Flight Nursing.

This profession requires the right amount of professional education, a couple years of traditional nursing experience, and a certain set of skills to be effective on the job. A flight nurse salary is not as black and white. There a couple factors that need to be taken into account in order to probably properly assess how much a flight nurse has the potential to make in term of yearly pay.

There are many factors that could affect the pay of a flight nurse. These factors include (but are not limited to):

• The location of the job,
• Type of employer
• Education and certifications earned, and
• Experience as registered and flight nurse.
• Level of risk involved in the job
• Inactive Pay vs. Active Pay (time on rescue missions vs time on call).
• Likelihood of a natural disaster.

Flight nurses will be paid more wherever natural disasters or any type of accidents are more likely to take place. This is to compensate for the risk of taking on during the job. In those states, flight nurses will always be in high demand.

The Salary

The median salary for flight nurses is just over $70,000 per year, according to salary.com. This is only slightly higher than traditional registered nurses who work in hospitals. The range in what flight nurses can make is pretty large though. They can make anywhere from $55,000 to $85,000 per year.

Their shift usually consist of two to three 24 hour shifts per week. They usually work 6 to 10 shifts per month. Ten shifts per month is extreme but it does happen. Many of these nurses have secondary jobs as a nurse in intensive care units of emergency rooms.

Registered nurses in that work in the hospital make between $67,000 and $69,000 on average, according to salary.com.

Obviously, the more experienced you are then the more you will get paid as a flight nurse. Flight nurses with under four years of experience can expect to get paid between $50,000 and $60,000 per year. Flight Nurses with five to nine years of experience can expect to paid between $60,000 and $80,000 per year. Flight nurses with over ten years worth of experience can earn over $100,000 per year.

The median salaries are highest in New York, New Jersey, and Alaska. In these states, the median salaries for flight nurses are all north of $80,000 per year. The lowest median salary is in South Dakota. It is just under $57,000 per year for flight nurses.

Now work experience will earn you more more money but it comes with additional responsibilities such as administrative duties and management. These administrative tasks can consist of scheduling and reporting.

Employers

Who you work for also matters a lot in terms of pay. Flight nurses that work for private companies get paid a lot more than flight nurses that work for clinics and hospitals. Positions that pay between $48,000 and $56,000 per year at hospitals; pay $75,000 to $85,000 per year at private companies.

However, in the military the experience is not as important. They will train you in your occupation. It is more the rank and length of time in service that will determine your salary. That salary can be over $100,000 per year.

Insurance And Other Benefits

Flight nursing has many other benefits than just good salaries. Flight nurses also receive a full benefits that usually covers dental, health, and life insurance. Employers can usually cover a large portion of the insurance premiums as well. This makes the cost of coverage pretty cheap compared to other coverage plans given in other professions.

Private companies offer special benefits as well. They can also accommodate flight nurses with travel costs. As well as stipends or allowances for housing and meals if need be.

Because flight nurses have favorable schedules, they have a lot of free time to pursue other things. They could use their spare time to pursue advancing their education. Employers might even provide financial assistance for RN to BSN programs or advanced certifications as long as it is related to nursing.

Employers of flight nurses often receive generous retirement packages. Many involve employers matching a nice percentage of money put into 401K accounts. Government and military workers may be eligible to retire after twenty years of work.

Vacation time can be as much as 4 weeks if they have a decent amount of experience. With not much experience, 2 weeks should be more the expectation.

Career Advancement

There are plenty of opportunities to advance your career as a flight nurse. As mentioned earlier, experienced flight nurses can be placed into supervision and/or management roles. These roles come with increased salaries.

Flight nurses that promoted to management positions might receive adequate pay raises if they work for hospitals in clinics. They will receive much higher pay raises if they work for private companies or the military. This is so the nurses continue to work on their professional development and advance their education. This will also help nurses keep up and cope with the job requirements.  

Conclusion

This is what flight nurses should expect in terms of salary. There are plenty of factors that go into this though, as explained above. If you are registered nurse that works in a hospital and you are thinking diving into flight nursing, do not expect to earn as much as someone who has been flight nursing for a couple years. Hospitals and private companies seem to favor those with experience. However, you need to start somewhere. There are plenty of opportunities here to get paid and earn great experience. Find them and move forward.

Good Luck!

Sources

• http://www.nursefrontier.com/flight-nurse-info/flight-nurse-salary/

• http://www1.salary.com/Staff-Nurse-RN-Flight-Transport-Salary.html

• http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Flight_Nurse/Hourly_Rate

As some organizations continue to think about reaching potential audiences for whatever reason in the old fashioned way, the fact of the matter is that nowadays, there are better and more immediate methods. If you are truly looking for the most efficient and comfortable levels of getting the job done for any process, you simply need to be aware of what you are doing underneath all of the layers of operations. When it comes to communications with others for any purpose, the Internet and global technologies have taken hold of the entire system. Not only are people going to be able to move forward much quicker than they ever have before, but if you are able to tap into that system now, then you have a much better chance of improving your organization’s communication abilities as well.

Sales

Every organization has a sales force. Even the companies that act as nonprofits, government agencies, and charities are selling in a manner of speaking. You need to be constantly in contact with the people you are involved with, and you need to be sure that when you have something that needs to get to them, you have to get it to them powerfully and quickly. While the old guard model was to literally go across the state or the country in order to get to see someone else face to face, the efficiency driven models of today’s society only needed innovation to improve on the process. With video conferencing software you can literally be in front of your target audience member to make a sale, and then when the meeting is over you can be onto your next project in seconds.

Some individuals may not be as comfortable with such a quick process, but the fact is you can do a dozen meetings with video conferencing — thanks to today’s technology advancements — in less time than it would take to get all the way through airport security and to your boarding gate. Technology means you can get in front of more people faster. This is all before you even talk about the costs of business travel and commuting to a meeting in the first place.

Training and Education

Any organization needs training and education within them. If you aren’t training your employees at different locations how to better use processes, services, and products, then you are training the customers how to be more efficient. You could also train suppliers on certain aspects of the organization so that both parties can benefit, and you can even train those who you rely on for services about your organization so that they can better respond to your business’ needs.

At the end of the day, everyone can always use a little more training to become a little bit better in their role. However, one thing that most companies can’t afford to waste is time. That’s exactly why it is so vital to find a way to connect with multiple people as quickly as possible. Minimizing the amount of time needed to travel, get to a meeting, and spend time going over things is one thing. But, when you add in all of the flexibility, you also have a great shot at getting people to buy in the first place. No employee, supplier, or any other member is going to want to willingly give up time to work with you on meetings. However, by having a quick and efficient process in play, you could literally be looking at them face-to-face and eye-to-eye within seconds, no matter where they are, thanks to new video conferencing methods such as Blue Jeans Primetime. You can’t imagine how much more likely people are to buy in and give you the time when it isn’t inconvenient to them.

Stakeholder Meetings

If you are fortunate enough to take on investors, you also want to be able to communicate with them as effectively as possible. This is true for current investors, potential investors, other businesses you wish to collaborate with, or even competitors (to a certain extent). However, the last thing you want to do if you are trying to manage an organization with the correct financial model in play is to invite them all in for meetings in an overpriced conference room, put them up in expensive hotels, and pay for meals and refreshments. What you can’t afford is to hemorrhage cash. So instead of minimizing communication, go the other way and show them how important their time is by always maintaining communication and not stealing hours or days out of their life to come communicate with you.

Every organization needs to feel out how they want to operate. If you try and force anything, you will most likely wind up failing. But, if you can find the common ground on communicating with your employees while keeping an eye on innovation, you will find yourself with a much more “close-knit” group while also minimizing expenditures along the way.

1. Enforce An Electronics-Free Zone And Spend As Much Time There As PossibleGive your eyes a break from the glare of those screens by simply turning them off in a given room of your home or office. An alternative method is to give up electronics during certain hours of the day on designated days. The point is to give your loved ones your full attention and allow your brain to shut off the stress of work and restore in peace. For instance, if your electronics-free zone is the bedroom, then you can actually sleep rather than gorging on a full-season show release on Netflix.
2. Step Away From The SidelinesIt’s your turn for action. Rather than wasting time on social media while your son finishes baseball practice, volunteer as a coach or commit to helping him practice once a week. Don’t just stand by the fence watching your dog run the park. Run with them. If your significant other goes to a spin class every Saturday, turn it into a couple’s event. Physical activity is the best way to recharge, and it’s more fun when shared with your loved ones.
3. Pitch A Tent And Soak Up The Goodness Of Mother NatureNo hiding in a luxury camper allowed. Find one of the best air mattresses for your weight and height, pick up a sleeping bag, and head out to a local camping site alone, with the family, or with someone special. Keep it simple by roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and hiking. Take pictures of the wildlife and hang them in your office so that you can remember that exhilarating feeling of refreshment that comes just after a night by the fire.
4. Create A Challenge, And Then Rise To The OccasionDo something new, but turn it into a challenge. For instance, cooking is a great way to relax and recharge, but don’t just pick a recipe out of a cookbook. Allow your children to create a mystery box of ingredients for you or find a way to combine two recipes that seem at odds. This engages your creative mind, and it may turn something you don’t want to do into a healthy hobby.
5. Immerse In The Creative ArtsVisit an art gallery, or create your own paintings and transform a room in your home into your personal gallery. Sit at the spinning wheel and learn to craft pottery, or rummage through second-hand stores in search of antiques. Write a book of poetry, or download classic literary works on your e-reader and curl up by the fire. If your job requires technical thinking and constant focus, then give your brain a chance to dream wildly and wander freely.

Implement just one of these suggestions into the upcoming week, and you may experience a surge of productivity once you refocus on work. Your entrepreneurial spirit may even spark new ideas while your brain is at play.

The good news is that you can utilize simple sleep hacks to ensure that you get a good night’s sleep in spite of your busy career.

How Does Sleep Work?

Before we go into the hacks in earnest, let’s discuss the process our body goes through during sleep. Our sleep comprises of repeating cycles and they can be divided into two major categories – REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, and non-REM sleep. The REM phase lasts around 70 minutes and this is the time when you dream. It is also at this point that your sleep is lightest i.e. you are most likely to wake up during this phase. Non-REM is the resting phase, a deeper level of sleep where your body recharges itself. Waking up from this phase will leave you disoriented and heavy for a few minutes. Put short, try to sleep restfully during the non-REM phase, and wake up during REM when you aren’t in a deep sleep that could result in grogginess.

To optimize your sleep, you can address two specific factors – the environment you sleep in and the activities you perform before falling asleep.

Creating The Ideal Sleep Environment

Your body remains acutely aware of its surroundings as you sleep. So you’ll need to follow the following tips to ensure that you aren’t woken up by any unwanted external events:

• Keep the noise out – try using white noise or ear plugs if required. Just as you need to shut out the light, noise cancellation is equally important for enjoying a good night’s sleep. Sudden, undesirable sounds such as cars driving by or rolling thunder can wake you up. Try playing soothing white noise to drown out the unwanted sounds – your mind isn’t irritated by peaceful sounds such as that of rainfall or the wind blowing through the trees.
• Keep the heat and humidity down – even though your body temperature automatically lowers when you fall asleep, you should still try sleeping in a cooler room than you’re usually used to – the blankets will provide you all the warmth you require. According to research, the optimum room temperature lies between 15 to 18 degrees Celsius.
• Know the difference between your living room and your bedroom – make sure that you train your mind to associate sleeping with your very own bed i.e. a bed so comfortable that your brain just won’t be alright with sleeping anywhere else! A comfortable mattress will go a long way towards this end. Even if you can’t afford a high end mattress, there are some excellent mattress toppers which are far more economical and will help you achieve the same goal.

What To Do Before Falling Asleep

As previously mentioned, the real trick is to actually fall asleep. Once you fix this, you’ll notice a huge rise in your productivity. Here are a couple of simple behavioural changes that you can implement to sleep better:

• Turn off all electronics half an hour before bedtime – after a certain point, artificial light and bright screens begin to keep your from falling asleep. There are two reasons for this – firstly, they hinder the apparition of melatonin which is required to make your body feel sleep, and secondly, they affect your circadian rhythm: this is your internal clock that controls your energy levels. If you absolutely must use a device, be sure to do so with the screen dimmed. There’s an app called f.lux which reduces blue light input to your screen automatically after a certain time (blue light has the most negative impact on your sleep)
• Be careful of what you eat or drink – four to six hours before going to bed, stay clear of alcohol, coffee or rich food such as sugary snacks or cheese. Even if they aid you in going to sleep, they will adversely affect your sleep, in particular, your REM cycles. In short, they might be responsible for you waking up multiple times in the middle of the night.

Do you often find yourself carrying out cumbersome social media marketing tasks for your business? Nowadays, it is essential to integrate social media into your marketing mix.

This post will focus on five social media automation tools that will save you valuable time by automatically handling much of your social media marketing efforts.

How to use social media automation tools

There is only so much time you can devote to the tackling of various tasks. This is particularly true for entrepreneurs who run a business independently or who have only a small number of team members they can rely on.

Fortunately, there are multiple tech resources that you can easily utilize to:

• Post content on several platforms.
• Pre-schedule your posts on social media.
• Automate repeating social publishing jobs.
• Manage all social media accounts from one place.
• Keep track of your results.

Social Media Automation tools that will help you save time

Here is my list of top 5 social media automation tools:

1. Hootsuite – with over 10 million active users, this tool is presently one of the top ranked social media automation platforms.

It has a reputation for being one of the best tools for social media presence management, something attested by the Wall Street Journal. Its chief benefit, perhaps, is that you can start using this tool for free.

Key features:

• Connect with as many as 35 social media accounts.
• Integration with RSS feeds and your blog site.
• Keep track of conversations mentions of your business from the dashboard.
• As a bonus, you can integrate and manage this tool from your WordPress blog.

2. Sprout Social: Famous for its sleek, easily navigable user interface, this tool is another strong social media marketing / automation resource. According to its users, this tool can get the job done in fewer steps compared to other platforms. It costs a little under $59 a month to use it.

Key features:

• User friendly dashboard and interface.
• Unified smart inbox to make engagement intuitive.
• Keep check of Topics and Hashtags on Twitter.

3. Buffer App: Another easy to use, free of cost social media automation tool – but it does have a few limitations. The tool allows you to effortlessly pre-schedule content and post it to your active social media accounts. One of its most likeable features is its seamless integration with the Bit.ly App, a link shortener utility that can help you earn some extra profit on the side.

Key features:

• Support for multiple Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
• Seamless integration with the Bit.ly link shortener.
• Browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers are available that let you share content straight from the web to your social media channels.

4. Social Oomph: Similar to Bufferapp, this is another free social media automation tool which can be used to manage and streamline your social media channels. It has been up and running since 2008 and is a formidable social marketing app that is definitely worth a look.

Key features:

• Allows you to manage as many as 5 Twitter accounts as well as an unlimited number of LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.
• Automatic follow back feature incorporated.
• Monitor mentions and retweets from the app’s dashboard.

5. Twitterfeed: As implied by its name, this social media automation tool allows you to literally feed your blog to Twitter (as well as other social media platforms).

It may not fall under the conventional definition of a social media marketing app, but it does help you automate the task of sharing content across various platforms, and above all, it is totally free to use. You can see an example of http://www.hydrovac-edmonton.com using it to feed several of their social platforms.

Key features:

• Allows you to feed your blog content to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Content can be added from other RSS feeds to your social media accounts.
• Fetches real time information on how well your feeds are performing.

So there you are, a description of five cool social media management applications that will streamline your marketing endeavours and help your business grow. Best of all, you won’t even have to spend anything to take advantage of most of them!

Bruce Lee once said, “It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” – he really does hit the nail on the head! Some writers spend days working on a single 500 word article, while others can churn out several in a matter of hours. Does it mean that the quality suffers? Not necessarily. Some people are just more productive than others.

These sanity-saving writing hacks will help you shed hours of unproductive time, and improve your overall output.

Create a Suitable Working Environment

Everyone has their own creative catalyst. Some people like to work in complete silence, while others need the hustle and bustle of a busy coffee house. Work wherever you find it easiest to concentrate; just make sure that you’re free from distractions. Turn off your phone, close down Facebook, and tell your family and friends that writing time is work time. You wouldn’t let them interrupt your day if you were working in an office or on a construction site would you? It’s exactly the same scenario.

Stop Editing On-The Fly

First drafts are called “first drafts” for a reason; they’re not complete! Stopping your flow to self edit will block your train of thought. It doesn’t matter if your first draft – or even second draft – is riddled with poorly constructed sentences, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Edit and proofread your work when it’s complete. If possible, set the article aside for an hour or two. Mistakes can be difficult to pinpoint when you’re still in writing mode. Fresh eyes will make all the difference.

Outsource Research Assignments

When work becomes overwhelming, consider outsourcing. As a writer you’ll probably want to maintain a consistent “voice,” so hiring a ghost-writer may not be a viable option. However, if you’re at a loss for topic ideas or need to source some important information, such as statistics or a quote from an industry expert, a virtual assistant could be of service. Outsourcing will allow you to maintain creative control and concentrate on the content, rather than the mundane activities beneath the service.

Keep a Journal of Ideas

More often than not, your best ideas will come outside of working hours when your mind has had time to recuperate. Keep a notebook with you at all times and scrawl down anything that pops into your head during these unexpected occasions. You should be training your ideas-muscle like a bodybuilder trains his biceps. Before you go to bed at night, spend five minutes to think of new ideas. Simply write down anything within the boundaries of your niche that springs to mind, no matter how ludicrous it may be. The next day, delete, refine and prioritize.

Use Batching to Group Related Activities

Batching is a highly practical way of working that’s commonly used by online entrepreneurs to enhance productivity. Organize your week into related categories (batches) and try to complete each batch before moving on to the next. For example, if you need to write multiple articles about the same topic – a common occurrence for SEO writers – group them together into one batch. Or if video blogging is a big part of your online presence, consider writing the scripts for several videos on one day, and recording all of them on another. Batching essentially provides a productive framework for your work week, which allows you to remain focused on a single task, rather than having to constantly adapt.

Moderate Your Social Network Activity

In today’s digital world, checking emails and social networks is part of our hourly routine. In a survey conducted by ContentWatch, 41% of participants admitted that Facebook was their number one distraction during working hours; 50% also admitted that they wasted two to five hours per week on social media – enough time to write several blog posts! Applications such as StayFocused and InboxPause can switch off your email and social network notifications during certain times of the day. You don’t have to ban yourself completely – this can have adverse effects – but you should definitely moderate your use. Save email checking and social networking for your scheduled breaks.

Write an Outline First

Forget about what you were taught in high school. There’s a world of difference between formal essay writing and blogging. You don’t need to plan out each and every paragraph, but at the very least, write down the sub-headings and shuffle them around to ensure your article is well-structured. When you have an outline, feel free to follow your stream of conciousness, even if it means that you’re not writing in order. This approach is known as the “attack and complete” method and is ideally suited to list-based content.

Use Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

If you need expert information for an upcoming article, post a query on Help a Reporter Out. Their database has over 250,000 active experts, including thousands of influencers who have a strong web presence. Within just a few hours, your inbox will be bombarded with responses. Unlike Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, you won’t have to build up a following or “cold connect” with established names. Queries only take a few minutes to write and will leave you with a wealth of unpublished and unique information from some of the best minds in your niche.

Write for People, Not Search Engines

SEO writing sticks out like a sore thumb; it’s bland, keyword heavy, lacks personality and, worst of all, is boring to write! Writing for the search engines has its benefits, and of course, there is a place for it in the profession, but it shouldn’t dictate your style. It’s a strange irony that the type of content Google is actively trying to combat is often believed to perform the best. Five years ago you could write keyword-stuffed articles on a content farm and receive a top listing within hours; three years ago you could retain a keyword heavy blog, as long as the content was original and met a certain word count/keyword density. But… Google’s algorithm is constantly advancing and these techniques no longer work. If you write to rank, your content will suffer in the long-run.

Embrace Writer’s Block

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t think of the words. Rather than churning out uninspiring content riddled with unimaginative ideas, give yourself a break. Grab a coffee, take a walk and try to distance yourself from the task at hand. When you get back to writing, start off with something short and simple; something that doesn’t require too much thought or creativity. After warming up your mind, ideas will start to flow.

Trust yourself; not everything you write needs to be worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. You will inevitably read back your content in the future and wonder if it made the grade. Mulling over your mistakes will do nothing but hinder your motivation and harm productivity. Learn from your mistakes, but rather than criticize your past abilities, congratulate yourself; it means you’ve improved.

Every person is good at something. Every person has something to share. What is that thing for you? Some people are gifted with artistic talents, some are gifted with analytical minds and mathematical skills. Some people have the gift of gab and rhetoric, some are adept at mechanics and engineering, while others have instincts for finance and business. Some people geek out about movies, while some obsess over yarns and fabrics, and still others get all excited over books, or fashion, or food.

We all have our gifts and our passions, and whatever those may be, we owe it to ourselves and to the rest of humanity to share what we have, and at this point in this article you know that we’re not referring to material things that we have. We’re talking knowledge, wisdom, skill — valuable stuff that cannot be taken away.
This is how a lot of businesses and blogs are born, how books get written, how the greatest careers start — with gift of self.

There will always be people who could use your knowledge and expertise

Though at times you may feel that there’s nothing you can offer, but you need to be able to tell yourself otherwise.
The internet has made the world so much smaller and when people need anything, it only takes a few clicks and keystrokes for them to find it. All you have to do is let them find you. Put yourself out there and help them find you.
This is a great motivation for you to learn some SEO basics for your site or complete your LinkedIn profile, but sometimes all it takes is for you to post that article.

Your business can reap the goodwill that you sow

Sharing what you have always makes for good karma. Making that sign for that little girl’s lemonade stand could lead to more customers for your design business. Giving that career talk in your local high school could lead to future interns. Or maybe you’ll just gain a couple of friends to hang out with on weekends. Maybe doing that good deed would just help you get up and go to work the next day. Sharing of yourself can only do you good.

You can always use an outlet for your passions

Sometimes it has nothing to do with business or career, but just something that you love to do or just plain interests you. If passionate about film, that film review can only develop your appreciation for the art form. That recipe blog can only make you all that more excited about food. Forming that book club in your apartment building will give you something awesome to do that has nothing to do with your 9-to-5 career.

Conclusion

So go ahead and start that blog, make that how-to video, write that guest post. Hold that workshop, give that talk. Sharing and giving of yourself is good for the soul, fuels your passion, and increases your motivation.

Online shops are a dime a dozen — so ubiquitous have they become. The stiff competition means that only the cream rises to the top. There’s not a lot of room for mediocrity these days, as there’s no excuse for it.

It’s not even that the giant brands and with their giant brick and mortar chains such as Apple, Nike, Macy’s, with their equally gigantic budgets have completely taken over. There are still a lot of opportunities for startups and small-scale businesses to make it big online. Amazon, Etsy and eBay have provided platforms that have made it easy for any business owner to piggyback on the staggering market reach of these sites. But one doesn’t have to be all that big in order to be successful online. One just to have high quality products and a certain focus, a unique spin that appeals to a particular market segment — this is the one thing that even the multinational brands and giant chains, with their way-too-many cooks wanting too many things and increasing the probability of spoiling that e-commerce broth. So in this sense, being a small business could work to your advantage, as long as you yourself have this single-minded focus and an ability to edit and hone your ideas into finely-targeted executions. That focus, that USP, will even help guide you through the many aspects of putting up your e-commerce site — facilitating easy navigation, making the interface attractive, and bringing together all the other factors that make for a pleasant overall user experience.

To illustrate, check out these online stores.

1. MakerSpaceCanada.ca

It’s basically a toy shop for people who like building and creating things, kids and adults alike. They sell robot kits, drone kits, 3D pens and other things that turn engineers and designers on.

It may be a brainiac’s realm, but the interface is idiot-proofed anyway. The site design and the purchase process are simple and streamlined, it’s insanely easy to find what you’re looking for and buy it. In and out, no problem.

2. Skinny TeaTox

It’s bright and colorful while remaining neat and tidy. It’s all about tea, not coffee and tea and chocolate and juice — just tea. It’s not about indulgence or pleasure (although they don’t necessarily take that off the table) but about detoxing and losing weight. If that ain’t focus, then we don’t know what is.

3. Leatherhead

The site sports a retro, nostalgic vibe which works as a backdrop for selling beautiful leather baseballs, mitts, basketballs, and footballs. One can almost smell the leather.

The product photography and the simple, stark white background shows the high quality of the wares and shows the texture of the leather as well as the stitching.

4. Tastebook

Everyone’s online these days, no matter what their interests and hobbies are. Even those whose interests are in the analog world go online to shop for their paraphernalia or virtually roost with birds of the same feather.

Tastebook is a blog, a community, and an online bookshop that is geared towards those who are passionate about cooking. Its focus lies on serving the needs of all those gastronomes, epicures, and chef wannabes. A cook doesn’t have to be famous win this season’s Masterchef in order to have his or her very own cookbook — that’s achievable with a few mouse clicks.

Author Bio

George is a website investor and writes about website investing, due diligence, and earnings optimization at WiredInvestors.com. In a past life, he was a trader at an investment bank, but nowadays he spends most of his time in coffee shops browsing reddit whilst he should be working.

The following is a guest post from George, who writes about the process of website investing at Wired Investors.

Website Valuation: How to determine a Website’s Value

Are you thinking about buying a website for investment purposes, or maybe selling a profitable website that you built from scratch? Perhaps you’re not sure how to go about determining your website’s value?

Don’t worry – you’re not the only one. Regardless of whether you’re a buyer or seller, trying to work out how to do website valuation is a tricky business. Even the most traditional of assets – say, houses for example – are hard to properly value. It figures that if people can’t figure out how to evaluate a type of asset that has been around for a few thousand years, it’s not surprising that we have trouble with something that’s been around for only 20.

However, in the world of investments, there are a few things that can help us out when we’re trying to determine what something is worth (and this includes websites). After all, people invest money for the purpose of earning returns, so we can use these ROIs as a benchmark to compare different investments as well as asset classes. I won’t go into depth about how the returns on websites compare to other asset classes – but basically, I think website values as a whole are lower than they should be (read this Business.com article for more on this).

What I will say is that the first and most straightforward way to value any kind of website is to find out how the market as a whole determines a website’s valuation. The standard ‘rule of thumb’ for website valuation prices sites at about 15x to 35x monthly earnings, and the multiple tends to increase as the size and profitability of the site increases.

At the low end of the market, sites listed on Flippa tend to sell at 12x to 18x, mid-tier sites like the ones sold on Empire Flippers get listed at around 20x, and high-end sites can go for 30x or higher.

Now that we know the ballpark figures, we’re going to delve into the details. We’ll explore the methods that can be used for sussing out what a website is worth, and discuss what details are important when evaluating website value.

Website Valuation Methods

The first thing to know when attempting to value an asset is that if your assumptions are wrong, your methods are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how good a recipe is if you bought the wrong ingredients. One common phrase used in the programming world is GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. Make sure you do your due diligence and verify the numbers that you’re using before even thinking about trying to value a web asset.

Earnings Multiple

This is probably the most commonly used method for website valuation – and it’s relatively straightforward. After you’ve done your due diligence and you’ve determined that a website’s returns are real, you simply multiply it by a number – and this number goes up as earnings go up. Below, we’ve included a table with very rough approximations of ‘fair’ multiples depending on earnings

Obviously, the multiple that is applied will also be determined by the business model of the website. Ecommerce sites and SAAS sites are seen as more sustainable and will usually fetch higher multiples than sites monetized via ads or affiliate offers.

Now, if you’re a buyer, and you want to do better than average, your goal is to buy web assets at below the approximate fair values listed above.

The opposite is true if you’re a seller – you’ll want to emphasize the strengths (outside of earnings) of the asset that you’re selling to fetch a multiple that’s better than the theoretical fair value.

Getting to a website value using this method of applying multiples to monthly earnings is pretty easy. The tricky thing about using this method is that you need to adjust the multiple based on a variety of other factors – traffic quality, sustainability, monetization methods, etc. The main takeaway here is that less experienced buyers/sellers should treat valuations they obtain with the multiples method as approximations – valuation isn’t an exact science.

DCF Method

If you’re looking to either buy or sell a site, particularly if you’re working with the higher end brokers, you might run into a valuation method called the Discounted Cash Flow method – or DCF for short.

Spoiler Alert: I think the DCF model is pretty redundant method for determining website value for a number of reasons.

To understand the DCF method, you’ll first have to understand a concept called the Time Value of Money. The basic idea is that a dollar that you receive a year from now is worth less than a dollar today due to inflation and the loss of opportunity to spend/invest that dollar. Because money in the future is worth less than money today, it follows that future profits or cashflows generated by a business will be worth less than profits that are received today – and as such, we need to discount future cashflows.

In order to discount future cashflows, we need to choose a discount rate. There are a number of ways to choose an appropriate discount rate (see here). You then map out the cashflows of the website, discount them back to their value today (known as the Net Present Value, or NPV), add up the NPVs coming from the different cashflows, and arrive at a valuation.

I come from a Finance background, and I think the DCF method is tremendously useful for valuing a wide range of assets – but for websites, I don’t think that it’s particularly useful. Remember we mentioned Garbage In, Garbage Out earlier?  This is what we were talking about.

If you were trying to value a large company like Walmart, then a DCF model would probably be valuable – you know how many new stores they’re opening, you know how profitable new stores tend to be, and you know that Walmart is relatively recession-proof. Thanks to these factors, you have a reasonable shot at forecasting the future profitability of a company like Walmart – and so a DCF model makes sense, because the inputs you’re using (future cashflows/earnings) are likely to be reasonably accurate.

Websites on the other hand, are pretty volatile assets. Even the most stable websites can see huge drops in earnings due to a Google update, or huge increases in earnings because a product or post goes viral. It’s a fool’s errand to try and predict a website’s profitability two or three years into the future (let alone the 5 or 10 years that most DCF models use).

The DCF model is very precise – it feels good because you’re doing a lot of math and it gives you a nice, exact figure. But when buying or selling an asset, you should never mistake precision for accuracy.

Precision without accuracy is pointless – an archery target with more circles on it makes for a more precise target, but it’s ultimately useless if you miss the target altogether. The DCF model relies on reasonably accurate forecasts of future cashflows, and accurately predicting the future of a website years in advance is next to impossible.

Replacement Cost

This method is relatively straightforward, and is best used for sites that are relatively new or aren’t generating a lot of earnings. Essentially, you figure out how much it cost to put the site together, and that’s how much it’s worth to you.

Now, sellers will often claim that they have invested $X into a site – these claims are almost always grossly exaggerated. IF you want to use the replacement cost method, you need to work backwards and come up with your own figure for how much you think the site would have cost to put together.

Imagine a new business that owns a machine that prints t-shirts – the business has no customers and is making no money. How might you value that business? Well, if the business just owns that machine and nothing else, then the fair value of this business might just be the cost of the machine.

The same idea applies to using replacement cost to value a website – what assets does the website have, and how much would it cost to reproduce those assets?

Let’s pretend we’re valuing a website that has 5 pages of content, and each page has 1000 words. The website exists on a domain that is worth $100 due to its power or brandability. The website also has a custom logo, and comes with an ebook of 10,000 words

Assuming that you’ve verified that all the content is original and high quality and that the power of the Domain is genuine and not based on spammy backlinks, then you could value this site the following way:

If typical price for decent content is $0.03, then:

1000 x 5 =5K words + 10k words in the ebook = 15K words

15K words x $0.03 = $450

Domain is worth $100 and the custom logo would cost $20 so:

$450 + $100 + $20 = $570

That would be a basic example of how you work out replacement cost.

Now, an important thing to note is that as a buyer, you almost never want to pay full replacement cost – otherwise you might as well put the site together yourself and have greater control over the content/strategy of the site. As a buyer, you’ll only want to buy a site at a significant discount to replacement cost – you might take a 30% discount and value the site at $399.

Again, the opposite is true of a seller – you’ll want to try and get a price that is above your true replacement cost, otherwise you’ve just wasted your time.

Using Comps

This is a similar approach to using an earnings multiple, except that it’s a little more specific. A comp is basically a comparable asset to the one that you’re trying to value – for example, if you’re trying to value Walmart, you might use Target as a comp.

You can find comps based on business model of a site or the niche of the site (or both). For example, if you’re trying to value an ecommerce site, you could look for similarly sized ecommerce sites that have sold in the past. If you’re looking at a site in the technology niche, you might want to look for other tech sites that get similar amounts of traffic/earnings.

The problem with using comps is that there isn’t that much publicly available information about the details of website transactions – on the low end, your best bet is to look through old Flippa auctions. If you’re working with a higher end broker, you can ask them if they can give you information on comparable sites that they’ve sold in the past.

Once you’ve gathered a few comparable websites that have been sold recently, you can work out what multiples they sold for, take the average, and then apply it to the site that you’re trying to value.

Traffic Valuation

If a website has a decent amount of traffic but have much in the way of earnings, you can consider trying to value the traffic itself.

In the broader investment world, this type of valuation is typically used with tech companies that haven’t reached profitability – you might have read about tech companies getting huge valuations based on eyeballs – these ‘eyeballs’ basically mean traffic.

A basic way to determine traffic value is to find the relevant CPCs for the niche/vertical that the site is in, then estimate a reasonable CTR % and workout the how much the site would make if it were monetized correctly.

A quick example: A site has 20K visitors a month – the niche is very generic, so the CPCs are low – say, $0.25 per click, and CTR is 3%

20K x 3% x $0.25 = $150

So this example site could potentially earn $150 a month – but we definitely need to discount this heavily, because it this monetization hasn’t yet been realized. If we assume that we have a 50% chance of successfully monetizing the site to this degree (and 50% of failing completely) then:

50% x $150 = $75

We can then apply a standard multiple – let’s say 15x – so:

$75 x 15 = $1125

Some experienced buyers like using this valuation method because they often have a rough idea of what kind of visitor values they can expect for any given website, so they feel comfortable valuing for a website on its traffic numbers alone. Less experienced website buyers should probably stay away from traffic valuation until they get a good handle on a range of monetization methods.

Takeaways

Hopefully, you found the various methods outlined in this article enlightening. At the end of the day, valuation is a subjective thing, and while it’s useful to have a range of website valuation methods at your disposal, it’s the assumptions that you make about earnings and traffic that matter – the methodology itself is less important. Remember – when it comes to website value and valuation is general, the rule to remember is Garbage In, Garbage Out – if you give a formula bad inputs, your output will be useless at best and misleading at worst.

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If you liked this post, I frequently write about buying websites from an investment perspective at WiredInvestors.