The advantage of buying a website is that you do not have to establish an audience and wait for search engines to index the website. Majority of the webmasters will understand the benefit of link exchanges. Even those webmasters who are not well conversant with their SEO understand this. It is very important for every website to have some form of backlink network developed so that their results can be returned in the major search engines. Even a poorly managed website must have some sort of backlink network. Such websites may not turn out to be in the top ten search results and they will need optimization and improvement.

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In order to successfully make a living from flipping websites, you need to learn where to find the sites which could earn you nice profits, how to objectively assess the price for the sites you’ve targeted, and how to negotiate for the sale and close the deal.

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Owing to the relative anonymity of cyberspace, scams and frauds are also reaping profits on the Internet, often directly competing with legitimate online businesses. If you go into the site flipping business, you will undoubtedly come across some of these types, and it would be to your advantage if you keep in mind the following tips to avoid scammers and tricksters.

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I. Buying and Selling Websites

1. The Problem

   So. . . you’ve worked hard at building a web site from scratch. You started back in 1995 in the web’s “early days”. You built content, built the databases, designed graphics, and wrote software. You promoted your site every chance you got and added e-commerce to generate revenue. The last years seem a blur of staying up late nights, midnight snacks, working odd hours, tweaking code. However, now all the hard work has paid off and you are getting 50,000 visitors every day viewing about 15,000,000 pages the month. One day you get a strange e-mail. It is a well known publicly traded company that wants to see if you are interested in selling your web site. They ask you to name your price. You smile. Wow. Someone wants to buy your web site. Then the smile disappears as you realize that you have no clue as how to value a web site. After all, this is not just like any other business. What do you compare it to? It isn’t like real estate where you can easily check to see what the market is like or what comparable properties sell for. How do you measure your hours or hard work, sweat, frustration, and money that you have poured into the web site?

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A few months ago I came across a website for sale on WebSiteBroker.com. According to the information in the listing, the site was getting about 1000 visitors a day and was making about $250 a month selling a downloadable e-book. The seller wanted $7500 for the site. I took a look around and got excited.

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When entering into any transaction you need to be very careful, even more so when you are buying a website. There are several things to watch out for and a little bit of work can save you many headaches later. Here are our tips:

• Do your due diligence. In simple terms it means “Do your homework!”. Verify as much as reasonably possible about the website you are buying. Verify traffic information and cross-check them with third party information such as Alexa.
• Find out information about the seller and make sure that he/she owns the website and domain they are selling. Run simple background checks on the seller. You can use an outside service or use some of the free tools available on the Net - including something as basic as Google to look up his/her name.

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