Evaluating a Site's wealth potential?

I've done 2 transactions from Flippa and made ~$9000 in the process. By no means am I claiming to know everything about this, but this is what I did:

I searched around and looked for a site that had a stat that stood out to me. The first site I had didn't really have much income but had over 1 million page views a month, the design of the site was so-so but it was a free web host with a semi-active user base with about 50 new sign ups per day.

I knew I would be able to redesign the site to look a little better, I knew that with over 1 million page views a month I should be able to generate some money with the traffic and I knew that with 50 new sign ups per day, I would be able to just sit on the site and in 6 months I'd have roughly 9000 more users from when I bought it and I'd be able to resell it at a higher price... which is exactly what I did and that's where the profit ended up being on that site.

The next site I bought was a press release site. The design was pretty good, the traffic was there and it was already making income from people submitting press releases. I liked the idea of this because it was offering a legitimate service and already had people using the service. I advertised the crap out of this site and just let it run itself (I had to process the press releases) and I vastly improved the design of the site and ended up selling it for $5000 more than I bought it for about 3 months later.

I think you just need to evaluate how well a site is doing already and look for areas that you're able to improve it (redesign, more advertising, etc) and if you find a site that is already in a decent position but could be improved, that's one to get.

And another thing, you need to be patient. A lot of sites on Flippa are crap. A lot of people caught on that you could make a crap site, hold it for a few months and sell it on Flippa and you could make money... but now the market is flooded with crap. If it doesn't look GREAT and if EVERYTHING doesn't line up, keep on looking.

Potential Sites can also be seen in the warriorforum website marketplace . Flippa, hmm 10% are good sites while 90% are crap sites. I wish they changed back to sitepoint once again .

G'day,
Akky

I'm glad you found it useful. Best of luck to you when you decide to move forward.