Buying and Selling Websites

After following a link from NewspaperGrl's The Truth About Making Money Online post, I spent a bit of time poking around BuySellWebsite.com. Yes, it's a website where you can buy and sell websites. I visited a few of the sites for sale -- mostly affiliate-type sites -- and checked out the prices, as well as some of the stats for the sites. And I wondered if anybody was buying. Content consists of a website directory in various health and nutrition-related categories, each with a thumbnail image of the site and a one or two-line description.



Then I saw TotalNutrition.info, which has apparently sold for $10,000. According to the info provided about the site, it gets around 3800 unique visitors a month, and has a net income of $3000 a month (which appears to be from Adsense and Amazon affiliate sales), a PageRank of 2, and an Alexa ranking of around 1,000,000.



Another site that I checked out was MyScrapbookingSecrets.com, a site that sells digital scrapbooking kits through ClickShare, with $3500-4800 in monthly income from 3600 unique visitors, a PR3 and Alexa Rank of around 50,000. Asking price? $19,000 reduced from $27,000. I think I'll keep an eye on it and see if it sells, and at what price.



And finally, I was intrigued by OrganizedFamilies.com, which was for sale for $14,295. It has 7337 unique visitors, PR3, and an Alexa score of around 1,100,000. But the part that got my attention was the claim that the site has a 25% CTR and a $20+ eCPM. The site includes Amazon and other affiliate ads, Adsense, and direct sales of a few of their own products.



If all those numbers don't mean much to you, don't worry about it. The important thing to know is that a PageRank of 2 or 3 is fairly average for a small site (this blog has a PR3), and while Alexa rankings don't really mean much, a rank of 1,000,000 is nothing to brag about (this blog's ranking is around 500,000; also nothing to brag about).



My point is that these sites are nothing extraordinary. Clearly the people who've created them have put some work into them. Maybe a lot of work. They've found their niche, they've built their traffic, they've created content, and they've found ways to make money from their sites month after month after month. And now they're selling their sites for ten to twenty thousand bucks. Not a bad chunk of change.



You aren't going to build a website today and sell it for $10,000 next week. Building websites that make $3000 to $5000 a month in net income isn't easy. It takes time, it takes energy, it takes persistence, and you'll have to learn 5000 things you never thought you'd need to know. But it's do-able. And sometimes it's even fun.

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Mark Cuban on Success and Motivation

After reading this post by Mark Cuban at blog maverick, I've been thinking about success and failure. And in particular, about how fear can be such a big barrier to success. A lot of people don't like to talk about, or acknowledge fear, but for many of us, fear is a big part of our lives.

Fear of failure. Fear of ridicule. Fear of confrontation. Fear of risk. Fear of self-disclosure. Fear of success. These are all fears that can immobilize us, stop us from trying -- even when the negative results of failure are minimal.

As Cuban says, if you get it right once and achieve success, the failures won't matter much. Babe Ruth, Reggie Jackson, and Sammy Sosa all held the record for most strike-outs in a season more than once in their career. But they're much better remembered for being being home run hitters -- they're all in the All-Time Top 10.

Successes tend to be proportionately related to attempts. The more often you try -- including the times you try and fail -- the more successes you'll end up achieving. In most cases, failure isn't a total disaster. Success should be your goal, but fearing failure to the point where you don't even try achieves nothing.

One way to deal with a fear of failure is to look at it for what it is. What specifically are you afraid of? What will happen if you fail? Once you've figured that out, it's often possible to get rid of the fear, or at least go on in spite of it. It's not always easy to do that, but just because it's not easy doesn't mean it isn't worth trying.