Here’s a detailed step by step buyer’s CASE STUDY of what to look for when buying mainstream sites.  Regardless of your site’s exact business model, these tips apply.

The article was prepared by person behind Flippa a website sales exchange

Resource: Site Point

The key focus of this buyer’s guide is how to accurately gauge the potential of a young website that makes no money. Its methodical approach lets you size up the site’s earnings potential, niche competitive strength, and scalability.  I especially appreciated the focus on COMPETITION.  You don’t want to buy into a losing proposition.  That’s like willfully contracting pneumonia.

Next, we want to find out how competitive this niche is. Competition analysis is an in-depth topic, so it’s worth checking out some of the posts on sitepoint.com for more details. For basic metrics, I use Firefox with the SEO Quake Extension to display competition information, which will indicate the degree of difficulty achieving a #1 ranking for this site. The current #1 ranked site in Google’s results has the keywords in the title and a PR (page rank) of 3, but the keyword phrase is excluded from the domain name, another factor that can influence search rankings.