How to Buy Profitable Websites Online and Which Sites to Avoid

Knowing how to find profitable websites for sale and how to buy them is important, but more importantly is knowing which sites to avoid. Buying websites from online auction sites such as Flippa, Websitebroker and Ebay can be a profitable choice if the buyer knows what to look for.

Here Are Five Types of Listings You Should Always Avoid...

Shady Niches
These types of niches are going to be problematic right from the start. Pornography, internet gambling, pyramid schemes, Promotions, and foreign exchange sites. I mean if it is something that would arrive in your inbox and you would hit the spam button right away it’s not worth bidding on.

Short-term Promotion Sites
Sites that have a temporary value in nature for example, 2013 Severe Weather Predictions, or sites that offer a special sale for limited-time. Website sellers may put these types of sites to auction because they have reached their “peak profit”.

Sites that have been banned by google or are on Google’s hit list
Believe what you want but Google has a great influence on search engine rankings and traffic and is not likely to lessen in the near future. Sites that don`t focus on delivering high quality content and information to their readers most likely won’t make the grade. Take autoblogs for example, Google has always had a long history of penalizing sites with scraped content, especially now with all the recent Panda and Penguin updates going on. Sites of this nature will lose their value real fast.

Unintelligible business model
One of the most important things that should be completely clear in your mind when you are thinking about buying or bidding on a website is "How does the site generate money?" If the site is not currently generating any form of revenue, then ask yourself, "how can I make it generate revenue?" If the website is in fact generating revenue, from what sources and how are they being distributed? Always make sure you fully understand how the site is making money, or at least how it could make money.

Unclear claims from the seller

Any trustworthy seller should always be able to give you an exact figure of the revenue that the site is producing and the source where the revenue is being generated from. Also the seller should be able to provide you with proof of that revenue. If the seller just gives you a proximate or an imprecise number then that should be a red flag to you.

These are just a few tips on buying and starting a website business online, I`m sure there are plenty more where these came from and I will be posting more information in due time. Hopefully this will help you when deciding to take that first step to starting a successful website and generating an online income. If you have any tips you would like to share with us or our readers please do so by leaving your comment below.