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If you want to run a successful internet-marketing business but don’t want the monetary and time investment to build a site from scratch, there is an alternative.

Buy an already working site, and capitalise on it!

The advantages are obvious. Someone else has done the hard work for you, identified a niche, bought a domain name, and built a site around it.

All kinds of sites are available, for all budgets. You’ll find content sites, game sites, web 2.0 sites, retail sites, and more.

You’ll even find unique one-off products and services.

There are a number of ways to find these sites, and quite a few pitfalls you need to avoid.

Finding A Site For Sale.

1. Try contacting the site owner of a site you are interested in directly. Sometimes, you will find “site for sale” notices on sites you come across, but these are rare. Many “for sale” notices are just on parked domains, and therefore you are only buying the domain name.

Older, less-updated sites are the obvious candidates for a purchase. Try looking through Dmoz or the Google Directory as there are many sites like this there.

Remember to ask for and verify current and historical traffic levels.

2. Look on dedicated “Business For Sale” sites. Be aware that the kinds of sites available here may be at a premium. On the plus side, if you have the capital, you will be buying an A+, professionaly developed website. These sites and truly ready-to-go and you should get a lot of help from the current owners during the transitional period when you take it over.

Some sites include:

BusinessesForSale.com
SitePoint.com
Sedo.com
WebsiteBroker.com

3. Look on eBay. A lot of people sell cheap websites here, but make sure you read “What To Avoid” below first. You can also try classified sites such as Loot and Craigslist.

4. Use the Digital Point forums. There are hundreds of websites traded here, and since these are marketing based forums they are traded on their current or projected profitability. These sites will usually contain information on the traffic, such as hits per month, google page ranking, and any directories the site is listed in. They may also contain details on the sites current income per month, if applicable.

What To Look For

1. A useful, keyword based domain name. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find a cheap site with a premium name that is worth more than the actually website content. Sometimes it’s a good start for some strong SEO tactics, and sometimes a name will just leap out at you and generate possibilities on it’s own. One word, .com domains should be snapped up. Hyphens, numbers, and less used TLD’s should be avoided.

Of course some of the most popular domains around, like ebay.com, yahoo.com, and google.com don’t actually mean anything, so always keep potential branding possibilities in mind, too.

For example:

BUYMOTORCYCLES.com is good
BUY-A-MOTORCYCLE.info is not. There is potential, especially if it’s already receiving traffic, but in general avoid.

2. Current traffic. There are a number of ways to show the level of traffic a site has, the most common being hits per month. Proof of this is usually through the websites log, a screenshot of a popular site stats program such as “AWStats”, or a link to a third party tracker operating on the site, such as Googles Analytics or SiteMeter.

Be aware that raw hits may not mean anything, as it’s relatively easy to purchase say 10,000 hits to a site when all that site is doing to gain the traffic is appearing as a pop-under to another site, showing as a redirection from a dead site, or worse being automatically refreshed by a computer program 10,000 times.

Be especially wary of sudden jumps in traffic, such as an old site that has wavered around the 1000 hits mark and suddenly gets many multiples of that in the month or two before it’s listed for sale! The next tip might be a better indication.

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Tags: buy a business, buy a website, buy domain, buy site, domain auction, domain sales, domain templates, expired domains, expired websites, internet marketing, purchase domain, purchase website, site auction, site sales, website auction, website sales