buying websites for income: $ > brains

Way I see it (and this is for any investment), you have to know the market (niche) and be able to research it to determine if it will be profitable from an investment perspective.
If you are buying a pre-built site with the hopes of "hands off residual income" you will want to be prepared for a long wait, primarily, but you also want to properly research the keyword(s) that the site appears to be targeting.
I'm assuming you want to take possession of the site and not worry TOO much about future SEO and/or Link Building?
If so, you need to actually search the keywords you think the site should rank for, and see if it actually DOES rank for it, and where. Get a rough approximation of the traffic it might get (keyword tool, exact match) and keep in mind those numbers are an approximation and inflated by several factors that we might not know enough about to adequately define. It will always BE an over-estimate, and always HAS been. By how much is anybody's guess.
If you feel you have done the research and it might be a worthy investment, try to make a low-ball offer to see if you can get a deal, and monetize with a mixture of your own (adsense, amazon, CB/CJ or any number of affil offers). Optimize templates for chosen ads, try to develop a list if you're into list building, and see what rides.

The "buy and hold" investment website might be out there, but is hard to come by without proper research, at a minimum. You can't just throw money at a pretty looking site and hope it sticks and grows. And, like anything, any investment carries inherent risk; careful research should help mitigate, but you have to be willing to lose that money if you're not willing to carry forward basic SEO and link maintenance.

Good luck

You can do it yourself through sites like flippa, or go to a broker who specializes in this type of deal. My buddy sold his ecommerce biz thru a broker - it was a real business that made him about 7k profit a month, had a few years of track record and #1 ranking for a big traffic keyword. He sold the site for $250k. If thats the kind of thing you are looking for, then PM me and I will get the broker's info for you from him. I dont know the broker other than the fact that my friend said it was a good experience...

You are better off purchasing high lev domains then you are puchasing ready built sites if you ask me. Mainly because they give you the ability to turn the site into what ever you want. Many of the domains are parked which means someone is driving some kind of traffic to in just to get a little more money. Once you have a good solid domain simply outsource the work you want done. This will allow you full control over every aspect as well as how it looks.

You can out source the articles, links, design, and basically anything you can think of to help you with your rankings. Once you have it in a few steady spots for the keywords you want to target you can simply turn around and do the same exact thing once again. Now you will be looking at a steady income that all you have to do is get some people to do the work for you.

Hi Brian,

If you're cash rich and time poor you need two simple solutions

1) Outsourcing - If you need to understand how best to manage outsourcing try How To Live The 4 Hour Work Week Through Outsourcing - John Jonas Replace Myself Free Audio, but if you know what to do and just need 'bodies in place' then the usual options of guru, elance and rentacoder should do the trick.

2) A good vehicle to put your effort and money into.

Mostly people fail to realise that it takes just as much effort to promote a well performing site as it does a poorly performing one. The difference is the amount of money each site will ultimately make, so make your buying choice slowly and wisely.

Punch your criteria into the search function at Websites for Sale with Flipfilter.com, and look for a site in an evergreen niche (I still dont know if that's a real term, but I find myself using because other people do and most seem to understand what it means ) Stay away from sites that dont have at least three months history of steady, consistent and increasing earnings.

If you need to pay slightly over the odds to get a good, solid, consistent site do so, as an extra $300 spent now, will be nothing in comparison to the $1000s you could lose if you end up buying a turkey!

Alternatively, you can find higher tier sites from some of the brokers in this list here

How to find Websites for Sale – 35 Sites Ranked | Find Websites for Sale with FlipFilter

Justin

My tip for flippa is to set up a custom search for websites with a certain level of income. Then check once a day to see if anything good comes up.

The site is 95% rubbish but occasionally good sites come up for sale. I've not yet bought anything and to be honest the reserve prices are often in fantasy land. I am going to hell for bidding on a .com and then when the guy refused to sell it to me I bought the .net instead.

Unless you know what you're doing it's best to avoid anything with a trademark in the domain name, anything that's new and anything built to be flipped.