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In the past month or so I’ve seen very little, if any, sites for sale that were worth buying. Now, when I say this, I’m referring to sites in the $1000-$12,000 price range. I’ve seen a few higher priced ones near $100,000 that looked interested but I’m not currently shopping in that range.

Thankfully I’ve seen a huge decrease in the past year of those MySpace resource sites and proxies which were mostly rip-offs. The number of site directories hasn’t seemed to have died down though. There are as many for sale as ever. I’m not sure who is buying them but they seem to be selling.

It seems that either people are holding on to sites that are worth buying or the recent surge in site flipping prospectors has flooded the market with scam sales. I’m usually quite good at checking up on things before I buy a site but even I got scammed a couple of times in the past  two months by sellers who lied about and forged traffic stats “proof”.

And this is the main problem with buying and selling sites. It’s far too easy to fake proof of traffic and income and sellers know this. Any idiot with Photoshop can forge income and traffic screen shots. Even if you verrify traffic via 3rd party traffic stats, how can you verify the seller isn’t lying about income? Most sellers aren’t going to give you access to their PayPal, AdSense or affiliate accounts to check, so what can you do?

I really believe there is a huge need for a 3rd party, income verification service. A seller would pay a fee and give someone from the service temporary access to relevant accounts. The service would then take and host screen shots of the accounts and this would ensure that they are legitimate.

Given the huge amounts of money people spend buying websites, I’m surprised something like this hasn’t been around for a while. Using 3rd party traffic tools to check traffic stats is old hat and so is using services like Escrow.com to ensure a safe sale. So why doesn’t SitePoint or anyone for that matter step up and create a service to check that the site owner is being honest about the income being claimed?

SitePoint is selling a “Deluxe Web Site Sales Contract” for $97 but can’t put something actually useful in place to verify traffic and income claims. Having a contract won’t help you much in a scam unless you like spending time in court.

Until something like this is available and being widely used, I think you’re going to see the market flooded with more and more junk sites with false income claims. I’ve decided to get out of the market for buying new sites and focus instead on creating my own with a focus on promoting affiliate offers.

One of the simplest ways to get backlinks and traffic is to participate in forums that do not apply the “nofollow” attribute to anchor tags in signatures. By putting links to your sites in your forum signature, every post you make gets you free back links and potential visitors.

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I’ve been tied up the past several days and enjoying some great beaches off the coast of Koh Chang, Thailand so I decided to do a quick post on the new SitePoint Marketwatch newsletter. I just got the first issue about 10 min ago via email since I use their marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re into SEO, I’m sure you’ve read about how, from a backlink perspective, it matters if your sites are all hosted on the same IP or C class block of IP addresses.

If you’re not familiar with this concept, here is a quick explanation…

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This is the first of a three part post about finding, researching and buying web sites. This post will focus  on finding potential purchases.

There are lots of sites out there that list websites for sale. I tend to stay away from the sites dedicated to  this and go with the various, large webmaster forums. The reason is the sites that are dedicated to  buying/selling tend to either list very expensive, well established businesses or list crap sites that are  overpriced. Many don’t provide a way to publicly ask questions and get answers so you loose out on the group research that you gain on forums.

Forums I check daily for new potential purchases in order of most activity to least:

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Ok, so this site isn’t making $10,000 every 10 days, not yet at least. This post is about the large number of sites I see for sale every week on various forums that supposedly make a great profit for little or no work. Even so, the owner is trying to sell it for a low price because they need money ASAP.

Usually these sales get picked apart by forum members as they reek of a scam. I recently saw a site for sale that claimed to make $15,000 a month profit and was for sale for only $15,000. When the owner was asked why he was selling for such a low price, he said he needed the money because his weeding was “just around the corner”. Now, if you were making this sort of money, especially when you were getting ready to start a new life with your partner, would you really sell for only $15k or hold on to it and make a nice, comfortable living? Yeah, didn’t think so.

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Entrepreneur Vitamins is devoted to providing an all-inclusive resource for those looking to learn about starting, managing, and monetizing an online business. Follow along as I buy, sell, market and optimize my online properties. Whether you are just getting started, or have been running an online business for years, the content you find on Entrepreneur Vitamins will be relevant.

Who am I? Just an entrepreneur that freed himself from the cubicle rat race over 4 years by starting two small yet successful online businesses. Now earning a comfortable living and traveling the world, I’ve decided to share my past and future experiences, mistakes and successes in the hopes that they will inspire and assist you to succeed.

Join me, won’t you?