A few people, both online and offline, have asked how I’ve managed to get where I am in only a few months, and believe it or not it is not that hard.

There are actually 2 components to getting where I am:

The 3 P’s

I’m sure you have all heard of the 3 L’s with regard to buying a property, well I have the 3 P’s for money making websites. The P’s stand for Problem, Potential, and Price.

Knowing what to do to improve the Potential, and/or fix the Problem.

You don’t need the ability to do the work, but you do need to be able to identify what the issues are and get them fixed, obviously it is cheaper if you can do it yourself.

Problem

When I look at a web property that I am interested in purchasing I always look for problems with the site which are holding back the revenue generating ability. For instance when I purchased nintendofire.com the problem with the site was that it was banned from the Google index for spamming the index. The amount of income it was generating per month dropped by 75% when it got dropped from Google.

It took me about 2 weeks of work to clean the crap out of the site, and then convince Google to let it back in the index, the result was that the traffic returned and so did the sites income, in fact the income improved because I also added new streams of income.

I’m not finished with the site yet, I have hired a graphics person to design a new layout, I’ve got a lot of content to put it to move it from being a cheat site to a gaming site, and a number of other things that I’m keeping under the hood at present.

Potential

There are people out there who want to sell their site and don’t know it’s true potential, as a result the sites can go pretty cheap. You need to be able to see the potential and how to take advantage of it.

You need to make sure that the potential is real and not some hype by the seller, don’t get sucked into buying some new site that has great potential because of X, Y, or Z. If the seller is claiming great potential, then make sure you do your homework on that potential.

Price

You want to buy cheap, and if one or both of the other P’s are true then this one should be as well. When I use the term cheap I don’t mean $5, what I mean is cheap in comparison to what you can earn from the site. NintendoFire cost me $2,500 usd$, based on it’s income at the time that meant it was 10 months to repay my investment (assuming no other expenses). After buying it I immediately spent another $500 usd$ getting software etc to improve the site. (This was for new features I wanted to add)

Based on the standard practise of 10-12 months revenue for the selling price of the site, NintendoFire was not a cheap site, just a normal one. However, if I could get it back into Google then I should get my investment returned in just under 4 months, that made it cheap.

It was a risk, but a risk I was prepared to take, and it is definately looking like it paid off.

p.s. You don’t need an interest or knowledge in the subject matter of the site, although it does help. I’m not a game player and yet I now run 7 gaming related websites.