Sadly, this is my first post in about three weeks. I have exactly 10 drafts just sitting here that will (someday) be awesome posts IMHO, but I just haven’t had ANY time lately for writing. Well, no time to write here that is.

So what’s keeping me so busy? A website that I purchased (not coincidentally, three weeks ago) that I believe has some real potential. At first I thought it was too good to be true; a successful site with a ton of all natural backlinks, a community with lots of happy existing members actively creating page after page of original content, and an owner who put a huge amount of time into the site but due to his current situation couldn’t give it the attention that it deserved. There’s got to be a catch here, right? I haven’t found one so far.

I came across the site by doing some simple searches: “allintitle: this site for sale”, “allintitle: website for sale”, etc. I had to wade through some pretty bad sites as well as some very expensive ones, but ended up finding a diamond in the rough.

I’m not looking to make the bulk of the site’s revenue through contextual advertising. Monthly subscriptions and/or donations will be the key. By keeping users happy and providing a very useful service, I’m able to run a site with multiple income streams, and they all *should* be lucrative. I’m extremely optimistic about the site’s future.

Now, I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. The site has only been online for about three months and already has over 1,000 members. Currently ~20 new users are signing up everyday, and providing support to thousands of users will require a lot of my time. The site ranks well in Google (after only being online for several months, never got sandboxed), but can’t be found in the other engines so I’ll need to put some work into getting it ranked in Yahoo and MSN. There’s also quite a bit to learn as the site is pretty complicated (huge database with over 9,500 tables and growing which also has me worried), but I’m quickly becoming familiar with the schema and have already made a few changes for the better. I’m definitely ready to make this one a success as I’ve done with a few of my own sites in the past.

I wish I could post the URL here but I don’t want the site associated with SEO or internet marketing at all, plus I don’t need the spammers that “comment” here finding out about the site.