I was curiously running some numbers this morning and I’ve decided to share the results.

If you don’t know already, I’ve sold my web application development business and I’m now in investment mode.

My next simple plan is to start acquiring sites to build a different – diverse portfolio of investments and new revenue streams. My thought was to throw $10k at 4 sites to simply start making $4k a month – a livable income, but I have a livable income already and some, so instead I might acquire smaller sites and more of them to achieve the same effect, $4k per month revenue.

However, I’m going to do it in such a way that almost anyone who has a fulltime income can do – if they can find some disposable income every month to set aside to invest that is.

Why? Well finding sites that are in the $10k range isn’t easy, there’s not as many around as there are $1k sites, so it’s slow going and slim pickings. Other reason is that I’d like to acquire a wider range of sites and see if we can’t network a few together, do some link building campaigns and build the traffic and revenue on them. If we can we might sell (flip) a few of them along the way down the track to speed up some revenue growth.

Ok, so here it is - the plan from $0 a month to $4k a month in 14 months.

What you will need: An endless stream of money, some internet skills and a server.

When I say an endless stream of money, you need to at least be able to set aside $250 a week - $1k a month, that’s like $35 a day, every day.

If you can’t do that, then you’re going to take a whole bunch longer to get there, also, a starting bank of $5k – which isn’t all that much cash, borrow it, steal it, sell something to get it, I don’t care… ok well don’t steal it, but just get it.

So the idea is simple, take your $5k, spend the whole $5k on a site that’s making $500 a month – shouldn’t be too hard, most sites sell for 10x profit. Or buy 2 sites at $2,500 each, either way, spend your $5k to make $500 a month.

Next month, take your $1k you’ve saved, and acquire another site making around the $100 a month mark.

The next month, do the same again, take your $1k and buy a site making $100, BUT, you should have in the bank $1100 from the last 2 months of revenue from your existing investments.

Take that cash and buy another site, so on your 3^rd month you’re spending $2k on sites, not the monthly $1k.

Next month, same again, buy a site with your $1k. By this month you should be making $900 a month from your investments, and the end of this month you should have had $800 from last month, so next month you will have $1,700 in the bank to spend.

So next month pony up some more dough and drop your $1k + your investment revenue, with some luck you should have some growth by now in the sites if you’re working on them (which you should be), so this month – month 5, drop $3k on new sites.

This will leave you now making $1,200 a month in revenue. I think you get the picture now.

So in a little over a year, you should be sitting on $4k a month. With some luck, if you are working on the sites during the time you should be able to build more revenue by increasing the traffic, try and acquire sites that complement each other so your overall traffic can grow.

By the end of all this you might have over 15 sites easy, but, along the way there’s always the option to sell some of them or consolidate them down to less, just as long as the revenue isn’t effected.

A good strategy might be to pick 2-3 niches, pick up a forum for each that has users and traffic already, and work on picking up sites that would be relevant to those forums so you can leverage the sites to drive more traffic to the forums – thus building more members and more returning visitors, and in turn hopefully more revenue along the way.

Now that I’m back in acquisition mode, I’ll probably be blogging about lots of dot coms that are for sale! Since most of my free time will be devoted to finding some that I like and would be interested in buying…

As far as a sustainable site goes, things that I’m not interested in are proxies, image hosts, free hosts, clickbank affiliate sites, PTC sites, and directories. Sure they all can make money, some do quite well, but when buying one not building it from scratch, you really need to be careful about where the traffic is coming from, how sustainable is it, and will it be switched or turned off after the purchase, the traffic could easily be fed from their other sties they are running.

The other thing is, proxies, free hosts and what not often get banned from ad networks, so revenue options can be limited – as can be growth.

There’s a forum for sale over at SitePoint, it’s actually a good forum, the url is: http://www.businessforum.net/

It’s making $0, it’s pulling over 500 uniques a day, 250,000 page views a month.

But his starting bid is $12k, and his BIN is $35k.

The reality here is that it’s over priced; it only has 7,000 members, 5,000 threads and 24,000 posts. It’s a bit, but not a lot for a 2 year old forum, so it’s been kicking along and slowly growing, but it’s not shit hot and taking off or anything. He’s put a lot of work into it, but it needs a lot more to get it really going, regardless, it is a nice foundation to start from, so it’s defiantly worthy of purchasing… but not at $12k-$35k

I think the main problem here is that he bought the site 7 months ago for $11,600… back then it has 4,000 members, 14,000 posts.

He overpaid 7 months ago for it. And he’s trying to sell it for more now, because in his eyes from the price he bought it for it’s now worth more.

The reality is that he overpaid, back then it was worth $3-4K, and now its worth about $5-6k tops.

There’s no revenue, there’s only 500 uniques a day and only 7,000 members. To really get this forum kicking and making any kind of money, it needs 20 hours a week put into it and more marketing cash invested into it, in 2-3 months you could if you’re lucky kick it up to 1,000 uniques a day, but even then from ads alone you would be hoping to bring in $500 to $700 a month. You won’t do it from adsense, you would be doing most of that revenue from private ad sales.

So after expenses, and all your time, you’re not making much. To keep it going you would be easily spending $200 a month on marketing, let’s say you profit $500 a month (after that 3 months of heavy marketing and time spent), and then you’re looking at a site worth $5k (10x revenue) probably more because there’s revenue and growth and a long history.

Still, not worth $12k minimum, if I was him, I’d spend $1k+ on promotions a month and start putting ads on the forum, sell ads for 3 months, get some revenue in and then sell, at least then you’re showing the potential buyer of the site that the investment is going to be worth it.

eBay is now only accepting PayPal for online payment – citing that your 4 times safer using PayPal than any other payment method.

Which is bullshit, it’s so easy to receive goods and then reverse a payment on PayPal it’s not funny, it’s so hard to get your money back from people who reverse charges for a bullshit reason it’s crazy.

This is just another move from eBay to jack up its stock price and profiteer since their stock has been crashing over the last few months – well years overall (it was almost $60 in 2002, $40 4 months ago and about a week ago it was down around $25).

It wasn’t too long ago they raised their percentage fee from like 3% to 10% in one hit, they make shitloads off PayPal as it is and locking every other payment provider out of the eBay market isn’t just a monopoly within eBay, but it’s unfair trading as a whole.

So much commerce is done via eBay now days that there needs to be other options for people who don’t want to pay through PayPal – either with an account or with their credit card.

Google is desperately trying to gain some traction with their Google Checkout, but it’s getting nowhere because of moves like this, if you could use Google Checkout on eBay I’m sure heaps of people would be using it.

I don’t know about you, but Yahoo buying out a Web Analytics company called IndexTools, and also testing Google ads on 3% of the Yahoo network search results is a sign of desperation from Yahoo – trying to stop a takeover that I think should happen.

Microsoft acquiring Yahoo in my opinion is a good move for Microsoft, and maybe even a good move for the internet in general, I’m still a little divided on that 2^nd point.

It’s great for Microsoft because Yahoo has a following of developers and general public, both of which Microsoft needs to set up its internet campaign overall – in followers, developers, advertising and more.

Not only that, Yahoo has a whole heap of other services that could be easily folded into the Microsoft family of services, such as their poor music delivery service, mail, developer network, geocities etc etc.

As for Yahoo, well I never thought they had the long term fire power to enter a war with Microsoft and Google, sure they have big numbers, and have for a long time, but Google came along pretty quick and stole a large share of that, and Microsoft is really pushing themselves into the arena.

Yahoo IS innovating, but people aren’t hearing it as loud as when Google innovates, I think Microsoft would do Yahoo some good, Microsoft knows how to make noise, even if it’s not always good. Yahoo has a lot of services that have been launched pretty poorly and developed poorly too, they seem to give up on them at times as well, I think this is where the Microsoft side of things can really help, Microsoft seem to stick with things and push enough resources and money into something until it either works well, or is completely dead.

Personally I think overall it’ll be a good move to join the two, the public might even benefit here somehow, not sure just how yet – besides some nicer apps around, it might mean there’s a gap in the market for another search provider, who knows.