One way to give your online income portfolio an immediate boost is through buying established websites. The great thing about buying them is that there is actually very little risk involved when you do proper research.

Websites are a great investment because they are so cheap (you can buy them for 12-20x monthly revenue), they have potential for immediate growth, and they allow you minimize your risk by exercising complete control over them. The same cannot be said for stocks and bonds.

What to Look for When Buying a Website

The most important question you need to ask yourself when you’re considering buying a website is if it would be more beneficial to buy that site or to simply create your own site in the same market. There is no point in buying a website when you can match or surpass it’s success on your own with less money. The best websites to purchase are those that have traffic stability and history (intangible assets that cannot be easily gained).

So with that being said, the value of a website lies mostly within its traffic. I like to see websites that have plenty of traffic history, but are under-monetized. This allows them to be purchased for far less than they are actually worth because once you take control, you can optimize the monetization strategy to immediately increase revenue.

I will also usually only consider websites that either require very little owner participation, or make enough money for me to outsource the required tasks. I have enough things to work on during the day and don’t really have any desire to add more workload. Because of this, I don’t typically consider a website that is making less than $500 per month.

Ultimately, you want to buy a website in which you are pretty sure you can immediately increase it’s revenue without destroying the traffic. You can still consider purchasing websites that are stable, but fully monetized; you just won’t get an exceptional deal on them.

Where to Look When Buying Websites

There are many places to find websites for sale, but most of them are absolute nonsense. Here is a list of 7 great places that I regularly check to see if there are any good established sites for sale:

You can also find some really great deals by contacting random website owners and making offers. That is an entirely separate topic that would take way too long to explain here, so just check out this great series of posts that focus mostly on buying sites that aren’t officially for sale.

Don’t Be Afraid to Take Chances

Always remember that, in online business, inaction is worse than “less than perfect” action. Just do you research and take the plunge.

When buying a website, keep in mind that as long as you are confident in the facts, and you don’t mess something up while you own the site, you can always put it back on the market as an exit strategy. If, however, you can hold onto the site (while maintaining or increasing earnings) for several months, you will have a “free” website added to your portfolio.

Note: For more research ideas and safety precautions, make sure you check out SitePoint’s guide to buying websites.

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