It takes a lot of hard work to get your website to the point where it is profitable and has a lot of traffic. You might want to cash in on all that time and money you’ve spent, but you want to get the most out of your investment. Before you list, make sure you do any housecleaning that needs to be done. Any broken links or glitches that you’ve been putting off… now is the time to fix those. Make sure you do all the SEO and everything is in good shape.

The Auction Listing

Why can some sellers get big money for their sites and some get barely noticed at all? It’s important that you create a site that offers value, but it’s not always the quality of the website to blame. Your listing headline and copy can make the difference between getting the price you want for your site or having it sink into Flippa oblivion.

With too many listings, the biggest mistake I see, other than a boring headline is not enough information about the website. Potential buyers want data. They want to know everything about the website and they want screenshots to prove it. They also want access to Google Analytics.

When writing up your listing, include everything including traffic, revenue, costs to maintain the site, outsourcing costs if any, how much content it has and whether or not it is unique content, whether or not it has a list, the number of back links, social media accounts, special programming or design, etc. Don’t leave anything out. Highlight the most important information in the headline. Grab their attention with revenue or high traffic figures if you have it, PageRank, etc.

You want to build trust with potential buyers and providing accurate data on your website will help to do that. Make sure that you break down all of your revenue streams by the source of the revenue and the revenue history. Go back as far as you can. The longer the site has been earning, the more you will get for your site.

Promote Your Auction

If you have a blog or website that is related, mention your auction. Some of your readers may be interested in the auction. Same with a list. Put your auction in your signature file if it’s allowed on forums that you participate in. I do this on the Warrior Forum. You can also get additional exposure with the Featured listing on Flippa. I don’t recommend doing this until the last couple of days of the auction, since most people hold off on bidding until then. You will get a lot more views doing this. If you have a Twitter account, tweet about your auction or mention it on your Facebook or Google Plus page. If the site you’re selling gets good traffic, put the link on that site too to let your visitors know the site is for sale.

You’ll get a lot more attention by getting your auction on the “Most Active” page on Flippa. You can do this by accepting all the very low bids. The more bids you get, the higher up on the Most Active site you’ll be.

Pay attention to your auction while it is listed. Answer any questions potential buyers might have and don’t take a lot of time doing it. An interested buyer may lose interest if his questions go unanswered for too long. Give accurate, detailed answers. Don’t be evasive. Good communication with potential buyers will help to build trust and help you get the most for your website.

Paypal is so convenient and so many people use it, that it is very tempting to buy and sell websites using Paypal. Sellers have to be very careful when using Paypal to sell websites. Paypal does not support the sale of digital goods, and a website is a digital good that is downloaded after payment. All a dishonest buyer needs to do after the domain and site has been transferred is to file a Paypal dispute saying “Item not received” and often, Paypal will decide the dispute to the buyer’s advantage. That leaves you, the seller, without a website, domain and without the payment for your site. Occasionally, with enough documentation, Paypal will decide in the seller’s favor, but that’s not the norm and is very risky to rely on that happening.

What can you do to reduce the risk of using Paypal for selling websites? Since the issue with Paypal is digital goods vs physical goods, turn your website into a physical good. Get your buyer’s address and send the site to him via Certified Mail on CD. He has to sign for it and you have proof of delivery.

Another thing I’ve done for a larger sale is to put it in the listing that the domain will be held by me (pointing at the buyer’s nameservers) for 60 days if Paypal payment is used. If they dispute the transaction, just point the nameservers back to your own host and you haven’t lost your site or your domain. After 60 days, they cannot file a dispute in Paypal so it is safe then to transfer the domain to them.

One final thing that helps when you need to win a Paypal dispute over a website sale is to have a sale contract for the transaction. I use the one that Flippa sells and just fill in the details of the transaction. It’s not as good as one an attorney would draw up for you, but it’s good enough. I actually won a Paypal dispute where the buyer tried to say that they did not authorize the transaction and I escalated it to a claim and submitted all of my emails and pms plus the website contract to Paypal. That was enough proof for them to decide in my favor.

For large transactions, it is best to use an escrow service to handle the transaction. A couple of good ones that I’ve used are Escrow.com and Safefunds.com. Both will provide you with a much safer transaction, however, Safefunds.com does it a lot cheaper than Escrow.com. When using a escrow service, I always stipulate that buyer and seller with split the escrow fee. Both of us are being protected, so why should the seller take on all of the costs of that protection? Using Escrow.com’s premium service over their standard service literally doubles your fees for escrow.

Although I’ve taken a risk numerous times and accepted Paypal for transactions of around $2,500, I recommend against doing that. To be safe, use an escrow service for transactions of $1,000 or more. You can use it for smaller transactions too if you want to and with Safefunds cheaper fees, there’s really no reason not to.

When I first started flipping websites, I basically created my own start-up sites and flipped them on Flippa at about $300-$320 each. That was a couple of years ago and the start-up market on Flippa has become very saturated and the quality of start-up sites on Flippa has decreased to a large degree. There are many sellers who think you can throw a blog together in a few hours and dump it on Flippa and make a profit. Some do, but many don’t. I’ve seen site flipping courses that profess to tell you how to do this and make a killing with a 3-hour website.

Buyers have become better educated on Flippa. They have needed to with all the junk being sold there. There are still good deals, but buying on Flippa requires a lot of due diligence to keep from getting scammed. If you want to sell start-up websites on Flippa these days, you have to offer more than just a 3-hour blog thrown together and listed.

The Domain is Important

Register a good domain for your site, preferably a dot com. An aged domain would be even better if you can find a reasonably priced aged domain in the niche that you are building. You can find aged domains on Godaddy auctions, Sedo, Afternic, and even Flippa. Shorter domains are preferable unless you are going to use an exact match domain for a good keyword. Brandable domains are good too if you create a consistent brand throughout the site, Facebook, Twitter, and any other social networks you use with the site. Having a great domain can increase the value of the site by hundreds or even thousands, depending on the domain name.

Ugly Sites Don’t Sell as Well

There are plenty of people around who tell you that ugly sites make more money, convert better, blah blah blah. That’s true for some sites, but not for start-up sites sold on Flippa. If you don’t put any time or effort into a good looking theme and some graphics to spice it up, you’re not putting your best foot forward. Buying a developer’s license for a nice looking premium theme is a worthwhile investment and one that will pay you back over and over again. For my blogs, I mostly use one customized Woo Theme and change the color scheme, headers and sidebar graphics for each site.

Content is King

One way to differentiate your start-up blog is to fill it with high quality, unique content. This is the very core of your site and you should not cut corners on content. The more unique content you add, the more valuable your site will be. I would have at least 20 unique articles on the site before listing it.

Adding Value

You can add value to a start-up site by creating a Mailing List, Facebook Page and Twitter Page for the site and getting followers for the social networks. A mailing list is particularly valuable for any site, but having a lot of Facebook fans and Twitter followers are also a significant enhancement. Try to design these in the same style as the site. If you can’t do that, outsource it. Someone can create a nice Facebook Fan Page and Twitter background for your sites.

Promote the Site

Now that you’ve built it, promote it. Buy some social bookmarking gigs on Fiverr to get it indexed and get backlinks. Use other reputable backlinking services for more backlinks. Don’t make the mistake of buying “backlink blasts” of thousands of low quality links which could put your site square in Google’s sandbox for some time. Slower link building is better.

If you’ve done the on page SEO for your articles and you’re building backlinks, you should start seeing some traffic. Have some related affiliate ads and/or Adsense on the site and try to get a little revenue going. That’s a huge plus when selling a site on Flippa. In particular, buyers on Flippa love Adsense sites. Even a small Adsense income for a start-up site will increase it’s value.

Do these things and you’ll be way ahead of the competition on Flippa. Much of the work involved can be outsourced if you can’t or don’t want to do it yourself.

Legally Sell or Giveaway PREMIUM WordPress Themes – Comes with Over $1000 Worth of PREMIUM Themes

My Review

How to Leverage the Hard Work and Creativity of Others for Your Own Personal Gain

See Also Bogus Lawsuits and Douchebags Get a Lump of Coal for Christmas

Yep, I purchased this seller’s “product” so that I could provide an informative review of this “product.” This WSO is all about profiting from other people’s hard work, by giving away or selling or leveraging in other ways, Premium WordPress themes and plugins. It’s a tiny pdf that explains GPL licensing for WordPress themes. You can, of course, get all that GPL info for free at the link above or thousands of other places on the Internet for free. There are 3 1/3 pages just talking about GPL. Then there’s two 1/3 pages with all his “creative” ideas on how to monetize all these free premium WordPress themes and plugins. The ideas are a no brainer that anyone with the ethics of this seller could easily conjure up.

The themes he was distributing were old versions of Woo Themes and Gabfire. As an example, I examined six of the Woo Themes he gives a link to and the files were all from 2009. The new Woo framework with all the bells and whistles that provides, plus all the security updates, including timbthumb.php update is not included. Do you know how many updates there’s been to Woo Themes since 2009? A lot.

When this seller was asked if he purchased these and were they downloaded from the source, he said yes, he purchased them in 2010 (liar, liar, pants on fire). When asked to provide proof of purchase, he blew that off. If these were downloaded from the source in 2010, they would not be files from 2009, now would they? I posted the changelogs and a screenshot of one of the 2009 versions he distributed with the version number on it … irrefutable proof that these files had not been downloaded in 2010, as he had said they were. My posts/proof that he is a flat out liar were deleted. Until he was busted, he was distributing 2 year old files that he downloaded from who knows where, containing who knows what malware and links in them.

It’s actually the lure of the Free Premium WordPress themes that are selling this WSO rather than the “course” he’s promoting. If he hadn’t added that little ebook on GPL licensing (which you can find out about all over the Internet for free), the listing wouldn’t even be eligible for a WSO, since none of the themes he is giving away are his work. People love freebies, right?

Listen to this bit of copy from the WSO listing …

I am going to teach you how to legally profit from the hard work of others. Everyday, I leverage the hard work of others to build massive email lists, add huge bonuses to my products (loose description of what he sells), and build loyalty amongst my followers.

It’s all around us… work that is done for us and ready to be leveraged. No, I’m not talking about PLR. I’m talking about WordPress Themes and Plugins.

Premium WordPress themes are big business and my product will show you

How to Legally Sell Premium WordPress Themes and Plugins, while Keeping 100% of the Profits

Ironically, he is distributing his “course” as an exe file to prevent sharing on the blackhat sites. Seems he would like to protect his “intellectual (and I use that term loosely in this case) property.” Hey Buddy …sharing is caring. Right? And you should have heard him scream and holler like a bitch when another of his products was shared on blackhat sites all over the Internet. Any infringement on his products, whether real or imagined, is met with his wrath and fury, but he doesn’t seem to care about pillaging those who develop WordPress products for his own gain. Legal … yes. He can get away with it legally. Ethical? Moot point. He has no ethics.

If your company wants to develop for WordPress, you have to swallow the GPL licensing for the parts of your code that use core WordPress code. This “software should be free” model is shoved down the throats of any developer that wants to build products to be used with WordPress by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. Contentious? Of course. It’s no secret that Woo Themes and Chris Pearson, the creator of Thesis had bitter confrontations over this issue (and probably many others), but Matt Mullenweg won in the final round and both Woo Themes and the Thesis developer had to swallow this licensing in order to continue developing their themes for WordPress. Quite honestly, if there weren’t talented developers who created themes and plugins for WordPress, I wouldn’t even use WordPress. The default themes given by WordPress are butt ugly and their functionality would be mediocre without the great commercial WordPress plugins available. It took the hard work of theme and plugin developers to make WordPress worth using.

Pillaging for Profit

Matt Mullenweg describes himself as an “Open Source Hippy.”

WordPress.com founder Matt Mullenweg said everything, not just software, should be open source and described himself as an “open source hippie.” Recently, the site’s founder professed his love for all things open source. Mullenweg was cited as saying, “I believe morally and philosophically that not just software, but everything should be open source,” according to ZDNet at the GigaOM Roadmap 2011 Summit in San Francisco, California. Source

From another interview, he describes his philosophy on GPL as being much like the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s people like this seller who then exploit the GPL by interpreting it to give them a license to pillage other people’s products for their own personal gain, hardly the real spirit of GPL licensing.

If anyone doubts that it is NOT Woo’s intention that their themes be given away for free, here is the post on their blog that talks about this.

So what does this mean?

The only thing that really changes, is that there’s no more restrictions on a Standard / Single and Developer License i.e. you can use these themes on unlimited domains irrespective of the package you choose (view a comparison of the different packages here).

The themes aren’t free and you still need to buy them! (i.e. there’s no hidden download link somewhere)

Of course in the forum that he frequents, you’ll hear him defending intellectual property rights, but in practice, that sentiment is quickly discarded when he can make a buck from other people’s hard work and get away with it. This seller defends his behavior under the guise of legality. Yeah, it’s legal, but anyone with an ounce of brain matter knows that the companies that develop and sell premium WordPress themes and plugins are in to make money, as they should be.

A lot of hard work, talent and creativity go into those themes, and it should be rewarded. Do the right thing and ignore parasitic charlatans. Reward the people who develop for WordPress and bring so much extra value to the platform. If not … no need to waste $10 on the course that teaches you to profit from other’s hard work. In a nutshell, you can get away with giving away, selling … whatever WordPress themes and plugins under GPL licensing. It does not give you the right to give away the parts of their product that are not licensed under GPL. As an example, the Photoshop files for Woo Themes are not GPL licensed, and therefore cannot legally be distributed, but I doubt that will stand in the way of the crowd that does this sort of thing. Do what he did to monetize. This con artist basically launched a WSO that provided filesharing links to around 70 of these themes. Not only does he make $10 a shot for each sale, but he is building a huge list, so give them away, use them to build a big list, stuff the themes with your ads and links and upload them everywhere, use them to get traffic to your website, use them in a membership site or as bonuses or OTOs, put them up somewhere and charge for them, whatever. He even suggests that you acquire GPL licensed plugins and change the Paypal donation button in them to YOUR Paypal button. Anything goes. There, I just saved you $10 bucks.

WHAT YOU DON’T GET WITH A GPL LICENSE

This seller is distributing these themes via the ordinary filesharing sites that you can find all kinds of stolen and pirated stuff on. There’s no telling what he stuffed them with before uploading. After all, do you trust a theme from a guy who advises in his course to stuff that theme with whatever you want in there, your links and encrypt it to prevent it from being removed?

When you buy a beautiful, highly functional theme from a theme company, let’s say Woo Themes for instance, you get excellent support in their support forum for the theme and you get very timely updates every time WordPress is updated or they add new features, which is often. You also get clean code that is free of malware and spam links.

As in the recent update, some updates are security updates. Woo Themes updated all of their blogs when a vulnerability was discovered with the timthumb.php file that many Premium themes use. You get no support or updates from themes that you don’t pay for.

Because free WordPress themes are so popular, they are a favorite way for spammers, scam artists, and hackers to cash in or just wreak havoc by delivering malware to unsuspecting users. They simply download the themes, alter them by adding base64 encrypted codes in the functions.php file of the themes. When the code is decrypted, they contain malware or spam links. Find out more about malware distribution through free WordPress themes in Anatomy of a Theme Malware and Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else.

The best and safest place to get free WordPress themes is from the WordPress.org official WordPress theme repository. The best place to get Premium WordPress themes are from the theme author’s website. Any other distribution, especially from file sharing sites, is very risky and not worth the few bucks you’ll save by trying to find commercial, free Premium WordPress themes.

It’s up to you to decide whether or not your website is important enough to purchase the themes directly from the vendors and receive clean code that is updated frequently and support is provided. It’s really a no brainer for me, but I build my sites for the long term. I use a lot of Woo Themes … have bought many developer versions of their themes and the support and updates are world class. They’ve fairly recently added a framework to their themes that makes setting the options and adding advertising a real breeze.

Their themes are extremely easy to customize. I use a highly customized version of the Gazette theme for my plrstyle.com sites. The customizations include a larger sidebar for better advertising display and a more attractive header area for customizing your header.

Then there’s the issue of website flipping. Do you really want to use a free theme with no support and questionable coding for the sites you sell? Not me. I want to be able to stand by the themes I use and provide an update or support when necessary.

What it boils down to is that you get what you pay for. Pay nothing … get an old theme, containing possibly malicious coding and backlinks to the distributor’s sites, no updates and no support. Your business is probably worth more than that. I know mine is.

You can download the full Moving a Site from One Host to Another Host pdf at http://flipace.com/transfer.pdf or buy the full Flip Ace Ebook here.

How to Transfer a Site From One Host to the Next

These instructions are for hosting with cpanel and for transferring one site from one host to another host.

First, you go into the File Manager in the cpanel where the site is currently hosted and choose the domain you want to transfer.

When you have a list of all the files, choose select all to select all the files. Once all the files are selected, you can use the Cntrl key to deselect the folders you don’t want, like cgi-bin.

With all the files that you want selected, go to top navigation bar of the File Manager and choose “Compress”. Choose Zip Archive for Compression Type and then in the url box, choose the name that you want to call the zip file. Do not remove any of the path information … just change the name of the zip file to what you want it to be. Then click on Compress File(s) and it will create the zip file from all of the files selected.

EXPORTING THE DATABASE

Select your database name on the left hand side. Go to Export using the tabs in the centre of the screen.

Your next step is choosing what to export (geeky code stuff, scary!)

Click “Select All” at the top and “SQL” of the circle buttons.

Choose the above options under Structure on the right hand side.

Choose the below options under Data.

Next, check Save As file, hit Go and save the .sql file to your desktop.

CHANGING THE DNS TO THE NEW HOST

Now’s a good time to change the DNS to the nameservers of the new host. You do this in the registry where you purchased the domain. You can usually find the nameservers of the new host on the cpanel, often in the sidebar.

Now you need to go to the cpanel of the new host and add the domain on if it is a host with numerous domains. If the new host is just hosting this domain only and it is the main domain for this hosting package, you can skip this step. In your cpanel, go to Addon Domains.

1. Go to your domain name registrar company on the Web. Log in to your account by typing your username and password in the appropriate fields. Wait for the page to download completely to see the list of your domain names.
2. Select your new domain name. If you have multiple domain names you will want to make sure you choose the correct name. Choose only the name of the domain that you wish to edit.
3. Go to the domain name’s control panel or configuration page by clicking on the provided link. Choose the link that will allow you to change the domain name’s name servers from the different configuration options.
4. Delete the old name servers from the field and enter the new name servers. Enter the correct name server codes for the primary and secondary fields. Check your new name server for the corresponding codes.
5. Save the changes you made. Depending on your registrar company, the modifications you made may take from 24 to 48 hours before they can take effect. It does not usually take this long, but don’t be alarmed if it does.

ADDING ON THE DOMAIN NAME TO THE NEW HOST

This is a screenshot of Hostgator Add-on Domain. Other cpanels hosts will be similar, but may not be exact. In the first box, type in the domain name without the http://. The second and third box will fill in automatically. You then either generate a password, or make up your own and type it in. If you generate one, it will fill it in automatically. You need to make a note of the password, as you will use it to log into your WordPress backend.

CREATING THE DATABASE ON THE NEW HOST

You can create a database through your cPanel.

Create a database.

Name it after your website so you don’t forget.

You’ll also need to create a username and password. Please make note of the password, the database name and the user as you will need this information for your wp-config.php file.

And then create your new user.

Lastly, add your new user to your new database.

Make sure when you add the user to your database that you check all the permissions for your new user. You want this user to have all permissions.

EDITING THE WP-CONFIG FILE.

You’re next step is editing your wp-config file. You need to let WordPress know what database you’re working with. You can find the exact name and user name of the database in your SQL Databases on your cpanel that you just used to create the database. It will have a prefix and you need the prefix plus the name you named the database, (i.e., myhost_nicheblog. The user name will also have the prefix.

You’ll need to update WP-config to show the new database name, username and password. Here’s the part you need to find:

UPLOADING YOUR WORDPRESS FILES

Remember the zip file you created in the beginning of all your WordPress files? If you didn’t download it to your computer, do that now. Then upload the entire zip file to the new server in the public_html (or root directory) of your domain. If there’s only one domain on the new host, the root will be public_html folder. If there are more than one domain, it will be in the domain folder (i.e., public_html/flipace. You should use an FTP (file transfer program) to make this easier. A great (free) one that I use is
FileZilla
.

After it is uploaded to the new server, go to the File Manager in the new host cpanel and go to the domain. Checkmark the zip file and extract it.

You can use your cPanel details on FTP.

Last step – Uploading the database

You now have a fully functional WordPress blog on your buyer’s hosting plan.

The following is a visual instructions for making the database changes.

Go to
http://domainingdiva.com/database.jpg

In the database, you also need to change the upload path to the new one. Click on the database name in the left panel and then click on Search. Select all and type in public_html for the search. It should come up with a couple of entries in wp_options. Click on the one that says upload path and open it.

Go to
http://domainingdiva.com/database2.jpg

One final change to the database is to change the user password to what you want.

Go to http://domainingdiva.com/database3.jpg

PUSHING THE DOMAIN

After you’ve determined that everything is functioning correctly on the new host, it’s time to push the domain to the buyer. You’ve already set the nameservers to his/hers, so now you only need to give it to him.

I use Namecheap.com for my domains and it’s a simple process to push a domain to another person. First, they must have a Namecheap.com acct or an account at whichever registrar the domain is at. Normally, you just go into your domain management functions and click on the domain to see all the options available.

Click on “Push Domain to User” and then type in their user name

Note: The new user must have all their contact info filled out, or the push will fail. If it does, just contact them and ask them to fill out all their contact info.

Note: While it often resolves instantly, it can take up to 24 hours for a domain name to resolve after you change the nameservers. If you can’t log in to the WordPress admin, wait 24 hours and you should be able to log in.

That’s all there is to it.

Good luck!

http://www.twitter.com/DomainingDiva

You can download the full Moving a Site from One Host to Another Host pdf at http://flipace.com/transfer.pdf

What could I possibly say that I haven’t already and many others haven’t already said about Sitepoint launching it’s new marketplace for buying and selling websites, called Flippa. Suffice it to say, buyers and sellers alike are very unhappy with it.

For whatever reasons, they thought that switching from a highly successful and highly usable interface to a queasy looking Twittery blue Web 2.0 with pathetic usability was a good move. They also apparently think that shoving something down paying customer’s throats that they don’t want and charging them a great deal more for the service is a good idea. When users complained about the interface as well as the exhorbitant price increase, this is what Mark Harbottle: Co-Founder of Sitepoint has this to say to his paying customers who voiced their thoughts on the new Flippa:

Thanks for all your positive feedback guys. We appreciate it. One thing to keep in mind…
Our buyers aren’t going anywhere. They are savvy business people. They don’t care about the design of the site or the fact the logo sucks (the current logo is a placeholder BTW), they simply get on with the business of buying, and we’ve made it a lot easier for them to do that on flippa.com.

Meanwhile while you all whine and complain about the fees, the design, etc. the smart sellers are listing their sites on flippa.com and they are attracting the majority of the buyer interest. They will also get the added benefit of the PR we’re about to roll out.

So, it’s totally up to you! If you want to come across to flippa and sell your site in the professional marketplace we’re creating for serious buyers, we welcome you with open arms. If not, please do go to digitalpoint. List your site for free and see if the old adage of “you get what you pay for” applies.

He also indicated that he doesn’t want to hear any more complaints about the pricing.

In a comment on this post, Matt Mickiewicz says that Mark has already apologized on the CenterNetworks blogs regarding his poor choice of words.  In case anyone missed the big apology, here it is:

“Mark Harbottle says …. I’ll stop by here Allen. Perhaps a poor choice of words, but I stand by message…”

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like an apology to me.

As a sort of bandaid to the bleeding wound that the 5% success fee has caused in addition to the increased listing price, Flippa staff changed the success fee to where the sellers can now be the bad guy and pass this extra cost on to the buyers if they choose to. Buyers are going to love that, aren’t they?

Considering that sales on Sitepoint have been pretty slow the last couple of months, I don’t think gouging the buyers for an additional 5% is a good idea. But hey … that’s just me.

Now I don’t know about you, but considering that Flippa has had such a rocky launch, calling his paying customers names does not seem like a good idea to me. I’d try a little ass kissing if it were my business that was on life support.

Contrary to what the Flippa staff is telling people, the new site has slowed down considerably. When I was using Sitepoint daily, my listings would scroll off the first page within 1/2 day because of all the new listings being created. It now takes 2 days for listings to scroll off the first page.  All of these changes haven’t changed one thing that was very wrong with the old marketplace called Sitepoint … and that is the large amount of scammers, both buyers and sellers on the site.  It appears to me that the legitimate sellers have been offended and insulted into looking into new options while the same old scammers are sticking it out at Flippa.  Just scrolling through the diminishing listings on the front page, I see the same old scam sellers selling the same old cloned traffic sites and MMR packages, the same old Revolution Church sites that are a dime a dozen … only difference now is they are charging more to make up for their losses in the new pricing and some are passing that success fee onto their buyers.

Matt says that’s because on the Sitepoint marketplace, the other listings came in as well.  Ok.  Probably true enough, but it looks to me like they’ve now cut off the lifeline of the Sitepoint marketplace.  I used to browse and buy from other categories, such as templates, scripts, domains, etc.  I only noticed them because I was there to buy and sell sites.  I don’t check them out any longer, and according to this Alexa screen, I’m not the only one who is not visiting the Sitepoint marketplace any longer.

In addition, we keep hearing from Sitepoint staff about all the sales the site continues to make.   Ok … so let’s take a look at today’s sales.

You can see that the majority of the sales being made are the low end, dirt cheap sites.  I was under the impression that the NEW site would be catering more to the high end.  That doesn’t appear to be the case.   It looks like the same old same old all dressed up in blue Web 2.0 to disguise the fact that the site is still full of people out to make a quick buck rather than savvy professional buyers and sellers.

Whenever a service fails so miserably to make it’s customers happy, you can bet there’s a new service around the corner to pick up the pieces.

Enter Sitedeal.org

Sitedeal.org is a brand new marketplace for buying and selling websites and unbelievably, it is free. You can pay for some upgrades, but listing on the site is completely free. The site is packed full of features.

One feature I particularly love is the Sitedeal Stores. I’ve built one already. You can see it here. Within a couple of hours of placing my listings there, I was getting pms from interested buyers. One buyer likes my sites and is interested in a package deal. That’s more interest than I’ve gotten from Sitepoint for a couple of months now, other than the “savvy Flippa buyers” who pm me to offer me $65 for a network of 4 Tattoo sites that gets over 21,000 visitors per month and has revenue.

I could go on and on about the potential and features of Sitedeal.org, but just go check it out for yourself … and while you’re there, Stumble it, bookmark it, Tweet about it, blog about it. Shout about it. It’s a whole lot better than the alternative.

In case you want to check out the reaction to Flippa, here’s the links:

Don’t Flippa off your customers

Flippa: It’s Alive (from the Sitepoint Forum)

Flippa is Alive from the Warrior Forum

SitePoint Spins Off Website Marketplace As Flippa, Upsets Users from Techcrunch

I’m writing this because probably a lot of my readers are newbies who buy sites and may be buying from Sitepoint and other forums/auction sites.  I use Sitepoint to sell my sites and occasionally buy some sites from Sitepoint.

If you buy sites on Sitepoint, you really need to do some homework. There are a lot of sellers who are purchasing MMR products that cost $10 or less, setting it up on a domain, and selling it for $167 more or less.  When I say a lot, I mean a lot.

Some of them even try to pass these MMR sites off as unique.  They advertise them as unique, but they are far from unique.  I saw yet another one of them two days ago that advertised the site as unique.  I found it for $49 by Googling and this scammer was charging $797 for this site.  I pm’d him and gave him the $49 link to the exact same site.  His response?  He gave me a link to the exact product that costs $5.99.   What can you say to that kind of arrogance and pure rip-off mentality?

Apparently this type of thing is not against TOS, so it is up to YOU to research the site before investing your hard-earned cash.

How to Flush Out the Rip-Off Artists

Use Copyscape.com for starters.  It will tell you if a site has duplicate content.  In addition, you can use Google.

Take a headline or paragraph and do this

“place headline here or paragraph or sentences” in Google with the quotes.  It will return any content within the quotes.  When you look at the results, look for Master Resale Sites listed and check it out.  You may find that there’s a Master Resale Rights product for a couple of bucks identical to what is being sold as a unique product on Sitepoint for over $100 or you may find that the site being sold is using PLR articles that are already all over the Internet.

Here’s another tip on how to spot the scammers.  Click on their profile and check all the sites they’ve been selling.  Click on each of them to see if they keep selling the same sites over and over.  Right now there’s a little scammer on Sitepoint who is selling the exact same “traffic selling” site over and over, just changing the template and domain name, but it’s the same site and he’s listed well over 20 of them so far.  And people keep buying them.  Not only is the market completely oversaturated with this BS site he’s selling, but Sitepoint is now overrun with people trying to sell “traffic” from these clone sites.

Take the time to do the research.

With the current state of the economy here in the US some of you might wonder if domaining is still a viable means of online income.  Here’s my experience.  I have a lot of domain names just sitting parked right now, but one by one, I am developing them.  I choose the best, most interesting names, develop a site, get it indexed, get some traffic and sell them at a nice profit.  All this, of course, takes work.  So many people want to just buy a domain name and sell it at a huge profit without doing anything to it.  That works for some really high-powered domain names, but for the average portfolio, it doesn’t … at least not for me.

Even if you don’t want to develop, in order to get more than reseller profit from a domain name, it’s going to take work.  In order to make a real profit from a domain name, you need to sell it to an end-user rather than a reseller.  Finding and contacting those end users takes time and work.  I’ve done it both ways … finding end users and developing.  I enjoy developing more than cold calling (via email) end users.

There’s a trend to develop mini-sites rather than park a domain.  That’s a good start, or at least a better alternative to parking sites, but I develop full sites rather than mini-sites.  It’s all about the end user.  As an end user myself, someone who purchases sites, I never throw money at “made for Adsense” mini-sites.  Number one reason is that I could throw that up in no time myself.  Number two reason, I don’t find them fun or appealing in any way.  If they make you some money … good, but people pay pretty well, even in this economy, for a well-developed and designed site in a hot niche.

Here’s some sites I’ve sold recently:

Land of Shopportunity
Anime Zoo
Dot Com Mogul

Here’s some I have in development:

eMovieTrailer
Simple Yoga

That’s just a few of them. I have more in different stages of development. Once they are developed, I get them indexed and get traffic going to them. How do I do that? Simple. I own Firestorm Forum, a social bookmarking exchange community and when I exchange bookmarks, let’s say Stumbles (that works best for me), the site is indexed within 48 hrs .. usually 24 and has great traffic stats immediately (unless, of course, the site is a real dog). It works beautifully and having the site well-indexed in Google and traffic stats to show off adds a great deal of value to the site and gives you some selling points for listing.

Where to sell?

I have my best luck selling on Sitepoint. It costs money but has been well worth it for me. One tip for selling a site on Sitepoint is to make a great sales page. Be sure to mention all of the assets of the site … how many posts, how much traffic, revenue if any, site features, potential to make money (ie … do you already have Adsense and ads in place?). Here’s one of my listings to give you an example of listing the site’s selling points.

One thing about developing nice sites to sell … you can even flip a weak domain name if you have a great site established on it … not a really crappy domain name … just a bit weak. Of course, if the site is really great, it might even sell to someone who purchases a better domain name for it.

What kind of sites to develop?

I have two favorites … WordPress blogs and Joomla sites. Many people know how to set up a WordPress blog, so that is probably the easiest site to get established. Joomla sites are a bit more complex and often the best components to add features to your site are commercial, so you have to sink a little money into the site. To tell you the truth, 6 weeks ago I wouldn’t have been able to put a nice Joomla site together to save my life. Then I bought one really cheap and had to buckle down and get to know Joomla in order to add value to the site and fix some problems. It didn’t take long to become a Joomla enthusiast and all in all, it was a pretty short learning curve.

So that’s it …my advice for selling domains in a bad economy. Works well for me. Hope it does for you as well.