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.

Can someone give me tips or suggestions for monetizing www.fpppro.com? ty

Off the top of my head I am having trouble thinking of anything super useful. You could try to start a FPP/W$/T$ marketplace.

I don't think attempting to get new user signups will be all that useful since most people who find your site will already know what FPPs are and probably have accounts.

You could run ads for other sites' RB plans I guess.

thanks for the reply, I hadn't though of a W$/T$ marketplace... I like that idea.. other site's RB offers are just about the only thing I came up with, too.. right now I'm trying to work on getting affiliate links with training sites but so far almost none of the sites have an affiliate program =/

Hi, I just found this thread... interesting ideas here.

I was wondering if there's any specific numbers you use as indicators of value when purchasing a website? For example, do you compare the ratio of current monthly income/ asking price? Or page views/asking price, or users/asking price? Or do you perhaps look for sites where you think that you can easily improve the site (by changing the ads or whatever)?

All these and more figure into a valuation. Get as much info as possible.
The two biggest factors for me I guess are sustainability of traffic and how much of my time will be spent maintaining.

Suppose you found a site related to Xbox 360. All its traffic is coming from search terms related to Xbox 360. Is it still going to get the same level of traffic 2 years from now when Xbox 720 comes out? Adjust your valuation accordingly.

maxtower I have experience owning and operating a couple of websites and early in the internet companies owned a dotcom bust -- (totally different ball game though).

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/61682

www.fxfisherman.com seems like an interesting to buy.... obviously i wouldn't jump into this on my own... but what do u think of this site to purchase...and if it's good i wonder if a couple people would want to go in on it together...i think it's a site that can actually generate revenue for a while!

Probably a retared question but im very neew at this, I bought the Unlimited Plan hosting from godaddy. I know it is possible to have 2 domains on the same hosting account but I have only managed to have 2 domains with the same content in them, my question is is it possible to have 2 different domains with different content, so it is 2 totaly different sites, on the same hosting account. Or do I need to get a dedicated server for that?

Yes you should be able to get more than one domain with different content on your host. How you set this up will depend on your host so you will have to google a bit to find out how to do it on your host. Basically traffic visiting www.abc.com will get directed to 1 subdirectory of your hosting account and traffic visiting www.xyz.com will go to another subdirectory.

Good thread, I've had a blog for a few weeks, and just recently added Google Adsense to my sports blog yesterday to make some extra cash hopefully.

It seems like 100~ a month might be achievable, anyone else have any tips for adsense for blogs?

This is a good site, but I think its a bit expensive for me. The owner seems too caught up in his recent good revenue month and isn't going to get off it cheaply. Another thing I don't like about it is that he is already making quite a bit of cash off the amount of traffic he has, so there isn't much room for improvement. The site is going to be a lot more valuable to someone who really knows the niche.

The site has a lot going for it though, good lucrative niche, lots of search traffic, deals with a subject that will be around for years.

Looks like he has an offer for 130k, which is about 3-4 years of revenues. Thats pretty high.