Web Ladder – Websites for sale blog

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!

Hi all,

Today I recieved the third video and again I wasn’t to impressed. It is quite simplistic. It says things like: “All you need to do is to raise the monthly income of the website from $800 to $4000. This is easy thing to do”

Really? it is easy to do? I am in this business for long time to know that there is no such easy on the web. You want to raise your website income from $800 to $4000? it is possible but you need to work very hard on it, and know what are you doing.

There are many ‘gurus’ out there that tell you things like ‘buy my tutorial and you will be free’. They sometimes give you good advices, but they all forget to tell you that you will need to work hard for that. Well they do tell you that, but only after you bought the product.

Anyway this 5.53 minutes of lesson 3 were almost a waste of time. Waiting to see lesson 4.

Hello all,

Yesterday I’ve talked a bit about this website that sells ‘flipping websites’ classes. They claim on their site that they sold websites for a total of over $729,000. This sounds impressive but I was skeptic.

So I registered to get 9 free lessons. I got the first one yesterday and I wasn’t impressed at all. In fact it was boring. Stuff like if you get 20 people to sign you website everyday and pay $20 your site will be worth a million. Stating the obvious is not a good way to attract people. So I forgot about it.

Today I received my second lesson and with the promising title ‘PROOF – $729k Worth Of Websites Sold‘ and in 10 minutes video the guy goes through his Escrow account and ‘Bank of America’ bank details to show you the transactions.

So forgive me for being skeptic – the guy has sold sites for a lot of money. He sounds like a nice guy who knows what he is talking about.

So I am waiting for the third lesson.

Assaf

Hi all,

Yes I know that it has been long time since I wrote. The only reason is because I am not active at the moment in the market. Why? I just so busy running my business so I don’t the time to check websites and upgrade them.

Having say that I have to admit that flipping websites is getting to the main stream. I’ve just read an article in the New York Times about it.

Also have a look into this website this person claims he earned $729,000 from flipping 3 websites. I have to admit that I am a bit skeptic about it, but I registered for free video and I promise to keep you updated about it.

Sitepoint looks like they are doing well but I am still disappointed with their user interface. I’ve tried to sell a website there not long ago and I wasn’t impressed at all with the experience. I still don’t understand why they choose to stick to a forum style. I wonder when they will realize that the market needs better tools. Still it is the leading website for flipping websites.

Assaf

Hi all,

I came across this website.

It has some nice features like search by PR, search by category and the option for users to give their opinion about how much a site worth.

This is the good things. But the bad things are the design. It is awful! You can’t understand a thing from the lists on the main page. They are mean less. You don’t get any real info about the sites. Then when you click inside it is even worth.

Come on people hire a good designer that will use nice colours and try to think what people want to see.

Really bad website.

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,

It is not enough to have a great website that you want to sell. You need to know how to market it to potenial buyers.

I was about to write an article how to avoid the ‘no bids’ effect but I did some research and found this article.
It sums all the points you need to consider before you put your site for sale.

My thoughts about ‘Buy it now’ button I always put it with 50% more than my reserve price. You can never know, sometimes it works.

Have a great sale!
Assaf

Hi all,

Today I’ve checked the keyword ‘websites for sale’ to see who are the top 10 on Google. Not a real surprise that Sitepoint leading the pack on Google.com

But on Google.co.uk Sitepoint are only number 2. And who is number 1?
This website: ukwebsiteforsale.co.uk

This looks like a seo excersise rather than a real website. A quick check on Google links doesn’t solve the mystery – How come a site with 2-3 stupid paragraph about websites for sale beats a site like Sitepoint?

Not to mention this blog about websites for sale that only ranks 72 for the same keywords. Google knows…

Assaf

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