Although I’m always looking for new ways to make money, I’m always prepared to move on if I don’t have time to develop it to the point where it makes me money. Even if that means I don’t break even i.e. sometimes you need to cut your losses and move on.

Recently I talked about two such sites in my recent post about mini sites, namely AlcoholView and Finding Love. I created these sites to see if you could make any money using free articles but I never really put the effort into them. Though I do now think that there is little or no money to be made in using free articles from directories.

I listed Alcoholview for sale on Digital Point and got $35 for it. Not a lot of money but the domain was due to expire so my choice to either let the domain expire, renew it at a cost of $8 or sell it on. When you think about it like that it becomes clear it was the right decision. The buyer also asked if I had any other sites and then proceeded to buy Finding Love as well, for $35. Again, $70 isn’t a lot of money but I was never going to spend time developing them and zipping the sites and sending the details for both sites took less than 20 minutes.

Another site I’m thinking of selling is RetroWheels, a car forum I picked up a while ago for only $130 including a leased vbulletin license. The seller was a little shy about some facts though, namely the site having a theme which can be bought for $30. I had been looking at loads of vbulletin themes around that time and never came across it so I never thought that it was a common theme. Still, I do still like the design.

I’m not sure if I could flip it for a profit of $100+ at the moment. I’m probably better waiting til it gets a little more traffic or waiting til it gets a PageRank so that I can sell some text links on it and sell it for 10-12 times monthly profit….though if it was making that I’d be tempted to keep it!

A bad habit of mine

The purchase of RetroWheels is a good example of a bad habit I have from time to time. When I’m interested in buying a site priced $1,000 or over I spend a lot of time thinking about whether it’s worthwhile. Traffic, branding and monthly income are all important but so is the time you need to spend developing the site.

For some reason, when I see a well priced site under $250 I don’t think about this. If I decide the site is undervalued and believe that I can either develop it and make money or flip it quickly, then I’ll buy it. However, I forget to think about the time I need to spend developing the site. This is not something I do all the time though I have bought several websites over the years because I knew they were undervalued. I’ve nearly always broke even and in most cases I’ve made a small profit but I do sometimes regret the purchase.

Cut your losses and move on

Whether you create a website from scratch yourself or whether you pick one up in a forum, the bottom line is if you don’t have time to develop the site you should cut your losses and move on.

Sites which don’t need updating and make $100+ a year are worth keeping but it’s probably best to trim your portfolio and concentrate on the sites you do want to develop.