So you've seen all of those appealing listings on eBay for websites that promise a living from doing almost nothing. Now I've seen countless people buy these things and I dont know why. In real life, if a person came up to you and promised everything like that you would naturally figure it to be a scam and not pay attention to it. So why don't people do the same on ebay? It's because these auctioners are crafty, they often times provide you with tables of potential sales and usually state things like "If you just make 5 sales a day, you'll earn $3900 a month!". This is what ropes most people in (and by most I mean inexperienced or first timers). Little do they know that getting 5 sales a day is a feat.

Unestablished Sites

Go ahead, go on ebay and search "website business", infact heres a link to the search if your too lazy:

Website business search on ebay. Now if you check out most auctions on that search I just linked to, you'll see that most do exactly the things I said, they'll include a "potential" profit table and not much else other than lines and lines of bragging about how their market is huge etc.(which is actually a bad thing, which I'll explain later).

Very few of those auctions will say how many visitors they currently get, or more importantly they wont state their conversion ratio. Sites that aren't currently getting any visitors or sales are called "unestablished" meaning that they aren't marketed at all, which means once your suckered into buying one of these sites, the sole burden of marketing (believe me, its a heavy one) will rest on your shoulders.

Before I go on, I must say one thing, most auctions now include the word "established" in their title just to attract people, often times this is not the case. These sites are NOT established, what they mean when they say "established" is that the site is merely set up, which doesn't really mean anything.

Cookie Cutters

Most "unestablished" sites I mentioned before that you will see on ebay are most likely "cookie cutters". What are cookie cutter websites? They are sites merely "generated" by someone slapping a different domain name on a template. That means they'll take a graphic image, stuff it with the same content and just slap on a different name for example one being www.cookiecutter.com which looks exactly the same as another one the seller is auctioning off like www.cutcookie.com. Buying a cookie cutter site is a sureshot way of failing in the online business world (and its what most new people do).

Diluted Markets

One thing I mentioned before was sites bragging how huge their market is and how everyone else is doing what their website is doing. Now, experienced webmasters know that this means stay away, why? Because if a thousand other people are selling what you are selling, then why would they even care what you sell? Markets with too many sellers selling the same thing wont turn you a big profit.

As counterintuitve as it sounds, the more specific your service or product is, the better. Sites that are unique or sell a unique product are called niche sites. A highly targeted niche product will do two things, one, it will ensure that the people who are likely to buy your product will only have you to turn to and two, you will be ranked much higher in the search engine because you'll be the only one or one of the few to sell what you're selling.

What you ARE looking for

So you know what to avoid when you look towards eBay to buy your own web business. Well what do you want an auction to have? The answer is basically the opposite of what I've said so far, you want auctions that state upfront the number of visitors to their site in the current month or last month etc. You want a auction where the seller states the conversion ratio of the website (how many people actually bought the product out of the people who visited) and also you want the seller to be open about how much money the site makes (not "can" make). Also be sure that the site is not a cookie cutter and is actually unique in its design. Follow these guidelines and chances are you'll certainly end up with a good profit turning website on your hands.