Web Ladder – Websites for sale blog

Name: MICHAEL CAMPBELL
Email: MCAMPBELL168(@)GMAIL.COM
Site PR: greater than 1
Want to buy: I would like to buy an established social network site.
I am not interested in any monthly revenue as much as I am interested in a site that has more than 500 members.

Name: mel
Email: mel@pluginid.com
Site PR: Doesn't matter

Want to buy: I am looking to buy websites with decent revenue, my budget is up to 50 K per website. Please mail me for more information

Hi all,

I’ve just bought a PR4 directory on Sitepoint. I will talk about it on another post, but here I want to talk about the system of Sitepoint.

In the old system you used to get an instant alert when someone put a comment or bid. It was very good because most of the time the comment was already in the email, saving you time.

In the new system you get ‘auction digest’ which is very poor. First it is not instant and arrive with some delays. Second you just get a message saying ‘there is new comment and 1 new bid’

but worse of it – you don’t get alerts when it matters. On this auction I discovered 27 minutes before the end that I am not the higher bidder. Why? because the seller didn’t accept the bid. Why sellers need to confirm bids? I don’t know.

In this case I put more bids as some others, and the seller accepted them only hours after the auction ended. So I didn’t know if I won or lost until the day after.

I’ve talked long ago about the problem with each bid extending the auction by another 4 hours. It is so annoying that you can never know when the auction ends. This is not a real auction in my point of view.But in the new system it is even worse – not only it reset the time, it adds 4 hours to the time that was left. So if the auction should ended in 3 hours when a new bid comes, the new end time is 7 hours forward. Gosh.

And last thing – Buy it now , you have to pay the full amount to secure the website. I can see the logic, but most of the time I won’t pay 100% in one payment. I prefer to split it into two so I am sure I am not dealing with a scammer. I wanted to buy it now, but I was put off by the immediate payment request.

All of these and some other odds things make the buying experience not user friendly and you waste a lot of time try to buy one small website.

Shame

Hi all,

A year ago or so Sitepoint has opened a new section called ‘Premium Web Sites for Sale‘ I can understand why they did that, and it makes a lot of sense to dived the bigger website from the smaller ones. It is also a good way to charge twice insert fees.

But from investment point of view you can’t really find good deals there. Why? because the seller already treat his website as premium and expect to get premium price for it. This is good if you want to sell a website, but not so good if you look for good deals.

So most of the time the price is well out of proportion there. Just a quick example:

Have a look on this auction this is a forum with $20 monthly income. And the starting price is $5000 buy it now $9999. This is a joke. No one will pay this money for $20 a month. Yes it has traffic so?

Looking for good deals? don’t search there. Having said so, if you are looking for buy an established website with income and traffic and you don’t mind paying premium price, this is your place

Hi all,

Have a look here on this auction

You get a site that has some traffic (500 a month) has 86 subscribers and nice design. All of these for…

$25! at least this is the starting bid of it. My advice – put a bid and find someone that can update the site.

Strong buy!

Hello all,

I saw on Digitalpoint forum someone asking what are the main things I need to look for?

This is a good question and the answer was on the same level. The user pipes posted this answer. My comments are in bold.

* Domain age. Buy at least one year old domain
* Directory age.
* History of domain. Check in the internet archive that the directory wasn’t something else before
* Reputation of current owner.
* Any current penalisation.
* Any past penalisation.
* Listed Sites.
* Reason for selling. They will tell you I don’t have time. Try to find the real answer
* Seller has a history of flipping sites.
* Any accounts closed that were connected to the directory, ie: paypal, adsense, anything.
* Any promises, obligations made to the past customers of the directory.
* Any shady promotional efforts.
* The true traffic, not the bots and all other traffic that shouldn’t be included. AWstat will give you a good picture
* How easy will it be for the new owner to upgrade the script, mods, etc.
* Expenditure against actual profit, breaking even, in the red, actually making a profit.
* Profit from listings? adsense? anythingthing else?
* Any other obligations

Hope it helps…!

Hi all,

You just bought a website – you paid, you transfer it to your server, everything seems to work fine. Great. Now what?

Let me tell you this – 99.9% of the websites that are been sold need improvements. It is rare to find a website that’s running on auto pilot mode and generates money. No one is stupid enough to sell this kind of website. So on each website for sale there is something wrong that the previous owner didn’t know how to deal with it, so he decided to pass the problem to someone else and earn some cash while doing so.

This is fine as long you remember it! It is very important rule, and it is better to be prepared. I will give you an example. I bought this art website. I like art, and I thought that this site has a potential. It was a pr3 with some income but not a lot of traffic, and I thought I could do better.

So I bought it. First mistake was that it was all written in cold fusion and I am a php developer. So I couldn’t change a thing… In fact the job was so big to convert the site to php that I had to hired a company to do so. (Great one by the way) so another $1000 went down.

Now I know how to bring more traffic and increase the PR. First you want to buy PR6 link somewhere. They are not that expensive and can boost your traffic and rank. A great place to do so is Lola directory Just for the record this is my directory, but it is so good that I had to recommend it.

But traffic and pr is not enough, and I didn’t know a lot about the market. Not a lot are willing to pay for paints online. So I have traffic, but I didn’t solve the problem of the old owner – Selling arts… I now it can be done, but I am a busy man, and don’t have the time to do so.

So the sites earns now around $100 a month – just to cover my investment. Bad one…

So traffic and PR are important but also the art of sell. For tips how to increase your sells read this blog . There are lots of tips over there that can help you understand the online world much better. In fact buy there tutorial. It is well worth the $300.

So the bottom line is that before you buy a website you need to have a good idea what are you going to do with it. Otherwise you will try to pass it to someone else sooner than you think.

Assaf

Hi all,

I’ve just bought a new bidding directory expending my directories network to 8 directories. Three of them are bidding directories.

Some will argue that the days of bidding directories has past, but I found that you may not get the same amount of submissions but there are still some webmasters that want to be on the top.

For example I bought thearttree.net for $60 and since then I’ve made around $1000 from it, without any marketing. Two weeks ago someone bid for $114 which is nice income

So I thought that if I can find another one for the right price I will buy it. The seller wanted $600 for bidweblink.com but we agreed on $350 which I found is a fair price for PR3 website.

I will keep you updated how this directory is doing.

Assaf

Hi all,

I am about to teach you a method that can save you a lot of money. I didn’t invent this method, but when I read it, it sounds so logical, so I started to implement it, and it works. It is a very simple but yet powerful that every professional buyer must use.

Let’s say you looking to buy a webmasters forum website. You can go to Sitepoint or any other website that offers websites for sale and search for ‘webmasters forum’ or similar search terms.

If we will stick with Sitepoint for a moment you will get a list of sites that are on auction. Check it yourself – The first one is me when I sold webmastersroom.com

Now take a look on the second result:

Looking to buy any webmaster forums/ web design or programming forums or any related domains

This is much better than to bid on auction. Why?

First sellers approach you so you can choose between several websites.

It also gives you the power to negotiate better. If they approached you it means that they are keen to sell. And you are the only buyer at the moment. So you can knocked down the price heavily. Of course that 80% will be crap, but still using this method gives you at least 5 websites to choose from.

Now if you decide to bid on an auction you compete against other buyers that will raise the price you are willing to pay. You also have to wait for the auction to ends, and there is no room for negotiation.

On the real world you can get bargains on auctions, but not with websites. The amount of quality websites that are out for sale is very low, and the competition is high. In fact I stopped bidding completely, because for every website that I wanted to buy and bid for it, I was outbid by someone, and the closing price was higher than I wanted to pay, or even worst higher than what the site is really worths.

Now I have some messages in relevant forums like:

“looking to buy…” and I get 5-10 offers a day. Now all I need is to chose from.

Have a great weekend,

Assaf

Hi all,

After 3 weeks break for (happy) family reasons I am back.

I was checking some websites on Sitepoint and Digitalpoint and I was amazed to see that excellentguide.com is for sale! For those who don’t know this is one of the best directories on the web.

For me this is the first place where I submit sites. Google loves this directory and it is good for ranking. It has PR7, 20,000 unique visitors a month, 150,000 page views and $6000 monthly income.

I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by the income figure – I think this site can make more. The price tag is $100,000 – not for the regular buyer. It is not the best timing to sell directory at the moment. There are a lots of discussions around the webmasters world about the war that Google has declared on paid directories.

Personally I think (and hope) it is just a hype, but the role of directories is not clear, and everyone are expecting to the PR update to find where the next Google trend goes.

But if you have this kind of money, buy this website. It has a very good reputation and steady income. This is the best website for sale out there.

Assaf