So, when buying a website you need to first do your own independent valuation of the site. Use the techniques found in the Website Valuation section of this book to determine the fundamental value of the website. If its value is higher than its price, you have yourself a deal!

The second method of obtaining a site would be to develop it yourself or pay someone to develop it for you. There are also many "turnkey" sites available for purchase where a company will whip together a site to serve a specific purpose such as selling a particular product or service. I would recommend staying away from the turnkey sites or at least thoroughly doing your due diligence before writing any checks for such a site. With the robust "What You See is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) website development tools available today, most anyone with basic computer skills can be a website developer in one weekend. I would recommend Macromedia's Dreamweaver or Microsoft's FrontPage if you are new to site development and want to jump in. If you are developing yourself you will also need a hosting account which you can find for starting around $20 a month. Again, a web search on “web hosting account" will yield plenty of options. STAY AWAY from any free hosting that will typically leave you with very little control over your site and possibly force you to put advertising on for which they will benefit.

The next part is a bit trickier. What type of site do you want? The answer to this question can be somewhat subjective. However, the one thing that is for sure is you want several sites. I'll explain why when I get into the Portfolio Theory of Website Ownership next. You have to start somewhere, so here are some things to chew on when deciding on your first site. What will people be interested in? By "people" I mean a large market. Don’t bother with a niche site about training Stereo Speakers; it's just not worth your time. Look at the masses, think big, what are a heck of a lot of people interested in? Travel, Eating, Skiing, General Sports, Education, this list can go on and on and on. These 'topical' sites are always good choices because most people have an interest or hobby of some sort that they can research, write about, and stay updated on to keep the site updated. This type of site would fall under the Content Site category.

Content sites are good for organic website traffic because search engine robots have an easy time reading lots of text on a site. www.anyhobby.com is good examples of a content site. Another site type is a data oriented site. If you have a database oriented mind or understand how databases work from a technical perspective, you will have an easier time thinking of a good data oriented site. There are sites that focus on displaying the results of queries entered by the web surfer. One may be to display song lyrics for any popular musical artist, looking up phone numbers, domain name information, or other data-querying information. All of these fall into the Data Site category. The good thing about a Data Site is that users typically are return users and you will benefit from a viral website traffic a bit more than a static content site. Viral website traffic is website traffic that is generated by word of mouth...or word of e-mail more likely. The whole idea of she tells 3 friends and they tell 3 friends and they tell three friends...that is viral website traffic and it can be VERY powerful. The data site will also need to have some textual content in order to help the search engine rankings. This is another topic for your SEO research if you plan on developing a site. Another type of site that also benefits from viral website traffic is the Tool Site Category. A tool site has some sort of dynamic tool that surfers need to extract information. The tools usually rely on some sort of computational based output. Some good examples are the loan calculator, how much house can you afford, etc. The tool site also needs to be coupled with textual content of the same topic to get proper search engine results. A less popular type of site is the pure viral page that may contain a joke, a funny flash animation or just something off the wall that really catches someone's interest and causes them to want to send the link to friends. This is a pure viral site and is capable of generating some enormous website traffic. The difficult part about the pure viral site is that it's difficult to match content oriented advertising, but affiliate programs will work. We'll get into the specifics of affiliate programs in the Expense and Revenue Streams chapter.

You want to start with one website to get your feet wet. The tough part is coming up with what type of site. I often have site ideas pop into my head during the day, while driving, or while going to sleep at night. Everyone is different, but once you're in this business site ideas will come to you a lot more often than they did prior.

The next connection you want to make is connecting the site's topic to products or services. Is the site topic in some way, shape, or form related to something that sells? It doesn't have to be directly, but somehow it should relate to something that sells. That something could be a product like sports equipment or a service like travel deals. If it’s not related to something that sells, then the site must be directly selling a product itself. It is a lot easier to come up with a site related to a product or service then to build one to sell a product. Look at it this way: how many listings are in the yellow pages for companies selling products and services? Legal services, financial services, hobby related products, products for certain races or minorities...the list goes on and on. It is in fact difficult to think of something that isn't related to something that sells. Now, why does it have to be related to things that sell? At the end of the day, the profit on the product or service is the pie, and many of its slices get cut up and given to those in the channel between the producer and the end user.

By hedging your income streams I mean building a diversified group of websites so that when income from one site is down for whatever reason, there is a good chance that reason is not affecting your other sites. There is also a chance that income may be up in some sites while down in others. By building a group of diversified websites, you have a “portfolio” of sites that can more easily withstand swings in income. This is The Portfolio Theory of Website Ownership. A simple example is a single site owner whose site is exposed to seasonality. Seasonality means that there is are different characteristics for different seasons and income or website traffic to the site is affected by this characteristic. A site about baseball will experience more visitors during baseball season. A holiday site may do most of its business in December. By developing over time a large variety of sites on various topics you will not only generate more income, but the income stream will be more smooth and easier to predict.

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