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!

Sellers can and do mislead buyers. I generally like to see google analytics stats. These are difficult to fake. You can ask that your email be added to a read only access list for the analytics stats. Also use escrow.com for money transfer. This can give you an inspection period for examining the site after transfer. If someone is willing to escrow, they are likely telling the truth.

Other things that can be misleading are when the seller knows something that will change after transfer. This can vary depending on the site, but the longer the history of earnings and traffic, the more assured you can be of its validity.

Yeah, I do, and in a way I guess you could say his site & success were motivation for me to enter this niche. I actually wanted to do this about 4 years ago, but I never really got to making the site until this year. Unfortunately the competition is much, much greater than it was when I originally wanted to try it, which sucks for me.

Thanks for sharing all your experience here! I love reading this kind of content, but it seems few and far between in this forum anymore.

$90/hr could be accurate for a lot of really good developers out there. But you could also try your hand at a site like elance.com, hiring someone to do the work for you based upon their bids.

Definitely pay attention to ratings and portfolios there though, as there is no guarantee that your project will be well coded/designed...some (a lot of) people have the mentality of "well, it works, and it meets your specifications, so it's done", even if it takes 5 seconds to load a single web page cause it's not done efficiently.

z28 gave a good response to this, but here is my own opinion...



I would start by searching google for things like "starting a website guide". stuff like that...
Then I would actually buy a domain name and get some hosting. This is pretty cheap, and you'll end up learning quite a bit just by going through the process.
The most helpful things I know are how to use cpanel (provided by your host) and familiarity with DB management through cpanel/phpmyadmin or otherwise. Almost every website requires a DB these days and there are a couple tricks you need to know in order to transfer them correctly. There are lots of guides for mysql on the internet.

This really depends on you. It wouldn't take too long. Typically you'll run into some kind of snag and have to learn how to get around it by searching the internet. I would say if you start your own site and get something complicated running like a wiki, forum, or CMS software, you'll have the very basics squared away. Becoming an expert will take time and just jumping in the deep end and figuring out problems as they arise.

I answered another similar question in this thread. Basically get as many screenshots of verifiable stats for as much time as possible and use escrow.com. A bunch of real data is hard to fake. If they can provide you access to google analytics, even better.

I have had these same thoughts. I think the best idea would be to find as many low-maintenance sites as possible. I know a guy who owns about 30 sites the size of the ones I sold and thats his full time job. I think he hires out a lot of work, and has a lot of free time.

I would feel comfortable with 100% if the sites were unrelated and the income streams were diversified as well. Its not like someone is going to unplug the internet. However, given that there is some time involved, I imagine it would be difficult for anyone with more than low $xxx,xxx to be completely invested in web businesses. So for someone with less than $50,000 it might make sense to be 100% websites, but as that networth increases, more money would have to be shifted to stocks, etc. Also someone making $10k/mon probably isn't interested in sites that earn much less than $500/mon.

Sites selling some type of affiliate program make the most per 1000 visitors. This would give you the best margins above hosting costs. Your site would be at the mercy of the affiliate program though. If the terms change you could get hosed. Look on the internet for "top web hosting companies". Those sites get paid when you click on one of the "top" hosts. They make a lot of money, and there will probably always be people who are paying for referrals. I imagine owning one of these sites would be very profitable, however, you would have a ton of competition who would constantly try to push you down the search rankings.

My success has all been from content sites with 3rd party ad networks. It works for me, but I am sure there are 1000s more ways to make money on the internet.

I think content sites with 3rd party ad networks are pretty easy to run. If you have something like a forum or wiki, where the users provide the content, thats even better. I can't speak to many other types...

This is an AMAZING THREAD! Thanks a ton for starting it!!!

I agree with everything Max said above.

I still want to emphasize though that it's easy to get caught up in all of the cool technology and lose focus of the big picture. Don't waste too much time trying to learn everything by yourself.

Become proficient enough so that you can write good technical specifications at least and make minor changes to your site without relying on others.

Assuming you already have a site setup, what are some good strategies for generating more traffic? Obviously you can start Google Adword campaigns, but what else has gotten results for you guys?

Any specific books you would recommend?

Search engine rankings are everything. If you're site is ranked on the first page of google for a decent key phrase, you are basically getting a free income stream.

There is a ton of information on ranking in search engines, so I won't go in too deep on that. The basic idea is to get as many links as you can. And its not just enough to get links, you need high quality links (links from sites google already respects).

If you are selling a product, possibly advertising is the way to go. Adwords is just one way, but you may find cheaper methods to get relevant traffic.

Books about buying/selling websites or about running them?

I don't really know of any books about buying and selling websites. I actually wrote a lot of information at www.howtobuywebsites.net, but I haven't been updating it lately. I was going to make a couple posts about my recent sales there when I return from europe. If you are really interested, I would read through some of the things I have written there.

On the technical side there are scores of good books, but I have learned everything from just searching on the internet.

Are there any ohter decent places website classifiends aside from Sitepoint Marketplace?

forums.digitalpoint.com is about the only other one I know of, but I don't like it as much as Sitepoint. I have bought a site from there though. Smaller sites are typically advertised there because they don't charge a listing fee.

Earnersforum has some listings, but they are sparse and not as good as sitepoint. If you find any other good ones let me know, but I think Sitepoint pretty much owns the market on serious sites for sale.

The interesting forums are "established sites" and "premium sites" on Sitepoint.

Yeah, I've bought some domains on Digitalpoint and SEDO, and WP layout on Sitepoint. But I haven't really seen established sites for sale that matched my comfort level...

In theory, if one buys a stable site for typical earnings multiplier and keeps it for a few months, one should be able to resell for about the same, leaving the income earned in the meantime as pretty low risk profit. If multiplier is 12 months profit and one ends up selling for 12 month profit - you are making 12% on your money in the meantime. (excluding compounding and transaction costs)

There are a lot of junk sites for sale. You have to separate the good ones. 10-20 sites go up for sale every day, and there isn't necessary one I would be interested in buying every day or even every week. A lot of times when decent sites do go up, they don't sell because the owner is asking too much for them.

All,
I am going to be out of town for the next 6 weeks, so if your posted question doesn't get a response, thats the reason. I'll make sure to dig this thread back up when I return and get to everything.

Here's a tip for you...
When you see a site you're interested in sell to someone else, check back in on it a few weeks later and see what the new owner has changed with the ads. That should give you some more ideas about how to change your own ad mix.

Agreed. I'd like to get into the passive income business with a website...I understand every layer (except high level coding) very well...but I'm too chicken to make the big bet and buy a site.

Guess the only way is to take that $1000 education that was mentioned

If you don't want to buy a site to start and need low risk, why not just build your own to learn the basics?

Total cost?
$6 a year for the domain name
and about $5 a month for hosting
= $66 and your time

Well, I don't have the skills to build a site from scratch (read: design and layout), I havn't touched web design since the days when notepad and HTML by hand was how things got done.

So either I buy BANS and build off that, or I buy an already functional site.

does anyone know the law around reusing certain content from another site? like if i wrote a script to get the movie times off fandango or whatever and reformatted them and redisplayed them on my own site - is that illegal?

You might want to find out if the site offers a service to grab XML files with the information instead like weather sites do. Our internal Intranet page at work goes out and gets information from wunderground every 30 minutes for the little weather thing on our site.

If you're literally culling the information by loading the actual page in code and then scouring the code for the information, then yes, that would be a violation, it would also be exceptionally easy for them to break your ability to do it.

Whether you have web design skillz or not BANS is a useful tool. However, don't expect that since you have BANS on your site you're going to make money. You have to have a game plan. You have to determine what niche(s) you're going to go into, and what course of action you're going to take to generate traffic(SEO, PPC, or a combo of both).