This is a question that could take a book to answer, but the short version is that you need quality links to your site. It is difficult to get these links, but if you create a quality site with good unique information, people will end up linking to it for free.

I think there is a HUGE opportunity for sites like - particularly for the BRIC countries that are still ramping up.

I haven't put too much thought into it yet - but the web is still in the "wild west" even in the US - these countries are way behind.

I've decided to go for the $1000 education program. But I'm a dumb card player with no real world financial transaction experience other than bank wires to the Bellagio.

I read that you should make sure that ownership to 'everything relevant' is transfered to you. How does this work? What's sufficient proof? There's no way I would be able to tell the significance about some scanned piece of paper with a signature. How will I know I'm not getting screwed, like 'yeah well that's not my signature' or 'lol pwned I still own the copyrights to that database system you're using!'

I mean I kind of have an 'I'll ship you the money and you ship me the site, takes 5 seconds' mentality, but it prolly doesn't work that way. When dealing with online purchases or poker sites I just assume everything is on the up and up because so far it's been going OK, but I would have no idea how to actually check that mysel.

EDIT thanks a lot all for all this advice by the way, and great blog! Cool that you're willing to share all that.

EDIT2 also I remember you from that ok guys lets set a timeline and all build our own site thing back in the day. Guess it paid off for you to go through with that!

Dale,
The transfer is more complicated than that, but the domain name transfer is very simple and can be done in 5 mins. If you have ever uploaded or downloaded a large file, then you know that some transfers can take some time. This could be the case with the site you purchase, depending on how much data there is.

Two things can complicated this process beyond a simple file transfer.
1. Transferring a database(s) - You'll need to read through a tutorial on the internet about how this is done. For small-medium sized databases, transferring through cpanel/phpmyadmin is fairly simple. There are guides on how to do this, and I think I remember writing about it on my blog at some point.
2. Different server settings - This is a less common problem to run into. Most LAMP servers on the internet are set up similarly. For example, I have run into problems where I needed to install some kind of graphics plugin and another problem where my php settings needed to allow larger file uploads.

My advice would be to try to get the seller to agree to do the transfer for you. He'll know the ins and outs better than anyone, so is probably the best man for the job.

If you actually are serious about this, please post/PM the auction listing you are interested in. $1000 is a lot of money, and I wouldn't want this thread to give any kind of false impression that this is a super easy thing to do.

max - Based on your experience with Sitepoint, would you consider buying any of their education materials? I was considering the "Website Revenue Maximizer" book. Its expensive though.

spex,
I have never bought any of their books. The only thing I bought was marketplace credits to sell my websites. When I return from vacation I'll download the sample and let you know what I think of it. From a first glance, the included CD-ROM pretty much has freely available stuff on it.
I also have a contact who buys a lot of this stuff. Perhaps he has this one and can let me know what he thinks.
I am skeptical of this kit for two reasons. One, they tout how easy everything is. You and I know there is no free lunch, and if it really were easy everyone would exploit it until profits were gone. Two, the author is supposed to be an expert. Well in this business if he really is successful, his real secrets would be worth more than $200. Or he could be selling a book a commonsense to profit on his success while not revealing too much. Or he might not actually make that much from the business he is writing about.
I would review the sample material to try and determine if there is real information to be gleaned vs. commonsense type info that anyone actually trying his hand would discover. I would also try to see if the author is a poster on the sitepoint forums. If so, maybe you can check to see the kinds of things he writes about.

Sitepoint would be the kind of place that tries to sell real information though as opposed to the obvious huckster sites like http://www.flippingwebsites.net/ They do have a reputation to maintain. Perhaps there are independent reviews of the material in their own forums.

I'm actually more interested in the non-technical part of the transfer. If someone sends me all the files, or transfers a database onto my hosting service, does that constitute 'ownership'? Could he theoretically claim that I somehow stole it and he owns the rights?

Not that I'm very knowledgeable about the technical side either, but I'm not computer illiterate and am 100% confident that I can pull it off if I look things up on an as needed basis.

So far I haven't set my mind on any site in particular. But I appreciate your offer to check it out, and I hope to take you up on it within a few days!

re: don't waste your money:
The only reason I want one is to see what it's like. Ultimately I see this thing purely as an investment, and I could really care less about the $100 a month a 1k site should bring in according to the 10x revenue model. If I have to do pretty much any work for that at all, it's a 'loss' compared to just playing cards instead. It's the potential opportunity for more serious investment that I'm after.

By the way, would you say that the more expensive the site, the tougher the job? I'm guessing that while it's not probably not like poker, it's not exactly like a big stock market either, where the return will not change much with portfolio size until you're talking crazy money. I mean, is there some skill you must possess or you'll run a 50k site into the ground, but not a 1k one?

EDIT was gonna post some potential prospects that I rejected early to see if I have the right thought process, but I'm feeling kind of tired, it'll have to wait till tomorrow.

You really need to think about this as buying a business - not a web site. If you want to play it safe you should consult a lawyer.

As far as technical issues, the most important thing is probably getting the domain transferred to your name.

A side note: A friend of mine built up a website and sold it for around $4000. He simply copied all of the files for the person and transferred the domain once he received payment. However, as soon as the scammer got a hold of the site, he immediately put in a request to paypal to refund the payment, claiming he never received the site.

Since my friend had no hard evidence of the sale, he never was able to receive his money. Paypal advised him to send a CD of the website contents to the buyer via registered mail in future purchases, as this would hold up as legal evidence of the sale.

I'm sure you could always come up with a Buyer's agreement as well that would work.

Although I haven't bought/sold any websites, I believe escrow.com should prevent this kind of situation from occurring.

I'd also recommend taking a look at this article:
Taking Payment with PayPal, Escrow and other Online Options

Wait, are you just plugging sitebond cause ya own it ?

better idea is to join their affiliate program and they give you the data stream you need + you get paid when people click on the showtime and purchase tickets on their site

use movietickets.com as well, as they cover the theaters that fandango doesn't

What's the nature of owning a commercial website as far as being a small business goes? Do you need a business license, business tax forms, etc?

You should be able to do everything as a sole proprietor and just file the appropriate tax forms in Turbo Tax.

Here's another thing, if I could: I have an idea for a site that is a lot more intensive than the simple hands-off variety. I would like it to make a profit (or I like to imagine it doing so), but the experience would be of value to me regardless.

It would involve querying data from a sizable database (user can select by check boxes and expanding trees--or user can enter data to send) and then performing some basic statistical operations on it, and then returning a result. I'm making initial efforts to get going with MySQL and R, for the core of the back end.

My question concerns the front end. I have never made a page, not an active page, not a simple html page. For all the operations I need, I think there are supposed to be many possible environments to use--PHP, ASP, AJAX, ...?--I really don't know one from the other in the slightest, or when I would need multiple. The question is whether there's anything like an obvious choice--for ease of use or a dominant standard, to approach this kind of a system?

My guess is that it doesn't really matter. All scripting languages have basic math built into them, and all the major ones will have libraries available for some kind of stats.

You can do some of the math at the database level, and even write procedures to speed things up. I prefer to do most of my calculations at the script level (PHP) for 2 main reasons:
1. If you ever migrate to a different database, it's easier
2. The calculations might affect the query caching in mySQL

more discussion on PHP vs mySQL calculations here:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show...hreadid=420245

If you want to chat let me know. The most important thing is probably normalizing the database properly so you can easily query what you need. Also, remember to index any important columns that might be part of your 'WHERE' clause.

Is it possible that after someone sells you a site, they create one very similar to it? Wouldn't that hurt the buyer of the site?

Also, can someone post an ad on sitepoint if they don't own the site? As in, instead of misleading, is there actual scamming on the sitepoint?

They could but sitepoint has "verification" where they tell the person to upload a file called something crazy like hasdfjlksfda.html. Only the owner or someone with access to the server could upload a file like that so once sitepoint sees that file the listing becomes verified.

It's the same verification method used by google and yahoo for their various webmaster tools.

I would recommend really examining the traffic sources of websites you want to buy. When I bought a photoshop site it was a new site but was getting over 1K visits a day from various photoshop directories. I didn't even think about the fact that the submissions to those sites would drop off their front pages after a few days and that traffic would drop 90% like it did after I bought the site. It was only a $500 site though so it wasn't a big loss there.

Also some people believe that google gives a temporary boost to new sites with new content and eventually many of those sites drop in rankings so keep an eye out for that when considering a new site.

Max,
Has the owner of the counter-strike site changed anything since you had the site? It appears the only ads on the site are google ads.

It looks like he removed the Tribal Fusion ads I was running and changed the appearance of some google ads. I haven't talked to him since I sold the site, so I am not sure why he did this. I am pretty sure he was accepted by TF as a publisher.

This reminds me, I need to do some homework for spex now that I am back home from vacation.

Max,
Can you go a little more in depth on Tribal Fusion info? I've studied their site, but lack a website that gets 2k+ uniques in a day. Is this one of those things that once you start pulling 2k+ legit uniques a day you are going to make money no matter what, or will TF really increase your gains?

Thanks,
w

TF is just another banner ad network. There are others which will work with smaller sites. ValueClick is one. I liked TF because it seems their payouts were higher than most of the others, but it was maybe 25-50% higher for my sites. If you are only using Google Adsense, definitely adding banner ads will increase your earnings. Another reason I used them is that they allowed ads to be placed on forums which some banner networks do not.

Any recommendations on who to go to for anonymous registrations of a new domain? I've been researching and apparently a good number of the 'anonymous registrars' are US based and will drop the anonymity after a single letter from a lawyer - not even requiring a subpoena or court order. I plan on starting a new site with poker related material/links and I'd prefer to remain as distant from the site as reasonably possible.

Wow, thanks for the heads up on that one. I had no idea they were so weak with their anonymity.

I'm still grumbling about Yahoo wanting an extra $9 to keep your name and address out of the WHOIS lookup for the domain. Anyone know a place or way to circumvent this?