Hunt - The website investor: the guide to buying an online website business for passive income

The Website Investor

The Guide to Buying
an Online Website Business
for Passive Income

Jeff Hunt

NEW YORK

The Website Investor

The Guide to Buying an Online Website Business for Passive Income

2015 Jeff Hunt .

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other,except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To Becky,
my best investment

Contents

How You Can Be a Shark in the Online Business Tank

Have you ever wanted to own your own business?

Do you want the flexibility of working for yourself without all the headaches that come along with typical, physical businesses?

Are you looking for a place to put your money to get fantastic returns?

Youve picked up the right book. In this short volume, you will learn how websites generate consistent monthly income that can supplement or replace your job.

Youll learn how you can buy and operate a website that is already earning cash and not have to build anything from scratch.

Many websites are real businesses with customers, products and monthly earnings but they dont cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire. The strategies in these pages can make you the venture capitalist shark even if cash is in short supply.

I have learned the tips and techniques you see here through years of personal trial and error. I make my living through website investment. You can too.

Get ready to claim your share of the worlds hottest digital real estate. The Where, the What and the How are all right here. All you need is the Will to join the ranks of successful website investors.

Introduction: Youre BustedFace the Camera

The seller was almost giddy as he described how his website grew by thousands of pages every day without him having to do a blessed thing. I couldnt see him because we were on the phone, but I could swear he was waving his arms because it sounded like he was bumping into things as he talked with his hands.

Google loves this site, just L-U-V-S it, he said with exuberance. Half an hour later, I had sent him enough money to buy a used Honda Civic, and he turned over the keys of his beloved website. I was in the mugshot business.

What the heck is the mugshot business? my wife asked. Oops, I should have run this one by her first. It was too late now.

This guy Brian made these genius little programs that collect mugshot photos and arrest information from jails all over Utah, I explained. Then he puts them on his website for all the world to see. Oh, and its all automatic.

Why would anyone want to look at a mugshot? She scrunched up her face.

I have no idea, but 30,000 people dropped in last month. And there would soon be many more viewers than that.

Another question my wife posed: Arent the criminals gonna be unhappy about you plastering their pictures everywhere?

Uh, yeah, I asked him about that, and he said I might get some flame mail, but I could just take down the pictures of the whiners. Besides, were a long way from Utah, I said, not sounding all that confident.

Brian was right. After thirty days, traffic to the site was way up. Earnings had increased by 66%. I was starting to feel pretty darn giddy myself.

However, there was one big problem. Brian had told me that the programmer who wrote the nifty software to find and publish arrest records had started to make impossible demands. While Brian had taken care of him, I was stuck without a programmer, trying to figure out how the system worked and how to scale everything up. A solution soon presented itself, and in a week or two, I was able to collect mugshots myself from any jail website that published arrest information.

It was all perfectly legal. Arrest information published by local law enforcement agencies is considered public record, and its re-publication is protected by federal law. So why did I hesitate to tell people about the newest addition to my website portfolio? Never mind that. This thing had potential, and I was going to run with it.

Utah was doing great, so I decided that it was time to branch out. Florida has a huge population, lots of big cities, and jail websites filled with pictures, so I started there. I also picked Oklahoma. I dont know why; I guess Im just partial to Oklahoma.

Three weeks later, the Florida and Oklahoma sites were already getting hits and making a modest amount of revenue. I had never seen new websites get on their feet so fast. Meanwhile, Utah was still growing by leaps and bounds. The iron was hot, and now was the time to strike.

It was summer, and the kids were fidgeting without a lot to do. I walked into the family room and announced that I was going to teach everyone a new trick called jail research. I had already prepared a list of states, and the familys job was to do Google searches within assigned states, looking for cities and sheriff offices with the most daily arrests. They were to record all their findings and report back with a list of jails that had information that looked easy to harvest. My wife, seventeen-year-old son, sixteen-year-old daughter, and twelve-year-old son each sat at his or her laptop or computer. The job was done in an afternoon.

Then the real fun began. Using the experience from Utah, Florida, and Oklahoma, the family room became command central, and everybody learned how to clone a mugshot website of his or her very own. Each person was assigned a state. Step by step, we walked through purchasing a domain name, installing Wordpress, doing designs and logos, setting up the locations and categories, and putting money-earning ads on each site. While the fam was working on the websites, I started getting all the jails set up to send us records.