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One of the main assets of your business if you are online is your website. Many internet marketers I know have a portfolio of sites which may cover different niches. The question to ask when you decide to enter a market is whether you should develop the site or buy an existing site.

The answer to that question depends on whether you have the capital to acquire an established site. Of course, if you don’t have the money to buy a site, then it’s best to learn how to develop a site from scratch.

But let’s assume that you do have the money to buy a website, then you have to consider the pros and cons of doing so.

The pros:

1. Established sites are already indexed in the search engines. Unless a site has been banned (an easy way to check is to do a site:domain.com query), you don’t have to wait till the search engines fully index your site.

2. Organic traffic. As a consequence of the site being already indexed, you will also get organic traffic from search engine queries.

3. Aged domains. Google seems to put some weight into the age of the domain when calculating the ranking for the search engine results.

4. Proven revenue stream. The more expensive sites that are put up for sale usually have an established record of the monthly revenue the site generates. This could be from ads, product sales, membership fees, etc. If you buy such a site, then you have an idea of how much the site will bring in and can project what you need to do to grow the site’s revenues.

The cons:

1. Different content management system (CMS). The site you acquire may be using a different CMS to manage the site. Unless you’re familiar with the CMS, there may be a learning curve.

2. Difficult valuation process. You need to do your homework before you buy any site. This will involve verifying all the stats and revenue numbers provided by the seller. For higher priced sites, you may need an attorney to help you.

I’m sure you can think of more pros and cons but I just wanted to throw these out there as something to think about.

If you’re serious about buying and selling websites, I highly recommend that you check out this course by Max Davis. I’ve gone through this course myself and I can vouch for the quality of the material. You’ll get videos as well as written course notes. The course covers all aspects of buying and selling websites including how to research sites for purchase, financing, how to negotiate, ways to protect yourself legally, where to sell your sites, etc.

Max has sold sites for over $500,000 (for a single site) before, so you will be learning from someone who has gone through the process many times before.

Having gone through the videos, I can say that much of the material you’ll find in there will not be stuff that’s been floating around the IM forums or sold as ebooks. This is the graduate level course in buying and selling websites. Go check out the videos that are on the site too.

If this is an area that interests you, definitely check it out.

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