Last month Stackman did a really cool post about buying websites on Flippa and optimizing them for profit. I have created tons of websites from scratch, but I’ve never tried to buy one before. So I took his advice, went over to Flippa and started browsing around. Here’s what I found…

There’s a bunch of crappy websites for sale!

There are good ones as well but you have to really dig through a bunch of crap to find the good stuff. I don’t think I was prepared for all of the retarded sites for sale at outrageous prices, but I got used to it. I ended up bidding on two different sites that I thought had potential.

If you haven't ever been to Flippa.com, you should check it out!

The first site ended up being highly competitive, and went for $3,200. I didn’t want to spend that much my first time out, so I let that one go. The problem was it was already too far developed and had affiliate income already set up on it. Honestly I’m not sure why the guy was selling it, unless it had just been sandboxed or something… Anyways, on to the next one.

The second site had about 15 bids on it as well as a Buy It Now price of $500. After doing some due-diligence and researching the niche and the site’s traffic, I decided to go ahead and buy it. I’m sure I could have gotten a better deal by waiting for the auction to finish, but I’m pretty impulsive when I get an idea into my head so I just bought it for the $500 BIN price.

The reason I liked the site was that it had a lot of content already generated. It has over 2,000 pages in it. That saves me a lot of work on the front end so I can focus on getting it traffic and monetizing it. It doesn’t have a blog, so I will probably add one of those shortly and put some more content on it. It also had quite a few backlinks already going to it. It has a PR of 0, but the groundwork is still there. It should be fairly easy to get it up to PR 2 or PR 3 in the next couple of months.

AdSense was the only type of monetization on the site, and there weren’t very many ads at all. I went ahead and placed a 468×60 banner for an affiliate offer in the header, and spruced up the AdSense locations. I will most likely build an email list as well so I can mail offers to my users.

That’s all I’ve got to report for now. I’m excited about the project and hopefully it will be a good long-term source of income. It gets old doing the affiliate campaign grind after a while, so this has been a fresh breath of air.