You just bought a website – you paid, you transfer it to your server, everything seems to work fine. Great. Now what?

Let me tell you this – 99.9% of the websites that are been sold need improvements. It is rare to find a website that’s running on auto pilot mode and generates money. No one is stupid enough to sell this kind of website. So on each website for sale there is something wrong that the previous owner didn’t know how to deal with it, so he decided to pass the problem to someone else and earn some cash while doing so.

This is fine as long you remember it! It is very important rule, and it is better to be prepared. I will give you an example. I bought this art website. I like art, and I thought that this site has a potential. It was a pr3 with some income but not a lot of traffic, and I thought I could do better.

So I bought it. First mistake was that it was all written in cold fusion and I am a php developer. So I couldn’t change a thing… In fact the job was so big to convert the site to php that I had to hired a company to do so. (Great one by the way) so another $1000 went down.

Now I know how to bring more traffic and increase the PR. First you want to buy PR6 link somewhere. They are not that expensive and can boost your traffic and rank. A great place to do so is Lola directory Just for the record this is my directory, but it is so good that I had to recommend it.

But traffic and pr is not enough, and I didn’t know a lot about the market. Not a lot are willing to pay for paints online. So I have traffic, but I didn’t solve the problem of the old owner – Selling arts… I now it can be done, but I am a busy man, and don’t have the time to do so.

So the sites earns now around $100 a month – just to cover my investment. Bad one…

So traffic and PR are important but also the art of sell. For tips how to increase your sells read this blog . There are lots of tips over there that can help you understand the online world much better. In fact buy there tutorial. It is well worth the $300.

So the bottom line is that before you buy a website you need to have a good idea what are you going to do with it. Otherwise you will try to pass it to someone else sooner than you think.

Assaf

I am about to teach you a method that can save you a lot of money. I didn’t invent this method, but when I read it, it sounds so logical, so I started to implement it, and it works. It is a very simple but yet powerful that every professional buyer must use.

Let’s say you looking to buy a webmasters forum website. You can go to Sitepoint or any other website that offers websites for sale and search for ‘webmasters forum’ or similar search terms.

If we will stick with Sitepoint for a moment you will get a list of sites that are on auction. Check it yourself – The first one is me when I sold webmastersroom.com

Now take a look on the second result:

Looking to buy any webmaster forums/ web design or programming forums or any related domains

This is much better than to bid on auction. Why?

First sellers approach you so you can choose between several websites.

It also gives you the power to negotiate better. If they approached you it means that they are keen to sell. And you are the only buyer at the moment. So you can knocked down the price heavily. Of course that 80% will be crap, but still using this method gives you at least 5 websites to choose from.

Now if you decide to bid on an auction you compete against other buyers that will raise the price you are willing to pay. You also have to wait for the auction to ends, and there is no room for negotiation.

On the real world you can get bargains on auctions, but not with websites. The amount of quality websites that are out for sale is very low, and the competition is high. In fact I stopped bidding completely, because for every website that I wanted to buy and bid for it, I was outbid by someone, and the closing price was higher than I wanted to pay, or even worst higher than what the site is really worths.

Now I have some messages in relevant forums like:

“looking to buy…” and I get 5-10 offers a day. Now all I need is to chose from.

Have a great weekend,

Assaf