Using Flippa to Make Money

Sep 8th, 2009 Domains 1 Comment

Basically Flippa is a place where you can buy and sell websites. However, it also gives you an insight into what sites sell for the most amount of money which should help inspired Web Millionaires to know what to produce and how to produce it.

Using Flippa

Flippa used to be a popular section of the Sitepoint forum where you can buy and sell websites and domain names.

It’s expanded greatly as indicated by the amount of sales and revenue earnt at the bottom of the homepage! Buying and selling site is huge business and prices can range from $75 to upto $150,000! Although it’s worthwhile to note that only 35% of sites get sold overall so targeting the right buyer is key.

There is a set fee to pay, then a % of the seller/buyers fee, so I’d suggest you have a quality site to sale at a high price otherwise there is no point in using this service.

How to make money using Flippa

The people who sell effectively are those who don’t promote the website’s name, but promote values such as:

Revenue earnt per month
Unique views
Alexa Ranking
Dmoz listed (Being listed in Dmoz can increase your value)
Backlinks (in particular Google backlinks)

They also make the most money using:

Adsense
Direct Advertisers (Although this can be a dark area for certain buyers)
Clickbank
Ebay EPN

It’s important to base your listing on a seller’s need as they usually ask for information like:

Full Google Analytics Stats
How much bandwidth is used, content platform (i.e Wordpress), time taken and pageviews
Revenue is earnt in the last 6 months
Ranked keyword positions (Google)

Sellers usually price sites on 10 to 12 months worth of income, however site’s can sell for a lot more depending on future earnings/statistics. I also think sellers need to be realistic in their set price depending on potential revenue and stay away from terms such as “never monetised the site” or “never got had time to use X offers” – these friendly comments should be seen as a warning as we’re all in the business to make money here and not monetising it properly is a big no no.

Most Expensive Sites

For buyers, it seems like the bottom dollar value of “How much can I make from this site” and “How popular is the site” are the most important things. If you plan to sell your site, think of it from a buyer’s angle…it’s all about revenue!

Sites that sell the most use:

Clickbank
Sites which link up to Clickbank, create referrals to Clickbank or paying money to affiliates. Example: Clickbank Membership site

Ranked Keywords
Usually these sites are quite old and have high PR. Also the amount of backlinks from established sites also help towards getting a good price for this type of site. Example: Football Keyworded site

eBooks
I never understood how a site could make money from having a one paged site which wasn’t designed very well, to a link up to an email form which they requires the user to purchase an eBook online for a set price. However, people are doing it and making money from it. I think it relates to Clickbank products too. Example: eBook Site.

Conclusion

For SEO Masters, it’s a quick way of starting up a niche site exploiting the short term SEO results from sites like Google and making a small fortune basing revenue on 1 month’s results. Other ways are to sell niche sites which rank highly for specific keyword phrases (even if those phrases aren’t that popular). Again Flippa sales depend on the buyer. If the buyer has a lot of cash, then in their mind they’re already looking for sites for a specific need which fullful specific criteria. As a seller, you need to make your site’s criteria very clear – if you make a lot of revenue – tell the buyer. If you get a lot of visitors or have high page rank, tell them also.

I’d suggest listing sites for $2000 minimum to make it worth your while. A site which you haven’t used or made much money from still has some form of value depending on it’s domain name, age and (aged) backlinks.