Having been involved with Internet marketing for many years now my family has also got involved and helps out on some projects. Well, this weekend my daughter decided she wanted a website of her own. Although she is still quite young, I thought this was a good idea and would start getting her involved in my business. Now as my daughter cannot build her own site, and dad's kind of busy building other people's sites, I told her we would look for one that was for sale and hopefully already making a few bucks. If we could find a site that was making a very conservative hundred dollars profit per month, my daughter would be thrilled and probably start planning her next shopping trip.



We searched the two most popular sites for selling websites (Site Point and Digital Point) and found hundreds, maybe thousands, of sites for sale complete with domain names, up and running. So we started to look at the posts one by one and quickly realized that the vast majority of these sites we very professional looking, had lots of content in the form of articles, and Adsense was already up and running. It all looked to good to be true. One guy was selling about 30 of these sites at $10 each. It was then that I realized what was being sold. These were a bunch of cloned sites designed to generate Adsense revenue, and this poor guy was just trying to get some of his money back since the big search engines are not ranking these sites anymore and the cost per click is too high to make a profit.

I even asked if these sites had any visitors or revenues and was told “not any more, but with some new content they could.” As you can imagine we didn't end up buying any of these sites for my daughter, although I did pick up a couple for the domain names. So next weekend we will look again and maybe contemplate building one from scratch.

If you are in the market for a website that is already making money a good rule of thumb is to base your offer on around what the site makes in six months, unless the domain name is worth the price alone, and stay away from these mass produced sites that are just another form of spamming. I know some of the big guys in Internet marketing are still promoting the template packages and some have a monthly deal were you get the templates and content for new niches each month. You have to figure you will not be the only one buying these site packages, therefore, you will have duplicate content, and your site will not be popular with the search engines or PPC.

As my Dad told me, “if it is worth doing, it is worth doing right.”