Advice Needed:Purchase of Website

Hi guys,

I hope I am posting this in the correct section.
Need some opinion/advice here.Someone wants to sell me a website for USD3000.

I have been monitoring the stats for almost 2 weeks.It gets around 30000 visitors and 300000 pageviews daily.However I noticed the traffic has dropped since the start of the month.According to him, this is due to the holiday season/period thats approaching (Christmas,New Year etc)
Does this apply to all websites?

What other things do I have to look out for before actually purchasing the website?

Thank you.

 

I wouldn't buy a site for that much money unless it was earning about $300 net each month...regardless of visitors. Unless you can monetize it much better than it is currently.

 

I'd agree that it's also a matter of revenue but with that number of visitors getting 300USD monthly revenue shouldn't be that hard.

With regards to traffic dropping in holiday seasons that all depends on the theme of the site, some sites will be really busy at Christmas (toy shops) whilst others may not be (halloween costumes for example).

 

Some of my business related sites drop a lot on weekends and the holidays. The issue is that not as many people are concentrating on sales, marketing, strategy etc. Presumably they are visiting more sites about "holiday cards", ipods, xbox, etc.

Nonetheless -- I truly recommend you have to think hard before investing in the Internet. Real Estate investing is a much better and solid undertaking (and if you follow my advice there's less competition for me :- )

Eric

 

Site makes $1000 a month from advertising revenue.

 

Thanks for the feedback Eric.Still considering

 

make sure you find out where that traffic is coming from, and they don't have some computer somewhere requesting every page of the website everyhour to bump up the logs.

 

I agree with you on that.Is there anyway I can check? Based on the stats,they seem to be coming from all over the world

 

If the site makes $1k a month genuine profit, you are stealing that site and should be arrested!

 

if they are not obviously coming from one source then you should be ok. But I would pay attention to where it's coming from. There should be a few key sources of traffic eg Google, msn, yahoo etc - links from other sites on the same topic etc.

 

Server stats does not show any traffic coming from Google,MSN,Yahoo etc.
Most of them are from sites which have similiar topics.Is this bad? I mean the website is not getting any traffic from Google etc?

 

check out the sites that are sending traffic to you. If they are quality sites, and are driving quality traffic to your site, then all is good. You can measure it in the amount of money the site is making per month.

If its an ecommerce website see how many sales are made per number of visitors. An e-commerce website should make at least one sale per hundred visitors.

 

Ermmm,how would you define quality sites? Measure quality of the site I am planning to buy or the site thats driving traffic?

How can I measure the amount of money its making?

 

The site receives no visitors from search engines but has 30k uniques daily? very odd.

 

yeah - that is odd.

If it's an e-commerce site you'd expect at least a 1% conversion rate of that traffic to sales. So that would be 30 sales a day.

I guess it can't be an e-commerce site then - because surely it would be making a load at that ratio.

My advice if you don't know what your doing, and your not sure, don't buy. OR post the url of the website here and we'll have a look see.

 

Ask the seller why he wants to sell a site that makes 1k a month for only 3k...

 

According to the owner, most of them were returning visitors.Meaning to say they had the URL in their Favourites/Bookmarks.

 

This is actually a blog where people drop by to post.According to him,its not worth his time and effort to monitor and moderate it everyday.

He will be devoting the time & effort on some other profitable projects.

 

Responded to your PM.

brandon

 

likewise - let us know what you plan to do...