Writing for Your Wealth

We’ve got some sun up here in the Pacific Northwest this week (first since… uhm…. yeah), so I’m spending time out in the yard working on projects. I knew you’d be very disappointed if I didn’t get a couple posts up this week though (okay, you wouldn’t notice, but I’d feel guilty), so I’m going to talk a little about buying websites and why you might want to.

When it makes sense to buy a website

When I did my How to Build Passive Income from Article Sites series, I had to admit that it usually takes 6 months to a year to start getting any noticeable traffic to new sites. That’s even when you’re a gung-ho link builder.

There are exceptions, of course, but the search engines prefer to reward sites that have been around a while.

In some ways this is good, because once you’ve got an established site, you don’t want Joe-Money-Pants to be able to come along and put up a thousand pages of content and acquire a thousand incoming links overnight, causing your five-year-old site–the one you built up all by yourself, one page at a time–to fall behind in the search engine rankings.

But… a year can be a long time to wait if you’re trying to build up an asset to supplement–or replace–your existing income.

One way to get rid of that wait, or “sandbox,” time is to buy a website that is already established (it may or may not already be making money).

The downside is that you have to have money upfront to invest in purchasing the site, but you can find somewhat established sites with promise for a couple hundred dollars. If you’ve got a few thousand to spend, you can get something that’s already bringing in hundreds a month.

There are a lot of pitfalls to watch out for (I’ve fallen into some myself), so I want to go over how to find a good site to buy and what to look out for.

As I was writing the post, it started getting pretty long (how rare for me), so I’m going to break it up and do another little series:

Coming soon…

• Buying Websites: Finding a Site
• Buying Websites: Researching the Site
• Buying Websites: How Much Should You Pay?