  Having fans of your company image or message holds tremendous value when it comes to your business valuation.  These fans will talk about your brand, push your brand, and probably generate some revenue in the mean time.

I think you’re getting the point.  Any investor will take a look at your assets and see what they are worth on paper. Any smart business owner however, will know that once you have website visitors and social media followers, all that is left to do is to figure out a way to monetize those visitors. In many cases an investor may know how to do this better than you do.  Take a good look at your Internet real estate presence.  Is your website just sitting there for someone to look at, or is it actually worth something?