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:
- SitePoint Marketplace
I normally stick with the Established Sites and Premium Web Sites forums. You have to pay to list your site for sale which helps reduce the amount of junk sites somewhat.
- DigitalPoint Forums
A good number of new sites pop up here daily. The questions/feedback from other members is more gloves off than SitePoint and are not afraid to rip a questionable sale apart (which is good for you).
- Wicked Fire
This forum lists pretty much everything web related for sale, not just sites so you have to do some skimming through the threads but there are some gems here from time to time in the low price range.
- WebTalkForums
This forum hasn’t been too active recently but I still watch it as new listings do pop up every other day or so. The quality of the sites here are on par with what you find on WickedFire, in the lower price range but I did find a good site here in the past two weeks which I purchased.
Got a favorite site that lists websites for sale? Please list it in the comments.
Staying On Top Of It All
Now that we’ve got a handful of sites listing new web properties daily, we need an easy way to check them all on a regular basis and even filter them if we happen to be looking for a specific type of site.
All forums have an RSS feed for each forum. Get yourself a good online or offline RSS reader. My choice is FeedDemon which is free and has a great interface. It also syncs your feeds with NewsGator so you can check them from any computer or your smart phone.
In FeedDemon, I set up a folder called “Sites For Sale” and add each forum’s feed to it. By selecting the folder, I can see all threads in all forums in one glance or select an individual feed to see only those threads. This makes it easy to see everything new once or several times a day without having to visit each site.
Now, if I happen to be looking for a specific type of site(s), FeedDemon lets you create “Watches” which are basically filters that search your feeds for specific keywords. Lets say I’m looking for forums for sale. I create a watch named Forums and enter “forum” as the keyword. I now have a single place to browse all sites for forum sites that are for sale.
Browsing listings is one way to find sites for sale. Another way that has worked well is to ask others to tell you when they have something to sell. Make a forum post that lists what you’re looking for. Be specific and note things like age of the site, amount of monthly revenue/traffic you’re looking for, the sources of income, etc. I’ve noticed it’s also helpful to list the total budget you have available for purchasing sites. This lets sellers know what you can afford and they won’t bother you with sites outside what you’re looking to pay (well, usually they won’t).
A third way to buy properties is to look for sites in search engines and ask the owner if he’s interested in selling. I’ve never bought a site this way but I’ve purchased several domains like this. If the site hasn’t been updated in a while, it’s a good indication that it’s no longer of much interest to the owner and they may be willing to sell.
In the next part, I’ll cover how I research a potential purchase.
Hi There, I found your site today and am enjoying it. Looking forward to hearing how you do your research!