Buying websites on flippa?

[Freddy Finger]

I'm pretty new to internet sales and marketing but am trying to learn and eventually build an internet business. While I'm learning about the things I need to know I was thinking of buying a web store on flippa to get my feet wet. Has anyone had any experience with doing this? Any sage advice you might care to share about internet web stores/web marketing in general? Thank you for your time.

[Jake]

Buying an established site that's earning money can be one of the better internet investments, particularly when there is a market and room for growth.

The biggest tip: Carefully search for fraudulent traffic and earning claims, I don't know all of the techniques but commonly people will use fake robot or paid 3rd world traffic for a few months to boost their traffic stats. There are also methods to fake page rank, like redirecting a ranked site to the one for sale for a while, I have seen the Google cached copy of pages have the obvious look of a different site.
Check compete.com, quantcast.com and alexa.com traffic stats as well as bounce and user view times, a high bounce rate (way over 50%) is a sign of robot traffic. These stats sites are getting data from a small sampling of users will toolbars, etc. installed.