First post, hello and help!

[Phrant!K]

G'day Wicked fire.

Newbie webmaster and was wondering if you guys could advise me on purchasing a website. I have made my money selling adult content to mobile phones and am looking to broaden my horizons and buy a website which is generating an income instead of building one from scratch.

I have browsed the sitepoint forum and also on ebay but I was wondering if you could give me some advise on purchasing an existing website. There is an arcade site that looks quite interesting, what kind of due diligence should I be doing beforehand (apart from the obvious proof of revenue etc)? The site in question has screenshots of revenue etc and the guy is looking for 30k for it. Seems almost too good to be true considering he claims a 5k ad spend per month for a 15k revenue figure. Surely 3 months net profit is quite cheap for an existing website?

The arcade site market, is it saturated at the moment?

I have limited web design skills and no programming experience so I would have to hire someone to do any design work. Am I kidding myself in thinking I can take care of the marketing and leave design and programming to someone else?

Should I start from scratch and learn the ins and outs of affiliate marketing/traffic generation before purchasing a ready made website?

Well, any advise is much appreciated. Look forward to chatting to you all!

 

[L146705]

I would be careful about spending 30k, check that the images haven't been photoshoped. I know a guy selling an arcade site for $100 if u want his email pm me. There are lots of arcade sites out there maybe you should buy one for cheap and see how it goes.
Also the bandwidth can be high.

 

[vdd]

Use http://www.bizmp.com for searching good sites.

 

[kr338r]

be very wary of buying pre-owned websites with outrageous revenue claims.
shoemoney has a blog post about a website that sold on ebay for about $10k.

it was very profitable, but it came with no keywords.
so the guy paid over $10k for a landing page only!

info is here:
shoemoney blog

 

[Jdog]

Agree with the above, if you are unsure then don't drop $30k on one site. The arcade market is pretty saturated, but you can still make money. I would buy a few cheaper sites and diversify instead of dropping all your eggs in to one basket.

 

[dastuff]

Yes at least set it up so the sale is in person and have him sign a contract confirming the information he gave you is true.

That at least makes the sale safer.