How to Make Money Buying and Selling Websites

One interesting way to make money on the internet is the relatively new field of buying and selling websites. But there are important questions. How much is a website worth? How do you determine the value of a website?

This is an easy online business to get into. It is possible to purchase a website for a relatively small amount of money. Where else is it possible to buy an existing business for under $100? Many websites point to advertising revenue that will pay back their entire investment in under a year.

Before you are able to successfully buy and sell websites, you will have a lot of questions, such as:

• What is a website worth?
  
• What is a reasonable price for a website?
  
• How can I evaluate the website's future income potential?
  
• Where do people buy and sell websites?
• What sort of escrow services are available to protect both parties?
  

There are three ways to find the value of an existing web site:

1. You can use a computer program to find the value of a website. These results are not dependable, and few people use them. Beware of a seller who claims value for his website based only a computer program's values.
2. Comparison with a similar website. This is similar to what is done in real estate. What have comparable sites sold for?
   
3. Intrinsic value. This is the least understood method. If you broke a website down into core components, how much value are the parts worth? What are the site's key traits?
   

Buying a website has many parallels with buying a piece of real estate.

If someone has a piece of property to sell, the appraiser would look at other properties of similar size, in similar locations, and with similar improvements. Websites can be valued using a similar method.

A great way to find out what websites are actually selling for is to look at Flippa.com (formerly called Sitepoint). Flippa.com is the number one place on the web to buy and sell a web site.

You can look at what sites people are offering for sale, but you can also look at what sites have already sold.

This is tremendous information and it's all free.

Go to the main Flippa page. Then you can browse through the tabs called:

• Featured Listings
• Latest Listings
• Ending Soon
• Just Sold
• Ended Unsold

Flippa.com operates like the auction site eBay - people bid on websites that are listed for sale during a set time period. There are also buy it now prices on some sites. If no one bids then the auction ends unsold.

When you click the "Just Sold" tab, you can see the websites that people have actually paid good money for. You can see the website's price, its age, the number of monthly visitors, and other features.

See how sites listed 'for sale' are described. Keep a file that shows what similar sites are selling for. You may find some great sites that will sell for less just because they have a poor write-up.

When you are buying a website, you are buying an asset.

If you broke the website down into core components, how much value are the parts worth?

People don’t value many of the key traits that determine a website's value. Here is one key trait of a website - the unique visitors that are looking for certain keywords.

Say, for example, that you look up a keyword like Mesothelioma in the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool and you see that advertisers will pay $27 for every person that clicks their Google AdSense ad that they put on a site that has this keyword discussed in it.

Now, say you find a site for sale that gets 100 visitors a day and this site is valued highly for the keyword Mesothelioma. Do you think there is some value in this site?

This is just one of the key traits that Ed Dale teaches you to consider when determining the value of a website to buy or sell.

Ed Dale is well known for his 30 Day Challenge, a free class that teaches beginners how to make $1 within 30 days by buying and setting up a website.

Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge attracts thousands of fans every August, and his 30 Day Challenge Training Videos are available free all year long.

But people may not realize that Ed Dale is also an expert in the relatively new field of buying and selling websites. Once, Ed even sold a site for $5 million!

It is essential if you are going to buy a web site, that you understand what is a good deal. What is a website worth? Which websites are bargains?

To answer these questions, Ed has just created a course on buying and selling websites, called Valuing Websites.

In this 7 module course, Ed Dale shows you step-by-step what to look for when you want to buy a web site. After each module, there are action points, so you can actually work on exercises to test your knowledge.

In Ed's course, he covers the complete range of elements you need to examine when buying or selling a website.

Ed shows you what to look for in your due diligence - the research and analysis of a website done in preparation for a purchase.

Ed will show you how to spot the pitfalls as well as the bargains.

If you would like to learn more about how to value a website, click Ed Dale's Valuing Websites Edu-cation Online to see part of Ed's first class - free.

Ed Dale's classes are available on your computer, or you can download the files into iTunes and use them on your iPhone or iPod.

Personally, I love his Australian accent - Ed sounds like the Geico gecko lizard.

So check out Ed Dale's video, and see if you might be interested in his class. Soon, you may be buying and selling websites!

Are you considering making some extra money buying and selling websites? As with any new business, there are a lot of things to learn. So, you can either try it yourself and learn the hard way, or you can learn from people who are actually doing it.

One thing experts will caution you to do is see if the website you are considering buying has been banned by Google. A website banned by Google will get no search traffic from that site. You can check the website with iwebtools.com to ensure that the website is not banned by Google.