Buying Websites on Flippa

Wow feels like it's been forever since I've posted here, and it has been. But I wanted to share my first experience buying a website on Flippa.com. It was a fairly interested experience and one I hope to do again in the future.

If you are not aware Flippa.com is an auction based site where you can buy and sell domains and complete websites. Theoretically it would be a place where someone who wanted to get into internet marketing quickly, could buy their way in and be up and running faster. The problem with that though, would be the quality of the sites listed there.

I spend about two weeks looking over the websites on the site, and maybe 5 or so were potentially worth bidding on. There are some fairly nice sites listed there but largely way out of my price range. From what I’ve gathered most sites making money, will sell for twelve months or more revenue. So a site making $100 a month consistently might go for $1200. A lot of the better sites go for a lot more but again, with some of these sites its a little questionable if the revenue and traffic numbers they’re listing are accurate.

What I Was Looking For

For my first site, I wanted to buy a site in a niche I was familiar with. So the areas I looked were internet marketing, design, sports, and pets. There were a few design blogs being listed but I didn’t bid on any for a few reasons. One, they take way too much time to maintain. I talked to two of the sellers and they were spending about four hours a day on promotion to keep their traffic numbers up. That really did not appeal to me. There were also a number of pretty thin, prebuilt sites without any traffic. Again not something I’d want to touch, unless I knew I could rank them quickly. I may actually try one of these in the future but not right now.

So I kept looking around until I found a site about WordPress themes. Here is the site: http://responsivewpthemes.org/. It may be down or running slow at the moment because I’m getting it moved over to my hosting.

I’m not a huge WordPress fan but I know there is some potential in the niche for selling themes, plugins and hosting. The site was very young but was getting a lot of love from Google and after looking at the link profile, I didn’t think it would get a penalty. The site was also pretty light on content yet was doing well with what was there. Good signs in my opinion.

The only monitization on the site was affiliate links to the various themes that were posted about. So my first idea was to continue with this but also push WordPress hosting. I’ve done fairly decent pushing hosting affiliate links before so I figured this may be an easy way to increase the profitability of the site.

But the real reason I liked the site was I could think of about 100 more articles I could write, almost immediately to grow the site out. I always hate writing on topics I don’t know a lot about and this one would be easy. The site was getting about 80-120 uniques a day and I know I can increase that to 300 or so a day fairly easily. So with a new monitization method (hosting) and the confidence that I could double traffic, I felt comfortable that I could double the profit of the site fairly quickly. 

Making the Purchase

Before making a bid you should always contact the seller and do some snooping around. It helps to go with sellers who have made sales in the past and have good feedback. Here is the actual listing in case you’re interested: https://flippa.com/2969939-responsive-wordpress-themes-with-2-360-uniques-mo-making-143-mo I went and looked at the sites my seller had sold previously. They all seemed fairly basic yet, decent quality, and they all seemed to still be up and running. I didn’t contact those site owners but I suppose if you’re thinking of spending a lot of money it would be worth doing.

The seller was quick to answer my questions and gave me access to Google Analytics so I could see where the traffic was coming from, some of the keywords and other useful information. I was able to see that the traffic wasn’t been purchased or anything else shady wasn’t going on.

I also spent some time reading the actual content, which was actually fairly decent. I checked it against Copyscrape too, to see if it was entirely or partially original.

This was enough to make me feel secure making the purchase.

My Goals

My goal for RWT is to:

• Double traffic in three months
• Double revenue in three months
• Add 100 pages of new content to the website in three months
• Resell the site again for three times what I paid for it ($980)

I’m going to go into more detail in future posts. Maybe make this a little case study. Right now I’m waiting on the domain name to finish transferring over, but once that is done I’ll go over my plans for the site and the execution.