When starting an online business there are many ways you can go about it. You can buy your own domain, from scratch, or you can get domains for sale that already have a website and traffic built in. If you choose the later option, it's important to do your homework so you don't overpay for the website.

Just like in the 'real world' you can make money flipping websites. People do it all the time. If you want to profit from someone else's work, you only have to look as far as the nearest website auction site such as GoDaddy.com or Flippa.com. There you will find a list of websites that someone else has taken the time to build and grow and hopefully has a steady stream of traffic and has made money from it.

Now you may ask yourself, if this person is making money with their site why would they sell it? The reason it that this is the way a lot of people actually make money online, they make more from selling the site than they would by keeping it. Or, they just don't want to hold on to a particular site, or they want to make some quick cash. If you do your due diligence you can pick up a great niche site, with decent traffic and maybe even some good links for very little money. And the best part is that it is turn key. You don't have to do much since it's already set up and profitable.

It's easy to get caught up in the moment and overpay for a site, but if you do that than it will take you longer to be profitable, or you might just get taken completely and never make money from a certain site. To be sure you don't do this it's important that you verify all income claims the person is making about their site. At a minimum they should provide you with screen shots showing their traffic counts, and their monetization efforts.

Many of the bigger flipping sites will have fairly strict guidelines that need to be followed by anyone who is listing a website for sale, these can help protect you but ultimately you are responsible for protecting yourself.

Take some time to do your own research into the niche that the website is centered around. How many products are for sale in this niche? Go to Amazon.com and do a search for the precise niche items to see how popular they are. Check to see how many customer reviews each product has (this will give you an idea of how passionate the people in this niche are about the product, more reviews typically means more passion, and more sales).

Go to the website yourself, look around. What is your first reaction to the site? All of these things will help protect you from making a bad purchase. Most sites that sell websites will have fairly extensive training materials to walk you through the process, I highly recommend that you take some time to check them out first, that is step one when trying to find great, profitable domains for sale.