

Ask HN: Buying a Website on SitePoint; Good way to bring in Monthly Income? - tocomment

The sites on there look like good deals, $4,000 for $1,000/month and such.  Has anyone bought one?  Are there any catches?
======
bkbleikamp
I used to buy and sell sites on SitePoint ~4 years ago.

Selling: I would build a simple blog, drop in Google ads, and get some basic
traffic with AdWords and then they would generate some clicks on AdSense. That
would give me a few dollars a day in revenue, I'd post the site, and sell it
for $500-$600 – I could do about 3 of those a month.

So people got a fully functioning & designed WordPress blog, but the income
may not have been completely accurate. It beat getting a summer job.

Buying: Be careful. A lot of these sites take time to manage, market, run
customer support, etc. It is not really passive income.

Many people sell after a traffic or revenue spike and give you average
numbers. A lot of people flat out lie. SitePoint has some great/honest people,
but I always ask myself why someone would sell a site that generates $50,000 a
month (extreme example). If it's a need for cash, surely the bank would loan
them money against that income...

Just be skeptical.

------
il
It's much better to develop a site yourself and then sell it on Sitepoint than
to buy one. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is-maybe traffic has
been declining, its been dropping in the serps, revenue is down, etc. Spend
that $4,000 on content and SEO, and you will have far greater returns.

------
weaksauce
Before buying I would make sure that the $1000 was not a fluke and ask to see
the logs. Also, the cost of one click could be more than the revenue
generated.

