Domaining Diva

I’m sure most people who are thinking about flipping/selling or buying websites know about Flippa, but when the question is asked, where can I sell my site, that seems to be the only answer people give. Flippa may be the largest at this time, but it’s not the only game in town. Due to the many changes Flippa has gone through with pricing structure and other changes that don’t necessarily benefits sellers, it’s worth a good hard look at the other places for buying and selling websites. Flippa does have an advantage over others with probably more buyers who search the site, so it’s still a viable website marketplace, but it’s always good to know all the options available.

There are also a fair amount of brokers who can help you to sell your websites, particularly if they are well established businesses that have established revenue and traffic and are valued at $10,000 or above. Brokers will often help with creating the listing or sales copy for your site and listing it at various resources both offline and online. They may also help with screening buyers, legal paperwork, and helping with negotiations and prospect questions when a buyer is interested. They often have developed a large list of buyers that they will contact about your sale.

Here’s a list of some website brokers:

Latona’s Website Brokerage
Quiet Light Brokerage
Acquisitions Direct
Acquisitions Agency
Maine Business Brokers
We Sell Your Site
W3 Business Advisors
We Broker Websites
Flipping Enterprises
Website Properties, LLC
Trusted Site Seller

Here’s a list of places to list your websites or look to buy websites.

Flippa

Currently the largest. Here’s the new pricing.

Listing fee for established websites & domains $29
Success fee for established websites & domains 5.0%
The success fee is paid by the seller when they make a successful sale.

Listing fee for new websites $9
Success fee for new websites 15.0%
The success fee is paid by the seller when they make a successful sale.

If your sites sells, there’s no real advantage in price between listing it as an established or a new site. In fact, if your site sells at a certain price point, using the new site listing could cost you more than the established site listing, so be aware of that when you choose which pricing to choose:

Your site has to sell for $200 or less, or your overall costs are higher due to that 15% success fee.

On a $100 sale:
$29 listing, $5 success fee = $34
$9 listing, $15 success fee = $24

On a $200 sale:
$29 listing, $10 success fee = $39
$9 listing, $30 success fee = $39

On a $400 sale:
$29 listing, $20 success fee = $49
$9 listing, $60 success fee = $69

On a $600 sale:
$29 listing, $30 success fee = $59
$9 listing, $90 success fee = $99

Traffic on Flippa can be pretty low in the beginning of an auction. Buying the enhanced featured listing can increase those views. If you do go that route, don’t buy it until the last day or two as that’s when people actually start bidding on most auctions on Flippa. You’ll notice a pickup in traffic also when it’s listing on Ending Soon tab.

The kinds of sites that sell well on Flippa are sites with established revenue. I was somewhat surprised at some recent sales below that appeared to sell for too cheap if the revenue is accurate. I didn’t investigate these listings very much. Just noted that they seemed to go too cheaply for sites with that kind of revenue.

REVENUE SOLD FOR
$599/mnth $2,249
$5,926/mnth $17,000
&20,000/year $8,000

As you can see from the above if the revenue numbers are legitimate, those sites should have sold for more money. So if you have a site that is making a solid income every month and has a history of doing so, you might want to consider a website broker. The commission will be higher, but the selling price will also be higher, in many cases, a lot higher. A broker could be well worth your time if you have a website valued at $10,000 or above.

Website Broker.com

This site gets a lot of traffic due to it’s high position in the serps for the terms buy sell websites. It ranks just below Flippa in the serps. Standard listings are available for 90 days for $9.95 and premiere listings cost $29.95 and give you more exposure than the standard listing. For listing just domains, the price is 90 days for $9.95, and premiere listings are $14.95. There are no other fees … no “success” fees, no commissions. The Premiere listings are listed in the Premiere Listing section of the site and will also appear at the top of their respective categories. They are bolder so they stand out more than standard listings and have a higher click through rate.

Buy Sell Website

The cost to list your website for sale here is $39 for a 2-week listing and $59 for a 3-month listing. It’s a well established site with plenty of listings and traffic. Don’t be put off by the ugly design (they should probably have hired a real designer to design the site).

Daltons Business

The UK’s largest business for sale marketplace. While they have a large amount of offline businesses for sale, they also have an Internet business for sale section.

Businesses for Sale.com

Pretty interesting looking site with website for sale listings in all countries. Has over 61,000 listings at this time.

Experienced People Forums

Forum for both website listings and information on buying and selling websites. Moderated to keep the spammers and scammers out. Doesn’t look like a lot of traffic but the site comes recommended by other website flippers. There’s a private VIP section which they say has all the good information but you don’t have access until you reach a certain (unknown) amount of non-fluff posts (which I haven’t yet).

BizSale.co.uk

Another UK based site that you can buy or sell offline small businesses. There’s also an online or web based business section.

Webmaster Talk Forum

Popular webmaster forum with a section for listing sites for sale.

The Warrior Forum

A lot of turnkey sites being sold in the Complete Sites for Sale section of the Warrior Forum. Can occasionally find some established sites listed here also.

Digital Point Forums and Ebay

I’ll group these two together. I don’t recommend either one. Too much spam, too many scams. ‘Nough said.

By Channel R [CC-BY-SA-3.0

A few months back, I decided to try out the “Instant Commission” affiliate platforms for selling my product and for getting affiliates to promote them. As soon as I listed, the affiliate requests started rolling in. I approved them for Instant Commissions, in spite of warnings on the site to only approve affiliates that you know. I mean heck … I didn’t know more than 2 or 3 of them at best so it sort of defeated the purpose to deny everyone else.

That turned out to be a big and costly mistake. These platforms are full of “affiliates” who steal credit cards, sign up to promote your product, and then make a bunch of purchases of your product with stolen credit cards. They are instantly paid the commissions and they instantly empty out their Paypal accounts. Within a month, the real owners of the stolen credit cards see this charge on their credit cards and file a Paypal dispute for unauthorized purchase. I got six of them within days of each other.

It took me awhile to figure out what was going on, but I soon realized what had happened. Not only did I have to refund all those unauthorized purchases and get charged an additional $25 per purchase for the chargeback, but I also paid the criminal affiliate and the funds were no longer in their Paypal account to recover.

This isn’t an isolated incident. The Warrior Forum is full of stories like this. Let this be a warning. If you decide to use these platforms, please put all affiliates that you don’t actually know and trust on delayed payments and don’t pay them for 60 days until the period of time for disputes is over. Once they see they’re on delayed payments, they probably won’t carry out their scam on you, as they wouldn’t get paid if they did.

I hope this helps to keep this from happening to others. It wasn’t fun and it was costly and it puts your Paypal account at risk to have that many chargebacks come in.

I’ve had a Paypal account in good standing for 6 years selling primarily websites and graphic design services, with an occasional ebook (but rarely).

Lately I’ve been working 3 ecommerce sites selling physical products rather than digital products. They are all still new and being worked on and two of them have around 1,000 products in them. Since they are built on Woo Commerce, I’ve purchased a lot of the extensions available for Woo Commerce. While I was browsing the extensions, I noticed a Paypal Advanced extension and did some research into Paypal Advanced. It allows you to accept both Paypal and credit cards on your website and is a actual merchant solution.

I decided to apply for Paypal Advanced for one of the sites in the survival gear niche. The site sells survival food, gear, tools (such as knives), first aid kits, etc. What happened next was a real mess.

Paypal acceptable use dept. reviewed the knives on the site and didn’t like 6 of them and asked me to remove them. I removed them immediately and then started reviewing the knives myself (I had imported a csv file of the wholesalers entire inventory, so didn’t really review the knives myself). I ended up removing another 200 knives from the site that weren’t a good fit for the survival niche, although they were completely legal knives. Only certain knives are against Paypal’s acceptable use policy, but they don’t define which types are or aren’t.

After I removed all those knives, I get a notice that Paypal has limited my account pending acceptable use review and they declined my application for Paypal Advanced. Two days go by and I call them both days and get nothing on what I need to do to remove the limitation to my account.

Then last night I get an email saying that my account is closed. All this simply because of Paypal activity initiated by me applying for Paypal Advanced.

During this limitation, I decided to scrap the idea of Paypal Advanced and applied for some merchant accounts. Figured I would see who accepted my application and go from there. Well, all three accepted my application but what happened next is the real kicker.

I decided to write a post on my blog about the Paypal experience. I then looked up the name of the Paypal President and noted that the most accessible contact info for him was his Twitter account.

This is the fairly new President of Paypal, David Marcus. There have been numerous stories on the net about David Marcus and his intention to change some policies and corporate culture at Paypal and do things differently. You can read one of those stories here: PayPal president makes house-call (or email) to smooth over customer dispute | VentureBeat and here: Paypal President Marcus Vows Change at Payments Giant – Tricia Duryee – Commerce – AllThingsD

Sounds good right? Well, it’s not just talk. After making my post, I tweeted the url to David Marcus, President of Paypal this morning. What happened next was almost immediate and stunning.

Emails started rolling in from all kinds of Paypal people … limitation removed, account restored, knives all fine now, Paypal Advanced now approved. I received 3 phone calls from high ranking Paypal executives apologizing for the mess and doing everything they could to get me up and running on Paypal Advanced smoothly and quickly.

The second caller disclosed that my blog post “went straight to the top” to the President.

This is an amazing story, at least IMO, of a man at the top of an enormous company who actually listens and monitors customer satisfaction and vowing to make culture changes in the company, actually does exactly that.

I’m not saying that this would work for everyone who has closed accounts or limitations. There are accounts that are unrecoverable and business models that they don’t support and will not support, but when they make a mistake, it’s not as difficult to be heard and are not as inflexible as they appeared to be. This change in Paypal is coming from the top down, and I was very impressed after a couple of frustrating days to have the problem conclude this way.

Whether you’re going to keep or flip a site, one of the most important things you should be doing is making the site profitable. A site with revenue will sell for a great deal more money on Flippa than a site with no revenue, so it’s well worth your time to attempt to make that site profitable. Here are some ideas on how to increase the revenue of a site.

Create your own product. Creating a well written, informative ebook on the topic of your website and selling it for 100% of the profits can produce a great deal more profit than just offering affiliate products for a percentage of the sale price. You can also sell a service from the website rather than an info product. Test the best pricing strategy. Increase your price, even if you have to repackage or edit the product to increase it’s value. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard people say that sales increased when they increased the price of their product. Don’t be afraid to charge more.

If you do offer a higher priced product or service, also offer a “light version” of your product. Sometimes people aren’t buying simply because they can’t afford it or they think the price is too high. You can overcome this with a light version.

Add great bonuses to your product. Don’t add a low value bonus that no one really wants. Make it a dynamite bonus so that people will buy your product for the bonus if they aren’t interested in the actual product. A valuable bonus can make your product irresistible.

Increase the traffic to your site. Don’t be dependent on just one source of traffic. If it dries up, all of your traffic is gone. If you’re trying to rank in Google for your keywords, make the same effort in Yahoo and Bing. Don’t forget social bookmarks such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and many others. They are not only a good source of traffic, but provide backlinks as well. A viral post in Stumbleupon, Reddit and Digg can get thousands of visitors in a short period of time. If you use paid traffic, buy more paid traffic. The point is to increase your efforts to increase the traffic.

Another good way to increase traffic is to become an authority on the topic of your site. Provide really useful information and you’ll find that not only do people visit, but they come back time and again for updates.

Launching giveaways and contests are also a good way to get repeat visitors and increase traffic. Make your prize or giveaway something really spectacular that most people would want. Giving away junk won’t get the traffic that a dynamite offer will. Visitors will tell other people if the giveaway is really great. Nothing better than word of mouth for increasing traffic. Launching contests and giveaways not only increase your traffic and encourage visitors to come back, but it can also increase your product sales.

Adding a Twitter account and Facebook page and getting people to like your page are excellent ways to get additional traffic. Tweeting your posts to your Twitter account and posting your posts on your Facebook page are good ways to increase interest in your site and to increase the value of your site should you list it for sale.

Make sure you’re building a list. If you’re giving something away, make them opt in to download it. Not only is a list invaluable for marketing to your list, but the list itself is a great asset to list on a sales listing for the site and increases the site’s value.

If you’re selling affiliate products, experiment. Don’t just sell one product. Add others to the mix and test, test, test. If you can sell one product, you can sell more than one.

JV with others. Do ad swaps with others in like markets, make friends and get noticed by super-affiliates. Getting links on authority sites or getting affiliates to promote your products can greatly increase both your traffic and sales. Attracting the right affiliates can make a huge impact on your business. Making friends and giving or helping others in your business is one way to do that. Build up a reputation for helping others, expecting nothing in return, and you’ll be much more likely to get people who want to promote your products.

One way to meet and make friends with potential JVs is on social networking sites. They aren’t called social networking sites for nothing. Contrary to popular belief, they are actually for networking with like-minded people and are a great way to make friends in your market.

Most of us have heard and may have even been affected by Google’s changes in it’s algorithm. The latest update, called Panda, has been out for awhile. We’ve seen the demist of blog networks like Build My Rank and others that just post links to the network for themselves and their customer’s backlinking efforts. Well, those links could now hurt your site instead of help it rise in the serps.

This means, that in order to do due diligence when buying a website, you now have to take into consideration what kind of SEO has been done to the site. Things like checking backlinks, site load time, unique and fresh content, anchor text links, and much more. You’d be well advised to read this (a href=”http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/253550/keep_your_website_off_of_googles_naughty_list.html” target=”blank”>PC World article to get up to speed on the latest Google algorithm changes.

This will give you a good list of things to watch out for when buying sites. It’s no secret that when a site is on the decline in traffic or revenue, that many sellers will opt to dump the sites in Flippa or elsewhere as quickly as they can unload it for as much as they can get for it. A site that was once successful may now be a site that is doomed. It’s traffic and revenue could already be in decline and it may also be running the risk of getting deindexed by Google. How sorry would that be to buy a site only to have it deindexed in a short period of time or to buy a site that was making good revenue and will soon be making nothing?

Due diligence
has to go beyond just checking the stats that are listed on a website auction. You now have to check historical data such as backlinks … how many there are and where are they? Are they just blasted onto blog networks with spun content or thousands of social bookmarking sites with the same anchor text? Other things you have to check for that Google will now penalize sites for are:

• Keyword stuffing

• Anchor text heavy links
• Slow load times
• Building links on link farms
• Too many ads and too many ads above the fold
• Autoblogging: Lack of unique content
• Stale content: site not updated frequently

There are of course many more Google changes and only Google knows most of them, but the above are some to be aware of and watch for when buying a website. Not checking could be a costly mistake.

Two types of websites that seem to always have a lot of bids and activity are Adsense sites and autoblogs. I can understand the popularity of Adsense sites but not autoblogs, other than people generally being lazy and not wanting to bother to add unique content to their blogs. Personally, I look for unique content when thinking about buying a blog from somewhere else. That’s a minimum requirement for me.

In addition to having no unique content, autoblogs can come with some built in problems. They are obviously scraping other people’s articles and possibly other people’s copyrighted photos, so the potential for a lawsuit or at least a cease and desist are high.

Then there’s the Google Panda thing … Autoblogs aren’t high on Google’s list of what it considers to be relevant and many are getting deindexed from Google or are disappearing so far down in the serps that they might as well be deindexed. All in all, if you’re browsing Flippa for sites to buy, I’d avoid autoblogs.

Beware the Cookie Cutter Business in a Box Sites

There’s also a very disturbing trend of cookie cutter sites (business in a box) being sold with a lot of success. The listings are all hype and have dubious income claims, especially since they are all start-ups. The income claims are in the copy since Flippa doesn’t even allow income claims on start-ups. These sellers sell the same cookie cutter sites over and over again … only difference is the domain name. Just copy the site to a new domain and they’ve got another listing. These low quality cookie cutter sites range from autoblog selling businesses to traffic selling businesses to social media selling businesses (buy Facebook likes and Twitter followers, etc.). People, there are a lot of these sites listed on Flippa. Please do some due diligence before spending your hard-earned money.

These types of sites often appeal to newbies who have little experience in buying websites or even in operating an online business. They think it’s going to be instant cash as soon as they buy it. Most are sadly disappointed to say the least, when they discover they’ve forked out a bunch of cash for a site that is not making an income as was claimed. Making money online simply isn’t as easy as all that. Spend $1,200 for a site without doing any work yourself and sit back and watch the Paypal receipts pour in.

Be certain to do due diligence when thinking about buying Adsense sites already making a passive income on Flippa or anywhere. They are hot sellers. Browsing the Just Sold section on Flippa, there’s listings like this, $630 per Month Adsense, High CTR, 2 yr. Old, PR2, Grants & Scholarships Niche, that just sold for over $9K. Listing looks good and has plenty of Adsense screenshots for income proof and Google Analytics.

So some research before investing in an Adsense site and make sure that the sites primary keywords are actually high paying keywords for Adsense. There are many Adsense keywords that are very low paying, making only a few cents per click. Also be certain that if the site advertises a certain placement in the Google serps, that you actually do a search for those keywords and the site does show up in that spot in the serps.

For more information on how to do due diligence, see my guest post on Flippa.