Bought Some Cheap Sites Last Week

Posted on 12th June 2010

In recent months buying good sites in the $200-$500 price range has become a little more tricky (i.e. every month I seem to find fewer decent sites for sale) so just last week I ventured into buying a few sites which fell in the under $50 category.

Now many of you probably already know that sites in that price range are usually not my style. Under $50 usually means no traffic, no history and usually very little unique content. However in recent weeks I’ve noticed a lot of people emptying out their portfolios with old sites that simply didn’t work for them.

Hard Times

No one will deny that times are hard, sites aren’t selling like they used to and with this trend not looking to change you’ll noticed many webmasters taking a long hard look at what their carrying in terms of domains and unmonetized websites. Any fat (or excess) their portfolio is carrying needs to be shed, it’s time to throw it all overboard and salvage what you can!

With this scenario taking place I thought I’d take a closer look at what’s being thrown out and if any of it is worth salvaging. What I’ve been looking for are 1-3 year old sites, with good content but very little traffic and zero earnings.

The $50 Sites

These are sites that have not only been neglected but have probably been sitting with the same owner for more than 12-24 months simply doing nothing. Domain renewal time is looming and these webmasters just want to get rid of these sites so that they can avoid the $10 renewal fee.

Sure $10 isn’t much but remember that in most cases these guys have usually already renewed the domain a couple of times and with no returns over that time and cash reserves running low (in this harsh climate) it’s time to sell or ditch the site.

They’re looking to sell cheap (maybe around $10-$40) and in most cases if the seller doesn’t make a sale they’ll probably let the domain expire. With all this in place I’m sure you’re seeing the potential for a very profitable purchase.

The key to success with these $50 sites is knowing what to do once you get them. The previous owner obviously did nothing and wasted their potential, so what are you going to do to make the purchase profitable!

Well whether you’re scratching your head at this moment or have already begun contemplating the endless possibilites that exist when buying a new site I’ll make things simple by showing you what I personally did with 4 sites I purchased last month.

The Sites

So here’s a quick run down of the sites I purchased, and what I’ve done with them. Remember all 4 sites were less than $50 each and purchased within the last 4 weeks.

• Runescapecheatszone.com ($30) - (original sale thread) Ok a simple cheats site based on the ever popular Runescape RPG. What attracted me to this site was that it’s an extremely popular niche and one that I know very well. The tactic here was simple a) clean up the ad locations and colors (they were a little messy before) b) build some good backlinks to the site. Total time investment was maybe 1-2 hours consisting mainly of small touch ups and link building. That’s really all I did.
• Ironmanwallpapers.com ($20) - (original sale thread) I’m a big fan of wallpaper sites and always think they can do well. So when I saw this niche wallpaper domain (.com as well) I grabbed it. Funny thing was, no one else despite the release of Iron Man 2 (just recently) saw it as a worthwhile purchase. I approached the seller after his auction had expired and offered him his reserve of $20.I then paid someone to collect 100 fresh new ironman wallpapers (cost $7) and uploaded them. After I had enhanced the contnet I built a few link exchanges (nothing major) and that was it. Once again my total effort was maybe 2 hours, the guy that collected the wallpapers took 24 hours, so total turnaround time around a day and a half.
• computer-jokes.co.uk ($45) - (original sale thread) Ok this was a little more expensive but still under the $50 mark. What attracted me to this one is that the humour and funny jokes niche never really dies. It’s usually a solid performer and a great niche to get into even if competition is often very high.The other bonus to this site was that the site was well aged and sitting on a keyword domain (a weak one I’ll admit) but nevertheless it had potential. Once again the major effort with this one was building some backlinks and moving some of the ads around. Total time on my part probably around 30 mins.
• emuguide.co.uk ($45) - (original sale thread) Actually bought this site as a package with computer-jokes.co.uk and once again this site was aged with some niche and unique content. The site basically lacked backlinks and just needed some basic SEO love. I actually haven’t gotten round to doing this one yet, but when I do it’ll mostly be the same as before. Get some link exchanges and maybe this time add a couple more articles to the site.

The Results

Well the results are still coming in as I never expected any of these sites to start showing any major changes until at least 3 months, however at the same time I wouldn’t be posting this report if I hadn’t already seen some changes. So here’s a quick rundown of what’s happening and just remember that all of these sites were getting next to no traffic and had zero earnings before I bought them.

• Runescapecheatszone.com - Earnings for the last 7 days stand at around $1. Not great but then we’re talking about it having $0 earnings previously that’s a great start! Monthly earnings after the first month we’re looking at around $4. Again not bad considering I’v put in around 1-2 hours and only bought it at $30. I think this site with some fresh content might be worthy of hitting the $10-$15 per month mark, but we’ll have to see.
• IronmanWallpapers.com - Earnings for the last 7 days is $3.20, which isn’t too shabby considering I bought this one for $20. By end of the month we can expected income close to $12-$15, and for a $7 further investment plus 2 hours of my time I’d say that’s a success. The great thing about this site is that it will continue to grow in authority and search rankings, especially once it gets some listings in google images. I won’t be touching this site for a couple of months and will simply monitor it’s traffic and earnings maybe grabbing a link exchange here and there.
• computer-jokes.co.uk -Earnings for the last 7 days sits at $2.60 and it’s going up every week. Again remember this was a site that was earning $0 per month. Total investment so far has just been the 1-2 hours mainly spent on link building. My hope is that once some of the search engine rankings I’m pushing for kick in, I’d expect things to move forward quite quickly. Overall looking at $10-$12 by the end of the month and I only paid $40 for the whole site so once again some positive growth going on!
• emuguide.co.uk - Earnings for the last 7 days sit at $0, but then again I did say that I hadn’t started any work on this. I threw this site into the equation to really demonstrate that if you do no work and add nothing to a site it will stay exactly where it is. I purchased all the sites around the same time, all were earning $0 but this remains on $0 whilst the others are growing. A stern reminder that effort and the right type of effort has to be applied to make a site earn. I’ll report on this site next month after I’ve done some work on it and you’ll hopefully see similar results to what we’ve seen above.

Sub $50 Sites

So what have we learnt ? Well firstly you don’t need a lot of money to buy sites. I’ve clearly demonstrated that with a budget of less than $50 (the cheapest site was only $20) you can buy a decent website for flipping purposes.

On top of that if you look at the resources I spent on these sites after purchase, well all 3 sites combined only took up around 6-7 hours and $7 of my own money. That’s all that was needed to get these sites earning and arguably even the $7 I put towards paying the wallpaper collector guy didn’t have to happen as technically I could have done it myself (but simply couldn’t be bothered at the time).

The Future

Well one things for sure, I’ll be monitoring these sites over the coming weeks and seeing how they do. If all goes to plan they’ll all be earning at least $20-$30 per month within the next 3 months and to me that’s a success.

By now the above purchases which you can all verify by checking the original DP threads should remind you just how easy it is to buy sites for either flipping or portfolio growth! It really isn’t that difficult guys and the above experiment on my part should hopefully motivate you to replicate what I’ve achieved within your own life.

On that note I’ll draw this post to an end and prepare to head off to the gym knowing that whilst I’m working out, my sites are flexing their own muscles putting $$$ into my account. Fantastic really and once again reminding me why I love webmastering so much!