How do you find web sites to purchase and improve

[KenW3]

The typical sources for websites purchased for improvement seem to offer little opportunity. There are resources that have been stripped bare, and any new opportunity is either bid past a newbie's ability to make money or buyers are simply paying too much for the sites. Forums once abundant with opportunity are now filled with opportunists offering sites that are not worth the time spent doing DD to find out they are junk.

Many of those who had made the easy money in years past, have now moved on from flipping sites. Is the process worth your time any longer? How do you find sites to buy and improve?

There are still opportunities and always will be for people that are willing to work. For people that are willing to adapt to change. For people that are willing to continuously learn new techniques. For those creative enough to find opportunity when it has moved. How is this best done? What techniques can be used to find businesses that can be purchased?

The web is filled with old, obsolete techniques. Ideas are still discussed on other sites, and instructions are still sold, for methods that have not worked in years. I would also expect any suggestions on this thread to become obsolete at some point. If you search for ideas on G, use their search tools to limit results to the past year or even the past month.

So how do you find sites to buy that can be improved, that you can monetise, to sell or to keep? What techniques do you use to find opportunity? What is working now?

[KenW3]

I'll take a first crack at this. The typical techniques used to find backlinks work very well for finding websites to buy. Any search of sites within a niche you are familiar with, any blog in your field on the back pages of the SERPs, is opportunity. It is a matter of finding the site models you have experience with improving and monetising.

I would suggest assembling a set of website footprints. (These would be the type of footprints BH programs use to find sites to spam.) To start, read the SEOmoz article titled: The Professional's Guide to Advanced Search Operators and then determine exactly what you want to find. Market Samurai and other programs have these capabilities built in. You can use search operators to narrow down opportunity and then go about finding the owners of those sites.

InTitle: is a title keyword search. InAnchor: looks for anchor text. InURL: finds keywords in a domain name. You can find blogs of interest by going to Google Blogs. Every site leaves footprints on the web, and this allows you to find sites you are able to work with and improve. What other search functions provide the means to find opportunity.

Opportunities come, opportunities go. A lot of sites found by using these techniques have webmasters that have already been contacted and said no. Your creativity in finding sites will com into play when using this method.


One person I know purchased Amazon affiliate sites cheap because the states changed rules for what constituted a nexus for the purposes of collecting sales tax. He picked up some good sites. G changes an algorithm, some people know how to adapt and find opportunity in those that don't have the information or the knowledge. Let me ask you this? What is happening today to devalue web sites? Is it temporary or permanent.

What if you could find sites that had fallen off of G's top pages, or were de-indexed? Not everyone relies upon search engines for traffic, and those people know how to turn around a site that was overly reliant upon SERPs. Which ones are worth the effort?

I don't expect members to reveal their secrets here, any more than I could reveal other people's proprietary practices discussed in confidence. My specialty is ecommerce, but I do not intend to reveal the specific techniques I use to improve profitability.

Opportunity does not die, it does not end, and it's not a dirty word or an MMO word. It is the very core nature of business, why some people make money and others don't see how it is possible. Today is another of the good old days for some methods that work now and won't in the future. People are going to buying and selling web businesses long after every member on this board is dead and gone, so let's have fun and make money and succeed while we're able

[Clinton]

Fantastic posts, Ken.

A comprehensive list of places where websites are listed for sale ... would also help.

I've got one list here and member visiongroup seems to have posted a more recent list here. See also this thread.