The Work at Home Scam Blog

Buying a Website

Buying an established website is a great option for those wishing to work from home. If you’ve got the cash to put into it, you can get a site that already has content and an audience. Then your biggest concern is adding fresh content and keeping the visitors coming back for more.

As with any work at home opportunity, however, there are pitfalls that you need to watch out for when purchasing a website. Here’s a hypothetical scenario: Let’s say a website owner has been running a site successfully for some time, and has the web statistics to prove it. Maybe they’re selling candles. Then out of the blue they cease to ship products that have been paid for. Angry customers start spreading the word, and soon they have no customers. In an attempt to get money out of the site one last time, they decide to sell the site to some unsuspecting work at home parent.

That’s just one example. Unless you have intimate knowledge of the website you are looking to buy, it’s hard to know just what incentive the owner has to sell it. So it is absolutely vital to do as much research as possible before you fork over the bucks. Here are a few ways to do that:

• Search Google for the site’s name and URL, and for the name of the present owner. Go through at least the first 10 pages (if that many results are listed) with a fine-toothed comb. Look for any complaints about the site, company, or business owner.
• Search Technorati for the same items, and for terms related to the site. Blogs are an excellent source of information from disgruntled customers.
• Check scam forums, and forums related to the site’s topics. They are another common place to find complaints.
• Don’t rely on statistics provided by the site owner. Even third-party measurements, such as Google pagerank and Alexa ranking, can be manipulated to make a site look more popular than it is. You could ask for screenshots of, or links to, their stat software, or copies of their log files. To find out who else is linking to the site, just do a Google search for “link:http://www.siteaddress.com” without the quotes.
• Check the site’s whois information and make sure there’s nothing fishy about it. Whois lists the name and address of who the site is registered to, as well as how long the domain has been registered. Compare it with the info given by the seller.

If you do decide to buy, keep records of all communications between yourself and the seller. This is vital in case they don’t deliver.

Owning a website is a great option for work at home parents, and getting your hands on one that is already well established can save you a lot of hard work. Just be sure you know as much as you possibly can about the history of the site before you spend your money on it, and it could prove to be a very worthy investment.