I finally did it. I took the risk and purchased my first profitable website with the hopes of getting closer to my goal of $2,000 /month in online cash flow assets, but it wasn’t what I expected.

The auction was coming to an end on a site I had been watching for some time. It was said to be making roughly $2,000 per month in net profit. Perfect right? I began bidding on the site in hopes of a great deal and a great deal I got.

By the end of the auction I had purchased the site for $450. It wasn’t until after that I realized this wasn’t a good deal at all.

It took around two weeks to fully transfer the site to my accounts because of the holidays. After chatting with the seller for a few weeks he kept dodging my questions on monetization. A topic that is quite important…

Once the site was fully transferred I began watching the analytics to see any signs of life. Luckily the site was getting around 1,000+ pageviews per day. Because the seller wouldn’t provide any real monetization strategies used to generate the “$2,000/month” net profit, I had to get creative.

I began playing with various ad platforms, but never made more than $0.05. Oh yea, that’s total revenue. Then, I moved to Clickbank products and Amazon Affiliate. Each providing more reasons for this sites downfall.

Based on EV (Expected Value) the risk would have been well worth it, but the EV was not accurate because the seller lied about earnings and could never provide any real means of profiting from the site.

So what now?

I’ve learned a ton from this little experience; Mainly that I will not be using Flippa ever again as they do seemly nothing to protect their buyers. Instead, I’ll focus on sites like EmpireFlippers.com who are actual brokers and protect buyers as equally as sellers on their sites.

Justin recently reached out to me with one of my posts which helped a ton. How could I ever expect to purchase a profitable site for less than 10x its monthly revenue he asked. He was right and I was incredibly ill-advised.

What would you do in my situation; You’ve just lost your investment, but you won’t be giving up anytime soon. How would you bounce back from this?