There must be someone on this forum that has purchased a website through flippa and had it make money for them. Or are we all busy selling

Ya... I wonder who is buying these sites?

If you want to buy site from Flippa be careful. A lot of sellers are using fake stats there.

Yes, I have!!

I bought a site that was making a little on Clickbank, maybe a sale a week. This year it has made me a sale a day after some further promotion and traffic routes I knew would work for it. It is actually turning into a little authority site in its niche.

In fact, I bought 3 websites last year that all generate significantly more money for me now than they did when I bought them. If I flipped any of these now, I would at least quadruple what I paid for them each, easily.

My advice is to buy websites that match any or all of these things:

1. A Solid Foundation (Unique, Already Earning or Aged In Google etc.)

2. A Theme Or About A Niche You Are Interested In

3. Potential And Room For Improvement. By Looking At The Website, Can You See What You Can Do To Make More From It? If you can't, don't buy it!

If I match any, or all of the above, I will probably buy! Especially point One and Three!

I have also bought sites that have not returned on the investment, and that was before I took the 3 points above into consideration. And, when I look now, the sites I bought that were duds do not match any of the above points.

Luckily the duds didn't cost too much, so I am not too bothered!

Hope that helps,

GoGetta

Some gems can be found on Flippa but they are few and far between, it's kind of like a car boot sale, you've got to rummage through all the crap to find the hidden gem.

When analysing a website to purchase before you even load up flippa sit back and make a promise to yourself that you wont get emotionally caught in the "what could be" mindset, if someone is claiming a $500 a month consistent income through their site and is selling it for $1300 then be sceptical, within three months they could make that money over so why are they selling?

Traffic stats can also very easily be faked and you need to know exactly where that source of traffic is coming from, organic seo? ppc? articles and blogs etc.

Why is the owner selling it? this is not a question asked by many buyers but is damn well important, you need to know specifically why the owner is seling? Was it a trend site, are the commissions and traffic dying off?

Go over everything with a fine toothcomb and question everything.

I've bought plenty of sites on Flippa, but as has been said you do need to watch out for scams. There are a lot of them out there.

I remember about 5 years ago now there was a website for sale that generated a lot of buzz. They were claiming to make $600k/month in income (the site was myspace-layout related if I remember right) and they were selling it for 300k. Everyone was awed at the fact that it was going for 300k, until it turned out that myspace had blocked the code the site was using and so their income had basically dried up. I don't know if they eventually sold the site or not.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But that said, there are definitely some gems to be found in Flippa.

I agree with Jason too regarding getting emotionally attached to buying a site, this can happen if you are not careful and you can end up paying more than you wanted too.

I also think its important to know why they are selling too, but this can also be faked to easy. The "I want to focus on other projects" and "I need cash to invest in other businesses" can be used in any instance whether it is true or not. So, I probably wouldn't think too much into that.

You can tell which sites are worth it and which aren't and if you are not entirely sure what you could do to make more money or profit from a site, don't buy it!

GoGetta

I used to buy a lot of sites from Flippa when it was on Sitepoint. There were a lot of really great sites sold for cheap that were ugly, but in good niches and had unique content.

Those days are over. There is so much crap that I usually end up closing the browser tab in disgust after searching. Scams and crap. Occasional gems if you're lucky enough to find it. You really have to do due diligence if you're going to spend money there, especially if you're going to drop a lot of cash. Even then, it's no guarantee that screenshots are accurate. Check traffic referring urls. I didn't and found that I'd just bought a site with nothing but cheap purchased useless traffic.

Recently I bought a site for $12,000. I've made my investment back and the site continues to earn money.

I only bought it because it is in a niche I am familiar with, so I knew about the site before it was being sold. Most people on flippa are trying to scam you, so it's best to stick with sites and niches that you know a lot about so you can more easily tell which sites are bad/scammy and which sites are gems.

I sold one of my sites on flippa a while back when I just wanted to sell everything I had and focus on some of my other responsibilities. It was a review page for a product that was ranked around position 3-4 on the first page of google for a keyword. I would check on it time to time to see what was going on and in about 4 months the site moved to the first position. I'm guessing from the buyer's standpoint, they saw that if they put a bit more work into it, it could potentially be more profitable.

I sold a niche site on flippa for $1,100. It came with a list of just over 1,000 subscribers and making a $27 sale every 3rd day on average.

As a seller it was very hard to get noticed on flippa and people wanted to do a screen share to confirm the results I was claiming. I spent hours trying to satisfy the potential bidders and only ended up with 2 bidders that actually bid.

I would have been better off just keeping the site. I think flippa needs to make some changes to benefit both the buyers and sellers.

Cheers
Ian McConnell

Yes, One of my friends sold over 5 websites so far and he made almost 400-500$ per website (It took him 3-4 days to make 1 site). The niche he picked was pretty awesome and his sites were sold out instantly.

Now he is working on more websites and he is having a nice success with those

Yes, if you are going to be buying a website you can make money but you need to know what you are doing and how to promote sites.

Helps if you know a little bit about the niche you are going to be selling too. It is more than possible though to buy a site, jazz it up + make it convert and make WAY more than what you bought it for.

Chris

Much like Suzanne said, I used to get great ROI's on sites when it was on the Sitepoint platform.

When I'm looking to buy a site, I'm not looking for income. Income is something that can be skewed in so many ways that it is never guaranteed. You can skew income screenshots, show a Paypal account that has nothing to do with the site except it uses the same email. That paypal account may have $15,000 in it, but it's not the site that is creating it...

I look for sites with traffic.

On the internet. Traffic = money. The best buy is a site that has 30,000 monthly uniques and the owner genuinely doesn't know what to do with that traffic...

Then you go in, drop some Adsense on the site, some targeted offers... your ROI is within a month.

--------------------------------

One of my greatest Flipping stories was a site I bought for $9,900 that had 50,000 unqiues per month. It was a blog, the owner made it because he loved the niche and loved to talk about it, the content was pure gold and naturally received it's traffic.

He didn't know how to monetize it.

I took the site, put together some adsense on pages, added three CPA offers, as well as linked up to various affiliate programs. In two months I had my ROI, in the next 5 months made over $20k with it, and then sold it for over 6 figures...

bottom line...

look for potential, not income.

i usualy sell on flippa but i bought 2 sites form there that had 150% ROI so im ok with flippa