Unusual Businesses Ideas That Work:
August 2005, Jermaine Jones paid $1,000 to buy 411Hype.com, a website about all things hip-hop. He beefed it up–added some forums about fitness and health, for example–and managed to boost traffic by a couple thousand unique visitors, to 7,000 a month.
Then, in late March, Jones put the site up for sale on a marketplace called SitePoint. He was bombarded with offers, quickly closing a deal for about $13,500. “I spent less than an hour a day on the site,” Jones says.
For obvious reasons, the big acquisitions by Rupert Murdoch, the Yahoo brain trust, and the boys at Google get most of the media attention. But every day, scores of small-scale Internet entrepreneurs are buying and selling simple-to-make, simple-to-run sites for thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars.
All sorts of sites are available–blogs, game sites, dating sites, entertainment sites–requiring varying degrees of expertise to run. You can build a site from scratch and flip it, or take Jones’s route: Buy an existing site you think you can improve and resell.
The key is to understand what you’re buying. Start with the basics: See where the site pops up on a Google search. Amazon’s Alexa.com ranks traffic. The seller will provide revenue stats, and you can scan message boards at SitePoint to assess a seller’s credibility. And, of course, you need a plan.
Photo by 411Hype.com.
Brian on October 30th, 2006 at 8:47 am
Why re-invent the wheel? There are some great sites out there and sometimes the originator does not have the time or the know how to improve the site. Look around for these sites and if you have some tricks, apply them and before you know it you’ll be living off passive income!