Buying Websites for Profit: How to Spot a Poorly-Monetized Site

In general, sites usually generate revenue through one of the following methods:

1. Advertising. By either selling links directly to advertisers or using Google AdSense, site owners are able to generate revenue whenever visitors click or view ads.

2. Products. By creating their own products (or hiring someone else to do so), site owners are able to generate revenue from direct product sales (often through PayPal or ClickBank).

3. Affiliate Sales Commissions. By selling products as an affiliate through ClickBank, CommissionJunction, or LinkShare, site owners are able to generate affiliate commissions, which are often paid out on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.

4. Feeding Traffic to Other Sites. Another way in which site owners generate revenue is by taking the traffic from one site and sending it to another in a network that they own. At the second site, they usually close the deal by selling a product or enrolling visitors in a newsletter.

As a prospective site flipper, it is your job to analyze each site you see in order to determine which of these methods it is using to generate revenue. From there, it will be up to you to determine whether or not you could improve the site's monetization by either employing a method not used or by improving upon an existing method.

Here is a list of things to ask each time you see a site that you might purchase:

1. Which of the four types of monetization methods does it use? Does it focus primarily on one type of monetization, rather than the others? I.e. does the site primarily generate revenue from AdSense or from direct sales of a product that it owns? You should be able to find this information, along with supporting documentation at the site auction.

2. Could the site benefit from eliminating one type of monetization and focusing on the others? For instance, if a site generates revenue primarily through direct sales, but includes AdSense ads and other links, could it benefit from eliminating these links that tend to draw visitors away from the site; and instead focusing on increasing the conversion rate of the sales page?

3. Is this site leaving money on the table in obvious ways? For instance, does the site contain a number of links that don't open in a new window or a new tab? If it does, it is needlessly sending away visitors; and this is probably leading to at least small revenue losses.

4. Is the sales letter for the product poorly written? If it is, there's a good chance you could relatively easily and inexpensively double or even triple the revenue that the site generates by paying a copywriter to create a better sales letter.

5. Could the site benefit from a squeeze page? In many cases, sending a reader directly to a sales page will result in much smaller lifetime earnings per visitor than if you send them to a squeeze page that captures their email address and name. The reason for this is that you get the chance to do extensive pre-sales; and then have the opportunity to pitch multiple products to them over the course of months.

6. Can the site benefit from better AdSense ad placement? Even if you don't know the optimal placement, you should be able to infer from the documentation whether the percentage of visitors who click through the ads is low or high.

While the list above doesn't capture everything you need to know about visiting a site and determining how well it is monetized, it does capture many of the important items to look at when purchasing sites.

Overall, the most important question you can ask when purchasing a site is whether it is poorly monetized according to these criteria. If it is poorly monetized, then that's a good sign that you should go ahead with the purchase. On the other hand, if you're having a hard time figuring out how the site could potentially make more money, then it may be best to move on and look for new sites.


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