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.
The site was poorly designed, had an outdated look and ugly graphics. Furthermore, the process for selling the e-book was awkward and the user experience was poor. I contacted the seller and expressed my interest in the site and requested more information. I found out that about 60% of the traffic came from organic search engine results and the rest came from various links. The seller also told me that on the average he spent about 2 to 3 hours a week working on the site and that his actual cost of maintaining the site was about $100 a month. I decided to buy the site because I saw the potential. After a little bit of negotiating with the seller, I was able to purchase the site for $5000.
This is where the real fun began. Within about a week I redesigned and updated the graphics and layout of the site. I also improved the sales process by eliminating unnecessary steps and allowing customers to purchase the e-book quicker. Within 30 days I had managed to improve the site’s performance from $250/mo to $500/mo. At this rate I was going to make back my initial investment within one year. That is basically over a 100% yearly return on my initial investment with minimal work. I know that with further tweaks to the site I can increase the income for the site to around $750 a month. Not bad for a little bit of work in the beginning and about 2 to 3 hours of work a week.
There are some people who say that the internet boom is over, and there is no more money to be made on the web. I know they are wrong. With all the Websites that are for sale, you don’t even have to find the diamond in the rough, it is more a question of finding the shiniest diamond in a sea of diamonds. With very little creativity, and only a little work, there is still a lot of money to be made buying websites.
