Assorted Thoughts on Website Buying, Selling and Monetizing

It looks like I'm developing what's known in medical circles as Part-one-itis. I don't know if it's there's a cure, but till they find one I'm going to launch a new "Part 1" to join my Part 1 of Not Having to Work Hard to Make Money and Part 1 of my Power Negotiations.

Today I came across the Madmums.com site. I find right at the bottom SEDO's little button which means that the site is for sale on SEDO.



Wow! A site that I wouldn't have found through the normal channels of brokers and Flippa! I love those.

I click the SEDO link and visit the listing page at SEDO. There's some brief description there about the site and, at first glance, it looks like not a bad site at all. But this post isn't about the site. If SEDO has some nice sites tucked away in its belly, I want to get my hands on them, and I want to do it without trawling through tens of thousands of domains to find 20-30 websites.

Now most people looking to buy websites associate SEDO with sale of domains and not the sale of websites so they don't monitor SEDO listings. And most folk monitoring SEDO are looking for domains, not established web businesses. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could access and browse all the SEDO listings for websites? You'd have very little competition from other buyers and may be able to close some sweet deals.

Unfortunately, it's not so simple. SEDO's internal seach doesn't allow you to filter out the domains and get only the established sites. The first other idea to hit you may be to try a Google search. If the SEDO box on the madmums site has the terms "project info", "statistics" and "SEDO & etracker", then other sites for sale in SEDO are likely to have those same words on their homepage and a search like this should call them all up for you. As you can see, that's not so and if you look at the source code of the madmums homepage you'll realise why - it's javascript/ an image, not plain text.

So the next option may be to identify the kind of words on the SEDO listing page that distinguish websites for sale from domains for sale and search in Google for that text. For example, websites for sale have this:



So if you did a Google search for all pages in SEDO that have the text "and the associated developed website are available for sale", you should hit the jackpot. Sadly, that doesn't seem to work either.

Strange. Till you look at SEDO's robots.txt file:



The folder that contains all the pages you want is blocked from Google! A site:http://www.sedo.com/search/ wouldn't work either.

So how do you get to the listings you want?

Have a look at Dreemer's post and his recommendation of Michael Schrenk's "Webbots, Spiders, & Screen Scrapers". From Amazon:

Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers is for programmers and businesspeople who want to take full advantage of the vast resources available on the Web. There's no reason to let browsers limit your online experience-especially when you can easily automate online tasks to suit your individual needs.Learn how to write webbots and spiders that do all this and more...
You'll learn how to create your own webbots and spiders that track online prices, aggregate different data sources into a single web page, and archive the online data you just can't live without. You'll learn inside information from an experienced webbot developer...
download the scripts and code libraries used in the book.Some tasks are just too tedious-or too important!- to leave to humans. Once you've automated your online life, you'll never let a browser limit the way you use the Internet again.

And I'm sure there are other good books/websites on the subject of creating bots.

So it involves learning a bit about bots and spiders, reading a book that'll guide you through modifying the script provided, and setting your spider to ignore the robots.txt. But are you willing to go the extra mile to get yourself a good investment? Or are you satisfied with spending half your life trawling through Flippa?

Your thoughts? Suggestions? Is there perhaps a better way to get the required SEDO listings?