While most people won’t buy high ticket items online, one particular product is an exception – websites. The internet is a huge marketplace for website trading and Flippa is one of those sites that offer this service. If you are thinking of buying websites from Flippa, this article will highlight some of the things that you need to consider.
What Is Flippa?
Created way back in 2005, Flippa is an online company that buys and sells websites, domains, and apps. According to their stats, more than 1000 new businesses are listed every day and they claim to sell more than $2 million worth of sales each month. It looks like a very profitable industry if you ask me.
Why Would You Buy a Website?
(1) “I Don’t Know How to Build One”
That’s the most common answer that I get from new business owners. A ready-made website sounds less complicated to manage as you can avoid all the preliminary technical set-up. Hmm…is that so?
I had a look at the Starter Sites on Flippa. Most of the websites listed here are newly built (probably less than 6 months old) and are unlikely to have any traffic or ranking. To promote the site, the seller would usually describe the advantages and make a few offers that come with the purchase.
While browsing, one particular website caught my attention. At a glance;
It’s a new WordPress site that doesn’t have any unique content or design and right in the end, it says that this website is a duplicate (I wondered why) but I read on anyway. In its ‘sales pitch’, here is what it says;
It runs on autopilot and you can start earning passive income by adding various affiliate programs. That sounds pretty easy, so I thought I check out the website itself.
All the content consists of (only) YouTube videos which are probably shared by other websites as well. Hence the duplication, maybe? The site is already installed with Google Adsense and Amazon’s affiliate links to speed up monetizing. So, what else is the seller offering?
There are a few things that I want to point out here;
- Now, bear in mind that this ‘complete website’ doesn’t come with a complete hosting service. Therefore, you still have to pay for your hosting with GoDaddy or other service providers to keep the website online.
- As far as optimization is concerned, I couldn’t see how having a tonne of videos without any text content or reader comments can make the website ‘fully SEO optimized’. It takes a lot of effort to get traffic to a website. Plus, if it is truly optimized, this site should already have some traffic coming in in the first place.
- I don’t agree with the video automation here because it’s not good for the user experience and doesn’t reflect any form of good quality content. Probably that’s what makes the website ‘autopilot’, but I am very sure that readers visiting this site, especially yogis, would prefer more personal interaction with the website owner.
- Considering that the site is built on WordPress, I can testify that the control panel is fairly easy to use. I would personally recommend WordPress for online business sites because it has so many advantages in terms of tools and functions.
- The seller does offer some form of assistance, but after the website is smooth and running, who else can you turn to for additional help such as marketing and building web traffic?
Overall, from this ready-made website, I am getting;
- A top-level domain name.
- A WordPress site.
- Tonnes of videos for content (which I can easily get from YouTube).
- Some help in hosting transfer.
So, how much did this website get sold for? $147 (other Starter sites sell for more)
This might not sound very much, but as a webpreneur starting her own online business on a shoestring budget, I consider this amount slightly overpriced. Here’s why;
- I can get a lot more top-level domains at NameCheap between $5 to $20.
- WordPress is free software and it comes with tons of free and attractive themes to build websites.
- Embedding YouTube videos is free.
- Hosting transfer isn’t that difficult; you can get free tutorials on how to do this on YouTube.
For less than a fraction of the price, I know of a platform that can do much more. Wealthy Affiliate is an online program that offers website building, WordPress hosting, and online entrepreneurship training through these following features.
With these tools and support, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to build a website even without any experience.
(2) “I Want to Sell Websites for Profit”
Flipping websites, as they call it, is another reason why people want to buy websites. A website is bought at a lower price, reconstructed, and sold for a profit at a higher price. Buyers are usually web-savvy people and have some form of knowledge in a particular niche to make the website more valuable than it was before.
They usually look for a more established site to begin with, in other words, sites that have traffic, ranking, and preferably generating some form of revenue. Here are other criteria that you need to consider before making a purchase.
- When was the site built? The older the site, the more established it becomes.
- How does the site build traffic? Ask the seller for genuine traffic proof if it’s not readily available.
- How does the site make money? Can you leverage that for your marketing strategy?
- How’s the feedback like for that particular seller? Ideally, you want to be dealing with the creditable seller, not someone with a poor rating.
Be very inquisitive when acquiring this information from the seller because the last thing you want is to end up with a website that has inflated and false data. Whether you like it or not, the Flippa marketplace has sellers who will try to scam you for your money. Read about a real case scenario on this blog.
Should you decide to buy a legitimate and moderate-performing website anyway, the next step is to plan how to continue to make the website thrive online. How much time and skills will you be investing to grow this site before you can sell it at a higher value?
One of the best ways to do this is to create good quality content for the site by using relevant keywords for search ranking. One seller even mentioned this on his note;
Website growth and SEO go hand-in-hand. You can’t have one and ignore the other. So, how good are you with your keyword research? Has any of your previous content got good rankings before? If you are not getting any results from your current keyword tool, check out Jaaxy, my favorite keyword tool which reveals some of the most powerful long-tail keywords out there.
Once you have done your due diligence, go back to Flippa to list your established website for sale. You could list as classified for free or pay $19 for auction listings. Whenever a sale is made, Flippa will take a 10% success fee for the transaction.
The next question you are likely to ask is how much to sell a website for. As a general rule of thumb, a good website should sell at about 10x its monthly revenue. But its actual value will depend on a spectrum of factors that are best calculated by a website broker through Flippa.
Buying Websites From Flippa – Is It Worth Your Time?
After spending a few days in the marketplace, I must say that Flippa offers some very interesting business opportunities for both buyers and sellers. If you want to buy a website, make sure you know what you are getting for your purchase. Otherwise, you are better off creating your WordPress website from scratch by using a powerful platform like SiteRubix.
If you think you have what it takes to flip websites, then make sure you do it the right way through content marketing and proper keyword research – the two main factors that contribute to a website’s value (and success).
At the end of the day, keep in mind that a website is more than just a commodity. It provides you with a foundation to launch a long term online business as well as providing a reliable tool for your client to achieve their business goals.
Do you have any thoughts or questions about buying or selling websites on Flippa? Please leave your comments below and I’ll get back to you.
Hi Cathy! Thank you for sharing this article with us, it was truly excellent. I have occasionally looked over the Flippa marketplace several times and I find it quite amazing what some people are selling. The website that you show in your example here is typical of a lot of the sites seen on Flippa. Unfortunately this site is full of people that are duplicating websites and selling them under different domain names, time and time again. The people buying them have next to no chance of making a decent amount of money with them.
On the other hand I do think its a very good platform for both buying and selling. As you have pointed out, you just need to be really careful and know what you are dealing with.
Hi Andrew,
Simply browsing through the Flippa marketplace can tell you a lot about people’s understanding about the value of a website. A site with a few main pages and blog posts that are not keyword optimized cannot possibly attract high traffic within a short period of time. This is something a lot of beginners need to know.
Publishing good quality content, engaging in comments and encouraging social sharing are some criteria to look for when evaluating a website. If you can’t see any of these, you may as well create a website from scratch which won’t even cost you much to begin with.
Hi Cathy, I’m glad I found this article.
I’ve been considering buying a website from Flippa as I thought there may be some advantages to doing so such as;
1. The website will have some history with the search engines and may rank quicker than a new site.
2. May already have steady stream of traffic.
Upon reading this, I now worry that I could make a mistake purchasing a site as I really don’t have a clue of what to look out for. Even the advantage of the being around for a while could turn out to be a disadvantage if it has been penalized by Google in the past and to be quite honest, I haven’t got a clue how to check to see if this is the case.
I’m having second thoughts now and beginning to think that building a site from scratch may be the better option.
Hi there Lee,
The most effective way to check for website traffic (or any Google penalty) is to ask the seller directly for an access to the Analytics. If you can interpret the stats, then you can make a better decision whether it’s worth buying the site or not.
If you are new to online marketing, I would certainly recommend that you start from scratch because that’s the best way that you can learn about organic and paid traffic as well as audience behaviors. The training at Wealthy Affiliate will walk you through this process step-by-step, so I would suggest that you check it out.
Hope this helps.
Buying a website from Flippa is an established practice and it’s a good option if you don’t want to build a website, create content, i.e. start from scratch. You can buy a website that already gets traffic and makes sales and then work on it.
But before buying a website you need to ask for Google analytics data to find out exactly how much traffic a website you plan to buy gets. Also you ask for screenshots of the revenue that comes from that website. Anyway, this can be a good option for someone who knows what to do with a website and I believe your recommendation on how to start an online business comes into play here.
This was a very interesting article on buying and selling websites. I sort of understand how this works, but some parts still baffle me.
When you buy an existing website with traffic that is earning revenue, either through affiliate links or AdSense, how does the purchaser start making that money? When the site was created all the affiliate links and AdSense would be linked to accounts of the person that built the site. How does that get transferred over to the new owner?
I find this concept of building and flipping websites very interesting, just not sure how it works exactly.
This is a great post, Cathy, one that’s really got me thinking about some possibilities.
Hi Darren,
Basically, during a website purchase, the seller will help the buyer with all the account transfer and technical set-up. The process is quite a detailed one and not something that can be easily explained here. I’ve found that this article offers the best answer to your questions. Hopefully, you’ll find the information helpful..
Hi Cathy,
I have another similar platform to Flippa which is Orion. Orion is a software that search for buyers and sellers for websites. Flippa is more like looking for ready made websites while Orion is looking for buyers who have their specs in mind and looking for web site designers to build it for them.
Thanks for the review of selling your website on Flippa I have been selling domains on the platform with some success if you can find a cheap domain name aged ones are the best and then move to flipper it can make you some profit.
Also if you host the domain name on WA first keyword optimized with small web presence you can drive the value up check your purchase price with estibot then when it has increased in value filp on flipper.
I would say this is better than trying to sell websites with no value. Using Wealthy Affiliate to do this is the best way I have found to increase domain value.
Hi Simon,
Thanks for sharing your experience with us. It’s good to know that the keyword tool in WA can make such a positive impact to your business sales. This really goes to show that by doing proper keyword research, you can really optimize the traffic to your site.
Hey really good article.. I was a bit overwhelmed by all the different site building utilities out there, so sometimes it’s good to read a bit and be ‘reigned in’ so to speak haha. This will definitely help me on my journey. I think I’ll go with DIY though. But thanks for the great read! 🙂
Do you have any helpful hints for aspiring writers? I’m hoping to start my own website soon but I’m a little lost on everything.
Would you suggest starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many choices out there that I’m totally overwhelmed.
Any suggestions? Thanks!
Welcome to my blog, Alfredo. In response to your questions;
1) Helpful hints for aspiring writers – Writing for online content is a bit different. You need to write for your readers as well as for the search engines. If your content is search engine friendly, your articles are more likely to be found by your targeted readers. The key point here is writing and describing long tail keywords in mind. If you don’t know where to look for these keywords, try Jaaxy and see how it can generate relevant keywords for your niche.
2) Which platform to use? WordPress is free but most of the hosting services are not. Likewise, if you want to start your own website, you’ll also need to select a domain name which can be purchased with a domain registrar like NameCheap or GoDaddy.
In short, your own website = Domain name (paid) + Hosting service (paid) + WordPress (free) – that’s just the basic start-up structure.
If you are not familiar with WordPress and not sure about your budget, you can create a WordPress website for free using SiteRubix. It is a hosting platform that comes with built-in WordPress, and if you are using a subdomain, your website is free. Do take note that there are two types of WordPress format out there; WordPress.org (free) and WordPress.com (paid). The one that SiteRubix uses is WordPress.org.
I was also very overwhelmed when I got started. Fortunately, I belong to a community of entrepreneurs that has helped me a lot in starting my online business. So, if you need anything at all Alfredo, just let me know in the reply and I’ll get back to you as soon, okay 🙂
Before I came across Wealthy Affiliate and started affiliate marketing, I did a Udemy online course about domain flipping, buying and selling domains.
It was quite interesting, but wasn’t really my thing. I don’t really like the idea of buying a ready-built website. I would much prefer to build my own from the ground up. With the right tools and guidance, it is not really that hard these days. Another great post Cathy!
Ah…so they have courses like that too in Udemy? How interesting. Do you remember how much it cost? Did they share any ‘secret tips’ for selling a website at a higher price? I am curious to know.
I believe it was about $160, but I just had a look and it is on special for $10. It was quite good, it would be worth a look if you are interested 🙂
Hi Cathy,
I’ve never used Flippa and thanks to your review I am now more aware of what they do. In the example you cite, the yoga website, I can’t see that the site was worth much at all. The content was all free with nothing original. The only thing that might be worth paying for, is the domain name, especially if it’s a few months or even better, years old.
I understand the advantages of buying an established site, however the cost would be prohibitive. If a site with no traffic and no original content sells for $147, how much for a site with traffic, sales and original content? I’ll stick to creating my own WordPress site and follow the training at Wealthy Affiliate.
Thanks for your feedback, Peter. Looks like we are all thinking along the same line. Pay for good quality training, not for ready-mades 🙂
Hi Cathy, this is an interesting post.
For me buying a website with content would only happen if it had the same voice and the same writing style I have. Trying to fit myself into someone else’s “voice” would make content building very hard. I’d rather build my own site from scratch. On the other side, if your only doing this for the money and moving on to a different site, then maybe that is your talent.
I much rather prefer to build something and make it my own. And your definitely right, for that amount of money, you can join Wealthy Affiliate for less, pay a few months membership, get support and training. Excellent post and keep up the good work!
Hi Monica,
Judging from the reader’s comment, I could see that most people prefers to build their own site. That goes to show that it’s really not that hard after all. With a platform like SiteRubix, there’s no need to install any WordPress software and you can start using it immediately to build your own online business with the help of the training at Wealthy Affiliate.
That’s scandelous! I can’t believe they would sell an internet profile like that and call it a business, or a money making website for that matter. 9 views on the video? That’s funny! Great article, really brought suspense into the matter 🙂
Hi Matt, there are plenty of controversy how Flippa make money out of all these website trading. Google search it and you’ll find that a lot of them are scams. So, it’s really something every beginners should watch out for.
Hi Cathy,
You are right about Wealthy Affiliate having many advantages over buying a website on Flippa.
For a start if you create your own website, at least you know the full history and there are ways to run a background check on a domain name before purchasing it. To use your yoga example, I suppose you could buy such a site if you were running local yoga classes and then add a few pages with keywords relevant to your own location. You could then add more videos of your own to replace the ones provided over time and add more content with targeted keywords to appeal to a wider audience than just people interested in you local classes.
But if you are going to do that, you might as well do it right from the start and get training, support, hosting and all the other advantages of Wealthy Affiliate to get a site that ranks locally, nationally and globally. Thanks for a great article.
Exactly my point, Neil.
I was going through all these websites for sale on Flippa and some of the prices make my eyes popped. Some with very basic set-ups sold for much higher price than the Yoga one. The only value I see for starter site is probably a very catchy-keyword-targeted domain. As for other things, I can build/incorporate them on my own.
Good for flipping websites, but not that great a place for new website owners – in my opinion.