The anonymity thing is really just to keep your sites users from calling you in the middle of the night. Its a good idea regardless of how little protection it actually offers. I wish I had used it on a domain before. Some kids got my phone number and pranked me relentlessly.

I don't know how to get real anonymity, but you should probably try to figure out a way to use a name and address other than your own.

After researching some more, it seems the best advice is to just stay away from the US if you want privacy. I ended up going with a company based in the UK. Much better privacy protection and gambling/adult content is not an issue.

Namecheap.com offers a free whois guard. Is that what you're looking for?

Another shout out to max who encouraged me to purchase my latest site about a week ago. I purchased the site for 32k, and it brings in about 2100/mo in CPM ad revenue (Adsense, Tribal Fusion, as well as a rich media company). The site receives about 550k uniques a month, and looking at stats is growing by about 20-30k each month over the last year.

I plan on holding this site for as long as possible. The site is a graphics community focused around Photoshop files, so it should have quite a bit of longevity going forward. Without predicting future growth current revenue is $25,200/yr and requires less than 30mins of work per month. That's a 78% annual yield!!!

Thanks again Max, you've been an invaluable resource. I owe you many beers in Vegas.

I am in the early stages of trying to build my own website from scratch to gain experience, but also a possible income... I was wondering if any of you who have experience in website design / ownership have any advice on type of site to focus on..

I realize that having one that requires little work once the site is up possibly because users are the ones to keep adding information through forums or other possible ways, but is there something I should focus on?
-a specific video game site like max has?
-info on how to something that people don't know how to do?

Any help on where I should start would be greatly appreciated.

After reading this yesterday I decieded to build one and its up and running. PM me if you want to check it out. It has 9 visitors so far. OH YEAH!!!!!!!!

If I were going to create a website from scratch, I would focus on something where the users generate most of the content like a forum or wiki. One idea I had that I like (maybe its not good) is to take a good idea like social bookmarking (digg) or social networking (facebook) and extend it into a more specific niche.

An example of this would be youtube vs. pokertube or facebook vs. linkedln.

A lot of software exists for these types of sites, so one could develop it quite easily and spend most of your time link building and marketing to gain critical mass.

Find a need and a niche that hasn't been done already.

This is a great thread. Has anybody else looked into purchasing?

Check this horrible listing out.

http://websitebroker.com/site-details-999947426.html

http://www.amazon.com/How-Invisible-.../dp/0312252501

It's a good read and you can find it in most book stores.

It's slightly dated and doesn't have enough Internet stuff for my liking, but at the very least it's a good primer on how to avoid having your real name and address associated with anything.

There are different strategies for different levels of concern. For a medium level of privacy, he suggest sforming an LLC in a certain state (I think it was Montana - I can check if you care) with the most privacy-friendly (and lowest documentation) laws, then register the domain in the LLC's name.

Things that are not mentioned in the book :
You can pay for the domain using one of those grocery store prepaid credit cards (that you paid for with cash) so no need to ever give out your real information to anyone. You can do the same with the hosting.

If you need a phone number for verification purposes, you can just buy one of those $10-$30 prepaid phones and give them that number.

If you want to be slightly more paranoid, use something like findnot.com or Tor when doing anything related to the site so that a smart lawyer can't subpoena the IP address you used to register with and then ask your ISP who you were.

That should be enough for most users. If you are really paranoid and feel it's worth the hassle, you can do far more than this.

Or find a niche that has been done badly and make a better site.

can u keep us up to date..about how this goes? thx

1. if you are dealing w/ cheap websites: say $500 (maybe it makes $20-40 a month), would your ROI be higher? assuming you put some work into the site (creating content mostly, and then doing the standard stuff like SEO)

2. are blogs (wordpress) sites profitable? Or is this CMS not recommended.

3. What are some tips for creating a site that requires very little babysitting and is able to generate a profit (on a small scale, IE: maybe my hosting costs 30/month, how do i make 35$ a month w/ very little work). Does it all come down to: a good nich, good SEO, and then?????

4. lastly: do u post on digitalpoint?

You mentioned you used a web designer in India. Do you mind providing their info? My wife has a good idea for a niche auction site. I need someone that can get the site off the ground from start to finish without costing an arm and a leg. Any recommendations?

1) Well for just one site hosting is going to eat into 25%-50% of your profits if you're only making $20-$40/month. Hostgator Baby is $8/month and there's really no reason to host anywhere else plus this plan allows you to host many sites so expansion will be easy.

2) Blogs can be profitable. If you're going to run a blog you shouldn't even look at anything else besides wordpress.

3) If you want something that doesn't require much maintenance then you want content that DOESN'T qualify for what is talked about in this SEO Video. For example the results in Google for the civil war are unlikely to change very much day to day, month to month but the search results for war in iraq are very likely to change even daily.

Giving props all around: Thanks to max for the original thread which spawned other threads and got me interested in internet mktg.

One blog I write on wetshaving (which I got into from another 2p2 thread) pays all Host Gator / domain name bills from Adsense alone. It is a wordpress format and I agree that's the only way to go.

Pennies an hour for time, but it's really nice to have the freight pulled by one site while experiments in other stuff come free.

I rarely post on it now; maybe three times a month just to let Google know it's still active.

The bulk of traffic is from unique searches. People into this niche will frequent the forums; I don't cater to them.

My first dozen or so posts are "how-to" types and they get most of the hits, though I'm surprised how much traffic I get from what I considered B.S. posts to give Google a ping (i.e., the 'Habit Rouge Sport Cologne' post).

One of the best ideas I've found re: Adsense is to put the ad at the end of the post. This has had remarkable results.

Hi would really need some help.

Im about to buy a cheap website to get started and learn about the website bussines.

Can someone walk me through how a purchase is made.

Things like, how do I get the site and all the content registered to me, how do I move to a own domain, what domain should I use etc etc, im total noob at this so any help would be very apriciated, and if you could write a step for step guide how a ordinary website purchase looks like it would be great.

OK so I recently decided to finally go throught with this. Way back when I first wanted to do this Max had offered to take a look at some potential buys, but in my noobiness I couldn't identify a single one under $1k or so that I wanted - they all looked like crap to me.

Then I did some reading up on SEO, and now I have a better understanding of how those sites make money. Tbh I personally hate ads and am never fooled by even well-blended in Adsense - not out of principle or anything, but because I know that it's either not gonna have the info I was at the site for to begin with, or sell me the same info in crap ebook form. But I guess the statistics don't lie and I should look at it from the perspective of the average Joe, which apparently is much different. But I digress.

What I wanted to say is, z28 is right - don't get caught up in the tech stuff. I've ran Linux at home for a few years now, did a few C tutorials at some point, know a bit of HTML from back in the day, so I figured how hard can it be. Well I learned that it's not hard, it's time consuming. It'll be three weeks tomorrow and I'll be lucky to have the site finished in the next week. It's basically half an hour of semi intellectually-stimulating coming up with some clever way to do things (which 99% of the time turns out to be reinventing the wheel anyway, and probably poorly at that), followed by 7.5 hours of typing it up, all the time working out why some small detail doesn't work as planned. Or why it doesn't work in damn IE. Or it turns out I need something I hadn't considered, but the ****ed up way I've set it up, it's hard to add it in last minute.

I'm glad to say I've still learned quite a bit in the process, and should be able to do the next one quicker, if I don't just get a template. But I've also learned where the term 'code monkey' comes from. And here I always thought of it as a creative process.

No link cause it's not finished yet (altho Google and Yahoo seem to have somehow found it - don't see it in the SERPs, but they still pull up most of my test pages for some reason. What's up with that btw? Do they get a list of new domains or something?)

That said, all in all I'm looking forward to launching it, and learning how to get traffic - although it's probably gonna turn out that I should have just bought an existing site instead, at least I'll be better equipped to do that if I decide to in the future.

I'll keep following this thread (and that other one when I find it), and update you guys how it goes.

Interesting, I almost purchased counter-strike-dl.com, I own a few dozen gaming sites, including counterstrikesource.net and csstop100.com.

First of all great thread Max, thanks for it. I'm interested in moving to this field from poker. I've done great from poker for 5 years now, but it really is boring to me now and the game is getting less and less profitable. I'd like something else i an dedicate myself to learning, advancing and profiting from.

I'm interested in your site stuckinpgh. How is it going now? Have you bought anymore since? Increased or decreased the affiliate payments? PM me the site address if you want.

Atm i'm just toying around on sitepoint and reading as much as i can. There's a Pacman site for sale which is ugly but pulling 500/month net that i could be interested in depending how high the bidding goes, it'd be a nice entry point for me to get used to all of this before going for the bigger purchases.

What are all your thoughts on building instead of buying? For example the pacman site could be very easily remade for a suspect very cheaply. The game are just java from elsewhere then all the money made from adsense links to other games. So at that point his site has the advantage of having 92k uniques/month but assuming he sells for 12months * net rev his site is worth at least $6k.

Seems the site could be made, SEO'ed etc to the point of 500/months earnings for sell than buying it at $6k?

General question. It seems like it would be a good idea to kinda cold email existing sites that have possibility for improvement and added value that aren't on auction sites and ask the owners if they'd be interesting in selling since they are more likely to be worse at valuing their site or didn't think to auction to get the best price etc.

I imagine fan forums or fan made sites that the person just took up as a passion would be good pickings. I'm sure there's more. Anyone have any experience with this?

Here is an excercise I highly recommend doing...sit down and watch your parents or somebody else that is not tech savvy browse the internet/do some internet research. The experience kinda blew my mind but now seems obvious in hindsight. Show your websites to people like this and observe (do NOT instruct them how to use your site) how they use it. You will learn a lot...

This process will definitely improve over time. You will recognize situations where you will say "there has to be a better way than this..." and 99.9% of the time there is, and somebody is giving away the solution for free. You will also get better (hopefully) at designing your code base so that new features are easy to implement and won't screw up existing things. It sounds like you have next to no programming experience so if you are going to continue to code your sites by hand I would definitely suggest picking up and reading Steve McConnely's Code Complete v2. It will help new and experience programmers immensley imo.

There is often a lot of grinding involved in programming...especially on the web. For me, doing the backend stuff is 100x more enjoyable than html/css and luckily there are other people who feel the opposite and there are templates to suit just about all of your needs available.

I'm not sure how they find it. If I'm not ready for my site to go live I just don't hook the domain up to the ip address and then just access the test site using the ip instead of the domain.

Looking forward to hearing how you do!

This is a good idea, but in general you're about 3-4 years too late to the party. For the most part every site ranking on the first page of google results that gets decent traffic knows about how much the site is worth. Most of the time they have an inflated sense of value.

Now, I don't want to discourage you from trying. Its possible you uncover an untapped niche. You could also focus on sites that are only running adsense. Adsense earnings have taken a beating during this recession. If you learn how to properly monetize a site, you can easily boost earnings several multiples above adsense earnings. You'll probably run into a few site owners who have been discouraged by the recent drop in adsense earnings. You'll also encounter a few owners who are just dumb.

Focus your attention to top 100k Alexa sites. Anything less probably isn't worth your time. I would think you're more likely to find good deals in the bottom half of this group too. The more traffic a site gets, the more likely they are to be aware of their self worth.

I usually don't think of it as buying the site so much as the traffic. It's pretty difficult to get ranked on the first page of google. If a site is earning $500/mon reliably and selling for $6k I would consider that a bargain compared to building your own site.

There are two situations where it makes more sense (in my mind) to spend the effort building a site.
One, if you're targetting a really uncompetitive keyword or phrase in google, then you can just throw up a really crappy site and hope to rank with minimal effort. Unfortunately, these terms also have very little traffic, so you have to be careful not to spend too much time. But if you can crank out a site that ranks with a 5 hour effort, and have it earn $10-20/mon then it will eventually pay off. Repeat the process 1000 times and you're retired.
The second case where it makes sense to build a site is when you are trying to build a really decent site. After reading sitepoint listings for a few months, you'll realize that niche leading sites will rarely be sold on Sitepoint. And if they are selling, its going to go for a lot more money than most people have. In this case, if you think you have a good chance at building a site which will be recognized as the leader in its class (like 2+2 for poker for example) then I think its best to build it out.
If your plan is just to build a copy cat site, I imagine it is just cheaper to buy than to build. Of course, I always err on the side of laziness.

Another thing I have noticed is that it seems some people selling sites make their living building sites and then cashing out on sitepoint. Try to find these guys and see what their repeatable formula is.

I go through quite a bit of detail on this on the blog I used to maintain, howtobuywebsites.net.

If you have any questions beyond that, I am sure someone can answer them here in the thread.