This isn’t anything unique because I know of at least 3 people personally (including me) who are currently doing this.

But it works really well, and if it works who cares if it’s unique, has pink spots or drives a Fiat?

AND and there’s room for many more people to get in on the action too

The technique is simply this:

It involves an initial outlay of usually a few thousand dollars to buy sites that other people are selling on Flippa.com

I expect to pay between $2,000 and $4,000 for the sites that I buy.

I expect each site to bring me a residual monthly income of $500 – $1000 depending on the site and how much I paid for it

To give you an example, one site I just lost out on (was outbid and missed the end of the auction) was based in the diet niche.

It sold for around $4,000, was bringing constant monthly revenue of around $900, mostly from an existing ebook (the ebook was part of the sale), Adsense ads on the site and Clickbank ads.

It was getting over 12,000 unique visitors a month and was three years old so the traffic and monthly income was well established.

It also came with around 3,000 followers from associated Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter accounts that came with the sale.

There wasn’t a mailing list included with this particular site but I especially look for sites that DO have mailing lists because they’re very profitable for me because of my existing business set-up.

It was a good deal at 4k because if the monthly income averaged out at $900 a month as it was currently doing I would have more than doubled my investment in 12 months.

So in essence the site would then have paid for itself and I could either continue to take the monthly revenue of to flip it for a lump sum

You might wonder why someone would sell a site making $900 a month for $4,000?

Well me too I but I no longer make the mistake of trying to work out their reasons. I do my due diligence and if the site stacks I’ll buy it.

For all I know the person might have financial problems or need the money for another investment or just might be bloody bored of running the thing.

It only needed a few hours’ work in ‘upkeep’ but that can be easily outsourced.

So you can see why I was pissed off that I lost out on that one – someone got a bargain.

A friend of mine – the 3k income in the headline –  recently bought a site aimed at potential writers (I’ve got one of those too actually) and is currently making around $3,000 a month in revenue from a site that cost him $4500 several months back.

It was making around $600 a month when he bought it but he tweaked it, changed the ads and got an SEO person on board (cost him $250) but it was well worth it

In fact I can’t stress enough that the most profitable skill you can have when buying and developing websites is to look at what they’re lacking.

If the SEO needs work (ask an expert for an appraisal) then getting a pro on the job will increase the revenue

If the ads need to be more targeted then work on that, or if any lists or Facebook page that comes with the site (a lot do these days) isn’t being monetized enough then work on that aspect.

In my experience there’s usually something you can do to increase the revenue you get from any site.

If you have some seed money, buying sites that bring residual income is a really good way to build an online business.

I highly recommend it, although it takes some balls the first time you spend four figures on binary code

And if it doesn’t work out you can usually resell it and make your money back on the sale