Some people make a living telling others how easy it is to start, market, and run a web site profitably. For the most part, that's just not true. Finding an unsaturated market to profit in is hard enough and even if you succeed at that, you have months if not years of hard work ahead of you in the way of marketing, SEO, and site development before you have anything to write home to mom about. If you're up to the challenge of starting from scratch, more power to you. But if you're looking for a way to quickly get involved with online business, you have an option:

Enter the Established Site:

For me to consider a site "established", it must have the following attributes:

  1. The site must have been in existence for at least 6 months. And I mean the actual web site, not the domain. The domain must be of equal or greater age. You can check a sites track record using the Wayback Machine at Archive.org.
  2. It must have pre-existing traffic.
  3. It must have pre-existing revenue that's documented and easily proved.

Don't be fooled, SEO can be a bitch, especially if you're trying to break into a saturated market. Purchasing an established site means you'll already have two very important elements of SEO: An aged domain and quality backlinks.

The older the domain/site is, the more backlinks it will have (typically). You can always expect better search engine rankings if you have high quality backlinks. Quality is key here. Anyone can get backlinks from link exchanges or from buddies with blogs, but getting same-topic, authoritative backlinks takes time and networking. This is a huge advantage to buying an established web site as this probably took the original owner quite a while to accomplish. By buying an established web site you have a great chance of bypassing start-up hurdles faced by the original owner, and if that prior revenue exists, you're more likely to sustain it and grow whereas new web sites have a notoriously high failure rate.

If you buy from a reputable seller who cares about his web site you'll also benefit from his knowledge and experience. You'll get the trade secrets, marketing tips, important links and more - everything that enabled him to grow the site to what it is. All you have to do is pick up where he left off and keep it running smooth. Just like buying a pre-existing brick & mortar business, already having the clientele and getting some training from the previous owner affords you a greater chance for success.

Drawbacks & Pitfalls:

The number one drawback is cost. You're not going to get all that initial legwork for free. You're going to pay a premium for the prior owners labor. Typically a fair asking price is 12x monthly net revenue plus assets. When I say assets I am talking about the site, the domain, and any pre-paid items such as hosting or advertising. Depending on the sites age, it's authority in the market and it's provable track record of revenue, a site owner may ask up to 36x monthly net revenue. Considering internet business is typically much more passive than traditional brick & mortar businesses, this is not unheard of.

One potential pitfall to lookout for is how the prior owner ran the web site. Sometimes a sites name has been through the mud so bad that you'll play hell rebuilding it's reputation. Be aware of 'spammy' marketing tactics that can ruin a site's image very quickly. Also be sensitive to any black hat SEO that's gone on. Black hat SEO is the use of cloaking, keyword stuffing, duplicate sites, interlinking, doorway pages, and more - all disapproved by major search engines. If a site has been penalized for black hat SEO it can be nearly impossible to get the site out of it's purgatory and back on the results page. If a site you're looking at appears to have been removed/banned from Google - walk away. You can see if a site is banned here.

Another pitfall is buying a site that's too personal to be handed off to a new owner. This is very common with blogs and tight knit communities. Many blogs are a one-man show and convey the voice of the sole author/owner. When a new owner steps in many times that voice is lost and consequently so are the loyal readers. If you're thinking about buying a blog, be aware of this. See if the owner is willing to post about the upcoming sale on his blog. Pay attention to the comments on that post and feel out their reaction. This sheds a lot of light on the trouble waiting for you after you take over. One site that comes to mind for me is NetBusinessBlog. Matt's voice immediately disappeared from the blog. Amazingly enough they've held on to a decent readership but it's growing at a much slower pace than Matt had achieved. Mubs from Most-Listed also wrote about some sites he wishes hadn't sold.

Conclusion:

If you're on a very tight budget you may be forced to start from scratch, which is fine - hey, how else are you going to learn the entire process? But if you're looking for immediate entry and you have some money to invest, buying an established web site may be the way to go. It's all up to you. But don't rush into things. Do your due diligence and make sure you're not being taken for a ride. My grandfather had a saying which my father's subsequently etched in my brain:

"Good deals are like street cars, one comes along every fifteen minutes."

Very true. Keep your eyes peeled but don't get emotional. Buying an established web site is just like any other investment. It takes time, patience, research... and a little bit of luck.

Links of Interest:

  1. White hat/Black hat/Gray hat SEO - Wikipedia
  2. Established sites for sale on FlipSquare
  3. 5 domain buying mistakes