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Originally Posted by Jay.
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?
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.