It really depends on your traffic. A mix is good to have. I can tell you the highest earning sites on the internet don't use adsense. As far as passive ad networks go, adsense is on par with the best. For us lazy folks, its hard to beat adsense + tribalfusion.

You can make more with affiliate ads, but these take time finding the right program for your traffic. Many sites probably can't get their traffic to convert effectively and so adsense is a better option for them. If your niche is really targetted well, certain types of traffic can very lucrative in the affiliate world. A site doing well with an affiliate program can earn the same as adsense with 1/10 of the traffic. It takes the right niche and the right pitch.

I have a site with a hostgator affiliate link (if anyone is going to purchase hosting from them let me know first) and it pays $50 per new account. Just imagine if you can convert a site's traffic at only 1%. That's 50 cents per impression which is much higher than the typical adsense click or anything else. Your site would have to have content catering to people who are interested in hosting in the first place though. A hosting ad on a gaming site would do poorly.

Another good way to monetize is private ad sales. I always had a plan to monetize the ipod site this way. Unfortunately I was lazy and never got around to it. Thats the thing though it requires time. You now have to deal with advertisers and their whims. ipods would be a good niche for private ads because there are so many accessories and other things marketted to ipod users. I did have one company sponsor a contest. They donated the prizes and paid me $200 to run the contest. That was a pretty good deal all the way around because the users don't see a contest as advertising. It doubles as content. I did put in a few more hours that month setting it up though, so thats the tradeoff. This trade-off is mitigated with more traffic. The more traffic you have, the more you can charge advertisers. It takes appoximately the same amount of work to setup a private ad on a small site as it does a big site, so the lower traffic sites do better with adsense while the higher traffic sites do better with private ads. Get enough traffic and you can hire an ad sales team.

Or maybe I saved you from a brutal downswing. HAH!!

I would like to point out that stuckin is pretty internet-savvy. I wouldn't recommend this to people who aren't familiar with websites from a technical standpoint. Of course all the work can be hired out but that cuts into your margins quite a bit, especially with a smaller site.

That being said, I do know one guy in the web business who isn't technical at all. He actually sold me the ipod site. He hires out all that work, and he is making over $50k/mon the last time I checked. Its certainly possible.

If you don't know anything about websites it wouldn't be the worst way to spend $1000 and try to figure it out with a small website. The worst case scenario is that you pay $1000 for an education in this business.

So this is your only ventures in internet marketing flipping websites or do you have other projects you work with aswell?

I own two other income producing sites, but the two I sold were the largest. The two I am hanging onto are profitable and are comparable to these two ROI-wise.

I don't have much experience in internet marketing outside of buying, selling, and running content sites with ad revenues.

I've heard a lot about sellers misleading buyers during the sale. What precautions did you take?

I haven't bought or sold any websites (only built my own and maintained them), but here are a few tools you can use to verify traffic:

www.compete.com
www.alexa.com
also, ask to see their raw web logs (or you can pull data using AWstats/omniture/etc)

A few questions for anyone who knows:

-If one knows nothing about managing/ coding websites, where is the most efficient place to learn the basics (does anyone know of an online class or a good book)?

-Approx how many hours of study would it take to become proficient enough to run a standard website.

-What does one need to know to avoid getting scammed?

-It would seem that sending as much as possible on one site would maximize the effectivness of each hour you spend working on the site and likely maximize the $ per hour earned....at the same time this lack of diversification would increase the risk of failure...what is the best number of sites to own so as to not get bogged down?

-What % of your net worth would you feel comfortable investing in websites?

-In your opinion what type of websites have the highest profit margins, and which are the easiest to improve the margins on?

-What type of websites are the easiest to run (in terms of complexity and hours) ?

thanks in advance to anyone who answers

I can answer some of these - I hope OP doesn't mind me joining in here.

This very much depends on how technical a site you want. I would break down the basics into 6 main things you need to learn though:

1. Presentation and layout - You'll need to know HTML and CSS

2. Design - unless you're naturally talented, just hire a graphics designer. They'll make something way nicer tha you can make in 1/10th the time. You'll then need to convert this into a web-friendly format (HTML/CSS). If you want you can find someone that will do both, but the good people tend to be very expensive. From what I've seen - User Interface types are the best

3. Server-side scripting - you'll need this to run your dynamic web pages and pull data from your database. The most common ones used are PHP and ASP/.net

4. Database - you need a way to store your data and handle users. mySQL, SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc are common examples. What you choose depends on your needs.

5. Server management - you'll need to be able to upload your files (FTP), CHMOD files for permissions, and if you're doing things right, use mod_rewrite for dynamic URL rewriting. Apache or IIS are the common servers used.

6. Web analytics - you need to know how your site is performing. Google analytics is free and quite powerful. If you need to scale, Omniture is pretty much your only choice but it's a monopoly and ridiculously expensive.

Obviously you don't need to know ALL of this, but if you want to be a one-man show you need to. If you have a programming background, most of this will come very easily to you.

You can learn the basics of HTML/CSS/PHP/mySQL in about a month. Will it look great or be super optimized? No, but once the site is up you can always touch it up.

From my time struggling with web stuff, here is my best advice:

- Hire a designer. As a techy guy, you probably suck at design. Or, at least use a template.

- Focus on a really solid database structure and site organization. Even if everything else is
messy and amateur, having this in place will make it easy to update in the future

- Figure out how you're going to get traffic. This will be the most challenging part of your site. SEO/Paid SEM/Affiliates/Social Media are all options

- Test, test, test! You have no idea what users want or what landing pages work. Trust me. I've found some ugly-ass forms/landing pages built in the mid 90's that still convert better than a shiny new design because it feels less 'spammy' to people

- Get out of a tech mindset. You'll notice that almost everything listed above is strictly a support role. DO use your data to drive business decisions, but overall you should be focused on getting more traffic and making sure your traffic is converting

z28,

Are all of those skills necessary if you plan on buying a completed website that is already up and running?

Also what are the best places to look for websites for sale?

This is a pretty broad question. It all depends on how much you want to change the existing site.

If it's 95% what you want and you just want to rotate a few different ads and layouts in, all you really need to know is a little HTML/CSS.

If you want to optimize it for SEO to get more traffic, you'll want to know almost all of the skills above.

You don't have to know -any- of the above skills, but keep in mind that you'll pay $90/hr+ to have someone else do it for you.

I need to find guys like you to invest in my website. I just launched a free online dating service last month (developed it from scratch) that makes money off ads. I basically have no money to put into marketing via services like Google Adwords though, so I'm relying on the little SEO knowledge I have.

For the first month, I maintained an average CTR of 2.47% and $6.38 eCPM. After making a change to my ad formats & positioning last week, I started to see slightly better results, with a CTR of 3.25% and $10.46 eCPM. (I created a lot of page impressions myself in testing the ad layouts though, so I have a feeling these most recent numbers will jump with more time.)

Right now, I'm averaging ~35 unique visits/day with 6.52 pages/visit for ~7k pageviews over the past month. Obviously the numbers WRT overall number of visitors are low, but I think the Adsense rates I listed above show that it can certainly be a profitable site with some work on increasing visits.

Would be awesome if I could team up with someone who has some liberty when it comes to finances since I'm broke as hell, especially if they had knowledge WRT running a website, as the OP and a few other posters here seem to have.

Even though I have a technical background including a few years as a web designer I don't do any of the work for my sites myself. I have a great company in India that does all the work for me.... and they're like $10/h

India FTW!

Do you know who Markus Frind is?
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/
He is running a successful free dating site and you might be able to glean some tips from him.

Your CTRs and CPMs seem very high with adsense. I imagine these will come down with more traffic. Dating sites especially, because frequent users will become ad-blind, but I also don't know much about rates in this niche.

Yeah, I would do the work for you for a lot less than $90/hr.

Great Thread Max!