The recent sale of some high profile blogs (blogging fingers, cashquests, blogtrepreneur )has created a ripple throughout the blogging community.  Suddenly many bloggers are considering the previously unthinkable subject of parting with their pride and joy.  They are balancing the angel and the devil on their shoulders, one telling them to take the money and run and the other telling them they will regret parting with their pride and joy.

You might have the shoe on the other foot and you might be an aspring blogger who is looking to get a headstart on a blogging career.  Maybe you have some money in your pocket and don’t know what to do with it.  Maybe you want to buy a brand rather than create a brand, whatever your motivation you are in the market for a website and you won’t let money get in your way.

The age old question is how to match up buyers with sellers.   This is not a difficult proposition if you are in the market for a car, a house, a loaf of bread or a newspaper but if you’re in the market for a website or a blog, well that poses another issue altogether.  Where do you find sites for sale?    You can’t just run down to the website store right?  Well maybe not yet but there are sites out there dedicated to matching buyers and sellers of websites. 

 One of the cornerstones of my business plan is content website development and/or website flipping.  In order to facilitate buying and/or selling websites it would seem to be obvious that you would need to know where to both find and sell websites.  I know a lot of you are considering the same thing so I will share some of the information that I have acquired in my endeavor.

Two sites are very well known in the internet community for buying and selling websites and they are Site Point and the DigitalPoint forums.   In my opinion these are two of the best sites to start with as by the nature of being well known, they have a LOT of traffic.  The more traffic the better. 

Before you run out and part with your hard earned Benjamins to buy a website of your very own, I would urge you to do some research and make sure you know what you are getting.  I recently wrote an article discussing a list of resources that you can use to attempt to put a value on the site you are buying or selling.  Make sure you check out my 15 Must Have Tools article before you go in search of some virtual real estate of your own.

In this article we will discuss WHERE you go if you want to either buy or sell a website or blog.

Site for Sale Sites

SitePoint – This is, in my opinion, the Big Kahuna when it comes to selling sites.  They have a HUGE membership base (approaching 250k members) and a lot of big dollar sites have changed hands but do not let that discourage you as a number of low dollar niche sites also change hands daily.  If you can’t find it here you probably don’t need it.  This site is not a free listing site so if you want to list it you will have to pay however it is quite reasonable.  See the site for all the details.

Digital Point Forums - This is likely the 2nd most well known forum to sell your site boasting 125k ish members.  The for sale forum on this site is only 1 of the many categories that they have to offer.  DigitalPoint is a boatload of information for an aspiring entrepreneur and best of all it is free to list sites for sale here.  You do have to be an active member in the community though, so register now and start posting.

BizMp- I stumbled across this site and was impressed with all that it has to offer.  I have yet to list a site of my own here but they do offer a “brokerage” service.  The interesting thing about this site is that it is a feed aggregator for 20 of the biggest brokerage sites around the web.  Yep they pull the feeds in from SitePoint, Digital Point, and many of the others listed here….so you can come here and check all your favorite sites if you wish.  They do offer a forum but I haven’t tried out the other resources just yet.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

DNForum - Another forum that I have yet to use myself but they offer a LOAD of content, an attractive looking forum and boast nearly 50k members.  They do charge for different tiers of membership which at first glance is a turnoff but consider this, if the members are serious enough to pay the membership fee then they likely won’t be tire kickers or 10 dollar a year niche site peddlers.  That is my theory at least….let me know if you find out differently.

DomainState - Another forum that offers a wide variety of topics and categories ranging from a “Getting Started” forum to a 100k plus forum for the big fish of the internet world.   Could that be you someday?  DomainState boasts approximately 11k registered members but traffic appeared light to me.

NamePros - A forum based site similar to the others but boasting nearly 76k members at the time of this writing.  In fact they claim to be the “largest discussion forum of domain name owners in the World.”  I don’t know about all that but with 76k members you can expect some traffic to your auctions.  I did notice that they do not allow multi site listings, meaning if they find out that you listed your site elsewhere they will lock your thread. 

Webhostingtalk - A forum based site boasting the requisite broad range of categories covering everything from domains to website hosting.  I could not easily discern the number of members but the thread count looked to be very similar to many of the other sites.

Ebay - Anyone who hasn’t heard of Ebay has no business on the internet.  I personally don’t use them to either buy or sell sites as they appear to be overloaded with the low buck niche of the hour type sites.  I included them here though because with the membership base that Ebay boasts, they can be a force if you are able to sort through the junk to find a bargain.  One of my favorite sayings in the world is “you have to dig through a TON of dirt to find even one diamond.”

There are a metric TON of scammers and garbage peddlers out there so be cautious and don’t go into a transaction with your eyes closed. I would urge you to be very cautious when dealing with buyers or sellers on any of these forums. 

Proceed with caution and do your due diligence to ensure you don’t get scammed.

 If you are going to purchase a website or domain then do some precautionary work first.  At the very least look the domain up in the WHOIS directory and ask the seller if he can send you an email from the address listed there or if you can contact them via the telephone listed.  I would also make sure that I funded the payment via a CC somehow so that I had the protection of my CC company rather than depending on Paypals weak protection policies.

If you are selling then I would make sure that I retained control of the domain for a period long enough that you know the payment is going to clear.  Paypal is the choice of most buyers and sellers but they have a notoriously weak protection policy.  It isn’t their fault really, as a scammer will always find a way but I would make sure that you verify physically who you are dealing with.  You can contact them via landline or email and make sure they are who they say they are.

 If you are selling a low dollar site then the risk is different than if you are selling a domain that is worth several thousand dollars.  Use the appropriate level of caution that makes you comfortable.

There you have it, eight forums that you should consider visiting if you are going to attempt to make money online via content websites or website flipping.   You might consider one or all of them, if your time is limited I would stick to Sitepoint and Bizmp.  Sitepoint is the gold standard and BizMp allows you to scan what’s been listed on the other sites anyways so it will save you a trip, especially handy for buyers who want to scan the marketplace in a hurry.

Are you ready to get off the sidelines and get in the game in 2008?