Let's take a quick look at a few of those!

1. Purchasing an online business gives you the advantage of the initial startup work already completed for you. It is like buying an existing offline business where the building, employees, yellow page ads, and so on are already in place.

Buying an Internet business gives you the advantage of having the basics in place. This could include a catchy domain name, a website or blog, back links, branding, graphics, email addresses, RSS feed subscribers, and so on.

2. Depending on the age of the business you are purchasing it may already have existing traffic, and a page rank from Google. This is certainly one thing I would look at, as you can make changes to help your site convert better, but if the traffic numbers are not there that is something you will have to concentrate on.

3. Does the business on the Internet you are purchasing have an existing email opt in list? To me this may very well be the most important thing because a list of subscribers can be worth thousands of dollars a month in income.

Many Internet marketers do not work their list correctly, so you could feel confident you could develop your list into a quality one of purchasers if the subscriber numbers are already there.

4. Certainly one advantage of purchasing an online business is you can immediately work on driving traffic to it. Many people waste a tremendous amount of time on things like how their website looks, changing the background color, and piddly things that do not drive traffic to it.

Obviously any business without website traffic is worthless, so that will be the most important thing you focus on once you make your purchase.

Would you like to see what is out there? Here are a couple of websites to check out for online businesses for sale:

- http://www.bizbuysell.com/

- http://www.dealabiz.com/

- http://www.bizquest.com/

You can google search the words "buy an online business" and find plenty of places to research businesses for sale. You will find there are many Internet business available for very little money. You should expect to spend thousands of dollars on an established internet business.

You can also join discussion forums and ask members if they know of online businesses for sale. Here are two of the best forums to do that.

- http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

- http://warriorforum.com/

The decision on whether to buy an online business or not becomes a personal one. Many people will not be able to afford to do it and will have to build their own Internet business.

There certainly are advantageous to starting a business from scratch and building it yourself. However, purchasing an existing Internet business may be the way to go, if you prefer to bypass the initial startup phase.