Website Investing
I didn't realize then but the seller was way ahead of his time and what I was actually buying was a article site about two years before that term was coined.
My wife and I had done a lot of buying on Ebay and I had been thinking about doing an Ebay related site. I even had about 25 pages of reasonably good content written so it seemed like a natural.
The seller had more programming skills than I do and the site was database driven. I elected to convert those to static pages and put them up unchanged. In those days I had no idea about links and how to get them. All I did was buy the site, add my pages, and change the AdSense code from his to mine.
The results were good I thought. The traffic gradually died off as the sellers links expired but it generated about $12 per month for the next year. On one hand that's not much money. On the other hand it is almost a 120% return on my investment.
After about 18 months I had learned a few things and realized those articles were about worn out. However, I hated to delete the pages because by now they had a PR4 on many and were indexed in the search engines. I elected to do a site re-design that moved my more timeless content closer to the home page and brought visitors to the new pages first. This seems to have slowed the loss of income and has gotten some of the new pages more prominently indexed.
At the present time the site has a PR5, gets about 75 unique visitors per day and still produces $5-10 per month of income. I have ideas for how to improve that which are just waiting for the right time.
In other words, I got my money back, made a few dollars besides, and have an old established site to expand or niche out into a variety of subjects. That works for me :)