Where to Buy a Website. How to Buy a Website

One of the most common reasons for us to be hanging around on the Internet every day is the abundance of information it is loaded with. The information is generated by multiple sources and is carefully organized in the form of files and web pages, which, when grouped together to form a single entity, become a website.
In this sense, a website represents a centrally managed group of web pages, containing text, images and all types of multi-media files presented to the attention of the Internet users in an aesthetic and easily accessible way. All websites enabled through the Internet constitute the World Wide Web (WWW).

Top 7 Website Acquisition Strategie

• Before undertaking a search for a website acquisition a smart web entrepreneur will stop and have a good think about what she wants the site to do and how it will fit within her overall web business strategy. Here is a list of the top 7 strategies to consider when buying a new website: 
• Buy a site that has targeted traffic for a product or service you already produce or sell. You can direct traffic from the new site to your products/services through advertising, email lists or sales pages. This is a great way to establish a customer base very quickly but you have to be confident that the traffic is quality, targeted traffic. Don’t fall into the trap of buying a high traffic site that consumes lots of bandwidth but doesn’t have the type of user you can leverage for revenue, otherwise you might be buying a liability, not an asset. 
• Buy a site to generate advertising revenue. In this instance you might not change the site other than by working to increase the amount of traffic and improve the performance of advertisements on the site. Sites with lots of good content but are poorly optimized are perfect for this strategy. Once you own the rights to the content you can then further leverage it by repacking and republishing the content in other ways ... perhaps information products, article marketing or as free give away enticements to join an email list. 
• Buy a site specifically to flip it quickly. This is perhaps the most risky venture (day-trading!) because you need to find sites that are clearly underperforming with the potential for a big upside result after you complete your renovation. Ideally you should locate e-commerce sites selling a product that has an established market that is only just starting to take off online AND the current owners are not good at search engine optimization or online marketing and are willing to sell. 
• The theory is that you can quickly implement your changes , tweaking a few percentage point increases in multiple areas, resulting in a good double figure increase in sales in a short period of time. If you can complete your work just before the general marketplace catches up you can make a mint by selling the site at a premium before the Internet becomes saturated and your early mover advantage is eroded or the market slows. 
• The web is one of the fastest industries in terms of competitive action due to the very low barriers to entry. To execute day-trading style website buying and selling requires an entrepreneur with their finger on the pulse of the web. They must be in tune with what’s new and willing to gamble on what’s going to be new tomorrow in order to have success. 
• Purchase a community driven site. A site with a massive forum filled with a nice target niche audience can be a gold mine to a entrepreneur. Often these sites were built by hobbyist fans, not aimed to profit in any way. Their website might have ballooned in growth to the point where the bandwidth is costing them a lot each month and since they are not skilled in website monetization they will be willing to sell the site at a bargain price. This can be a great strategy to make advertising revenue but be very careful with audience selection. Some forum communities are very difficult to make money from and may end up costing you more in ongoing hosting fees. Ideally choose a community demographic that has established high keyword prices in AdSense/high value to advertisers (electronic gadgets for example), has a good selection of affiliate products you could market or suits some products or services you already sell yourself. 
• Look for a site operating in a highly popular keyword niche or one you expect will become popular in the near future. Keywords drive search engine traffic and if you can pick the trends before they become trends you may own some valuable property. Consider if you could guess what tomorrow’s ... will be and buy the sites with established keyword rich content before they become mainstream topics and overpriced. 
• Remove the competition or merge with the competition . In this case you buy competing websites or negotiate a merger to combine with them to create one large enterprise. Depending on the industry you operate in this can be a very smart strategy to create market dominance. One of the best examples is website hosting. Often smaller hosts are bought up by larger hosting businesses with the result increased stability and professionalism. 
• Purchase a site strictly for the domain name. Obviously in this case you don’t care too much about what is already developed in terms of website content, you just want the street address (URL). Imagine a few years ago if you purchased mp3.com or blog.com. In this case the address itself is of significant value regardless of the website, or if you are good at picking trends, you might see the future value in a domain name before the market realizes it.

There are many other options available for how to use a new website acquisition and of course what you do with a new website and what type of website you search for will depend on your skills, the industry you operate in and your cash to spend. Remember to take some time listing a few goals you want your new website to achieve and strategize exactly what you will do with the new website before you buy it.

Investing Time And Energy Into Your New Website

Make sure you have the time to manage your new investment in web property. Remember just the transfer process and daily maintenance of your site will take time and energy and if you don’t have it available now then maybe you should hold off making the purchase. It would be a shame if your good intentions to improve a website result in you instead killing it because you don’t have the time to maintain the status quo. Remember a new website comes with new responsibilities, for example support emails and phone, server maintenance, SPAM control and the usual day-to-day activities of a webmaster. Don’t get caught up in the excitement of the purchase making you blind to the reality of how much additional work will be added to your daily activities.

5 Websites to Buy And Sell Websites & Blogs

Buying and selling of Websites is termed as Website Flipping. Here I’m compiling a list of 5 such marketplace which you can use to buy and sell Websites or your blogs. Many of them are premium Websites and many allows you to list your Website for free.

In case if you are wondering, how this works, it’s an easy process to make quick and handsome income. Most of people who are into Website flipping, first create a niche based profitable website and sell them at very higher price (usually Calculating one year income) on these market place. People who are interested and can maintain these sites, they buy it improve it and maintain or. Or, they also sell it at much higher price.

Though price of Website depends on many factor that includes: Current earning, traffic graph for last 3-4 months, traffic source, Domain trust, backlinks and other factors. We will leave that for some other time, but for now lets look into these Website buying and selling list.

We will cover more topic on how to start with website flipping and what kind of websites do the best for website flipping. If you don’t want to miss any of those post, don’t forget to subscribe to shoutmeloud feeds.

List of Websites to Buy and Sell Blogs:

There are many websites and forums which let you sell your blog, I’m listing down few of them which promise to provide you with the best deal :

Sitepoint marketplace : Sitepoint is the hub for website/blog flippers. They have different categories for start up and well established blog. Though sitepoint keep a commission on your sale, but the kind of price you can expect from sitepoint. You will not mind paying a commission to them.

Digital point forum : I won’t say that this is the best, but if you can use it wisely. You might find some potential buyers or send traffic to your sitepoint auction. Usually Digital point forum is a dedicated spot for webmasters, freelancers and people looking for more options to make money online.

SEDO : Another website which let you sell your domain and website. The listing of website and domain is free but like sitepoint you have to pay a part of commission when someone buys your domain.

Webhostingtalk : Webhosting talk is one of the popular forum for webmasters and talk on domain and hosting. The forum is also popular for auctioning your blog and finding a buyer for your blog.

Website Broker : Another marketplace to sell and buy a website. You will see some good number of website there on auction. Since prime aim of this website is selling and buying website, you can expect a good number of bidders for your auction.

So question is how to get started with Website flipping and the best way to sell your blog? This will be a very detailed discussion and we will cover it on the upcoming post.
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Buying a Website name

Buying a domain name can be a way to revamp an old site or you can choose a site with a standing good name. A brand name is important, it needs to be reasonably short and easy for your customers to remember. Hence, when you are looking at sites for sale, consider the name and its marketing potential.

However, if you see a site that has amazing potential, but has been lumbered with a bad name, there is no reason why you can't change that (obviously be careful not to lose customers - especially if it is an active site). The way you would go about doing this is to choose yourwebsite name carefully, search to see if this or similar names are available, then purchase the domain name (URL).

Once you own the Domain name, you can either point it in the direction of the file for the original site and keep the old site too, or upload the files of the website that you have just purchased to new hosting linked with your new domain (often when you buy a domain name, you can also buy hosting, email and other services at the same time, so be sure to shop around for a good deal). This process gives you the website you wanted, but with a chosen 'brand name' that can be easily marketed and remembered!

Verify the Identity!

Websites are like people in many ways, which unfortunately means that their identities can be faked too. You need to check a lot of details to verify a website. Moreover, you also need to check a lot of areas to decide whether or not the website you are considering is worth buying. The complete list is a long one, but some of the key points that you should research before engaging in talks with a seller are:

1. Age of domain (Search engines like 'established' and reliable websites)
2. Domain History - (many owners, blacklisted etc)
   
3. Is it a 'turn-key website' (ready to start) or an established website making a profit?
4. Is it getting page views? And .. How many unique visitors does it receive per day? Do these look faked? (2 months old with 10,000 daily views ... hmmmm)
5. If it is not trading in goods. Could you monetize it? Is it monetized already?(Monetization is often through Adsense, affiliates etc)
6. Are Google Analytics available? Have they been verified? (if you aren't given direct access) Could the owner give you temporary access?
7. What are the running costs? (Hosting, advertising, memberships, software licenses, stock etc)
8. How much time does it require to run it? (Websites can be automatic to 3-7 hours a day, you need to be sure you have the time to do a good job, especially if you want to make a profit)
9. How much marketing has been done? Manual or Bot? How many Backlinks?
10. Is it linked to other sites and will you get access/ownership? (Youtube, Twitter, Blogs etc)

Fortunately, to help investigate some of the many aspects above, there are some websites and tools to help you get the information you need. Some checking tools that you may want to also run while looking at websites for sale are below. Be sure to read the results and also trust your gut (if something doesn't seem right, it probably isn't):

• http://www.whois.net/
• http://whois.domaintools.com/
• http://centralops.net/co/
• http://www.archive.org/index.php

These tools provide vital information on aspects like who the domain is registered to, is it working, is the response time fast, what is it's history, when was it established etc etc. You can have a play with them to see the full details, but they really help you to check out how genuine the seller is and if they really are who they say they are. The only note I would make is that if in the website's history it has been transferred within the last year, the Whois details may still show the previous owner until the domain name is purchased for the coming year.

Next I will write about how to transfer the ownership of a website, which is a complicated process if you haven't bought a website before. However, once you know what to expect and what to do, it is actually quite a smooth and easy process.

Buying The Website

Once you find a good site that meets your criteria start monitoring and researching it. Check backlinks, investigate it’s history (try the Wayback Machine) and if the site has a community (forums, chatrooms, comment system, helpdesk, etc) see what goes on there. Check the site design, the structure of the links, headings, titles and keyword density. Check the site statistics if they are available.

Once you get a good feel for the site and you are interested in buying it’s time to contact the owner. You should be able to find an email address for the website owner somewhere on the site, if you can’t do a domain name lookup in the WhoIs database where you will find the email address for the person that registered the domain. Remember some websites will simply be hobbies for the owner which will make the purchasing process that much easier, while others will be fully fledged businesses making the transfer process just that little bit longer (think about business registration and incorporation detail transfers – now consider you may not even be located in the same country!).

Start casually by introducing yourself to the owner, state you like the site and then slowly gauge how much interest the owner has in their web property. Eventually you are going to have to express your interest in making a purchase and you can spend as much time as you like communicating with the owner to negotiate a deal. Like with buying anything, the negotiation process can be laborious as you gather the information you need to calculate a price. This process can be swift and easy or slow and painful depending on your attitudes and the willingness of the owner to make the sale and release private information about their website. You will need to know details like website statistics, revenues, and costs, all information that the current owner may be hesitant to give out. Demonstrating your sincerity at this point will go a long way in helping you to divulge as much information as you can order to properly evaluate the website.

If you are lucky the owner of the site may simply be so excited that their website will make them some money that a few hundred dollars will seal the deal, others, the more savvy owners will realise the value of their asset and you might have more difficulty negotiating and will pay a higher price. Remember you are never under any obligation to buy so don’t force yourself to offer too much because there are plenty, literally millions, of other sites out there.

Where you can to buy ?

Don’t Forget The Little Details

When you finally agree on a price don’t forget to look after the little technical details as you manage the transfer of ownership. Here is a list of some important factors:

• Transfer of the domain name registration details, the business name, incorporation information, hosting ownership and any third party software or subscriptions to your name. Check that everything, absolutely everything, has your name on it by the time the deal is done. 

• Get a contract made up outlining the deal and have all parties sign and date it. Also consider creating a clause stopping the previous owner starting up a competing site immediately after the sale. 

• Download the email lists. Download the email lists. Download the email lists. There is nothing more important in a web business then the mailing lists so make sure you have these safely in hand with backups. 

• Outline how much support, if any, will be provided by the ex-owner for a transition period. Having the owner available for questions for a few months after the sale can make the transfer less stressful.