These days many people are into the business of “flipping websites.”
What is the concept of flipping website, and how does it works? What does the person, who buys it, do with it?
Flipping website is a concept of “creating a website just for the sole purpose of selling it quickly for few bucks“. In general these websites have 10 to 15 pages of good content (optimized for Adsense) and on an average 3 months old. They are sold when the stats starts showing that the traffic has started coming to the site from search engines. Mostly these sites are sold from $100 to $200 range.
I have never flipped a website. But I always buy such sites. Why? There are many reasons behind it.
The seller has already done the research to find some good long tail keyword which can bring in easy traffic from search engines. That saves my time in doing this research.
The seller has already found the best possible domain name optimized for the keyword (so that he can sell it for more).
I can read and review the content on the site to see whether it is good quality or not. In comparison, if I have to ask somebody to write the content for me, I am not sure that the quality of the content would be good or not.
The seller has already done some off-site SEO to get some links from social bookmarking sites etc., so that search engines find it and start sending traffic to it. People don’t buy sites with zero traffic. So they try to bring some SE traffic and then only try to sell it. 
Site is already 3 months old and would add to the aging factor (though only of 3 months) when I compare it with creating a new website from scratch.
So, what do I do with the site after buying it?
I just do the following:
I add my adsense, kontera and some more advertising networks
I submit it to my network of directories, which bring good PR and backlinks.
I ask my team to do 7 day SEO work for the site
And, then I almost forget it.
Start searching for the next one on DP or SP forums
In the month of July and August 2008, I have bought around 20 such sites and hosted them all on a new shared server (under a test to see whether this business feasible and profitable). The total cost of them is $2840. But now the total earnings from these 20 sites combined brings in is much more than 10% of $2840.
So, this is another business of buying flipped websites and groom them to milky sites, which can give you more milk in the long term. The only thing you need to concentrate is which one to buy and which one to avoid as there are hundreds of them getting sold on forums.
Go ahead and buy a few miniature gems. Who know they may turn out as big monster in the future.