Forward:
I put up this site to give you some information about things that go on in the 'Wild West' that is the web today. You should be aware that there are people that make their money by building a basic marketing website and then putting it up for sale. They are making their money by selling you a web site that you could easily build yourself. This has been going on for years in the brick and sorter business and it has successfully transfered to the online world.
Their sales pitch will be that you are buying an established business with repeat customers and that you will make an income stream immediately. They may have huge traffic logs to impress you. Traffic can be bought or faked if you don't care about the quality. The log files will tell you about the number of requests for the page to be loaded, but they don't tell you much about the quality of those requests. If you know how to read them, and spend the time, there is quite a bit of information that you could find, but that information is buried much deeper than the raw numbers, and you have to know or learn the language.
If this is such a money maker, why does the owner want to sell? There can be valid reasons, but many of the people that tell you "If you buy this you will get rich quick!!" are making their money from selling you the site. If they were making all the money with the site that they claim would they have a reason to sell it?
On this site I will present the options available to you as far as owning a profitable business on the web. I am studying this subject and I will tell you the things that my research has found. I will also tell you some things to check for when considering buying a web site.
The Choices:
Buying an existing web site:
This could be a good deal or a bad deal. Be aware that there is a thriving business in selling web sites that are not really of much value. There is software available that will build a web site based on the key words that are input and populate it with affiliate links. The advertising line for this software is 'Why Park a Domain'. Somebody may happen upon it and buy something. I did not look at the sales letter mini-site, but I suspect that implied is that you can then sell the site as a going concern. Remember what P.T. Barnum is credited with saying, "There is a sucker born every minute."
Building a web site:
Building your own web site is a viable alternative. If you chose to build your own site you will know what you have. You will have to do some research and work a bit harder, and you may make some mistakes along the way, but probably not as big a mistake as paying somebody significant money for a cookie cutter site and still have to do the research to make it work for you. Speaking of research, I am off to do some further research for some articles that I have in mind for this site and for some of my other sites.