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.

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…!

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

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

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

From today you can subscribe for email updates whenever there is a new post. Thanks to feedburner just insert your email address on the top right click subscribe and that’s it…

Assaf

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

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

A month ago or so, Sitepoint as launched their new marketplace system. They claim that they worked on that more than a year. For those who didn’t visit the site lately won’t be surprised by the change. The changes are minor and you need to have a careful look to see what’s new.

So what’s new?

1) the look - is seems to be cleaner - not a huge difference - a different font, the upgrade listing has moved to the left- that’s it I think. Overall it looks better.
2) Sorting - you used to be able to sort the auctions by ending time. You can still do so, but then it gives you all the auctions that have been already ended. Why? I don’t need this information. Now I have to go to page 5 to find the ones that are about to end. Sorry but this is stupid. In 2-3 month time you will need to go to page 15 to find this information. Just remind you this is an auction site, so the ending time is one of the most important information. Now they buried it. Huge disappointed.

3) Buy it now - According to the new system when the reserve price is met the buy it now disappear. This to encourage people to use the buy it now. I don’t like it. As a seller I prefer to have a full control on the sale and not use artificial rules.

4) Conditional bids - Now you can submit a bid with condition - something like : I will bid for $400 if you can send proof of income. Again I don’t like it. This is something that the buyer should ask before he bid.

5) Legal binding - Sitepoint claim that now if you sell a website and there is a winner (if you didn’t reject his bid) you must sell the site to him. Likewise if you are a buyer you must buy. This is good but I can’t see how they will monitor it. It is not E-bay where they have you paypal account and your personal details. Anyone can open an account bid not pay and disappear.

6) Feedback - Buyer and seller can leave feedback on each other. It is one of the things that were missing in the old system. It is too early to say how it works on the new system, but it is a good news to have it.

These are the major changes. The bottom line is a bit disappointing. Yes there are some good new features, but it seems to me that Sitepoint are afraid to go all the way and have an auction section like ebay. Why? I am sure they have the answers.

Have a look here: http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/20371

This is a very good site that generates a lot of leads per month. But this is not what I want to talk about. Look at the bidding history:

• 22 Feb 2008 05:39

  $120,000 - chip2447

• 19 Feb 2008 12:08

  $80,500 (Private)

• 17 Feb 2008 03:39

  $80,000 (Private)

I can understand that someone has decided to raise his bid by $500 (the second one) but it is beyond me to understand why user name chip2447 has decided to raise the bar to $120,000 4 hours before the end of the auction. It is not that there are 10 bidders that are fighting for this website.

It is a lot of money to put, and I don’t think that many buyers have this sort of money. Apart of that, to run this website you need to be a lawyer , and again this limits the cometetion.

So why do raise the price to $120k? I really don’t know…

Assaf