How To Make Money By Buying And Selling Websites On Flippa?

Have you ever grown tired of your website? Do you have an unwanted website at your disposal? Or perhaps you bought a website frosm someone and now want to sell it? You can totally sell that website to earn a profit. Websites are just like businesses or properties. And just like in real estate where you buy and sell land or property, you can also buy websites and sell them, and make a profitable business out of it. A lot of people are making six figures out of this business, and you can too. If you’re interested, the place to go to is Flippa. Here, we will talk about how to buy and sell websites on Flippa, and some of the best practices associated witht the business.

What is Flippa?

Flippa is the world’s largest online marketplace for domain and website buying and selling (“flipping”). You can buy a website from someone, just like you would buy something on eBay. You can then either sell it for more than the amount you brought it for, or you can renovate it, add some value to it, and then sell if for a profit. Flippa makes this process really easy, and lets you concentrate on the bargaining and the ‘value adding’.

Setting up

Using Flippa is fairly easy. You simply sign up using a valid email account. Fill in your information, and upload a picture. A picture is important because people will more readily deal with someone who seems real enough. After the picture, you are done. You can now either buy a website or sell one. While selling a website, it is important to remember that you should fill out a complete description of your website, along with some other information which we will discuss shortly. Description is important, as potential buyers will judge a website by the description that you give them, and not by visiting that site.

The process of buying and selling websites itself is fairly simple. But many people out there are unable to sell their websites, or selling them for some peanuts. Here are some tips that will help you improve your profit, and your chances of making a sale.

Tips for selling websites

1. Provide Analytics data – Every serious buyer will want to look at your website’s analytics to make sure they’re not being cheated, or given wrong information. They will also want to check whether the revenue you are claiming is true or not. And most will not settle for ‘easy’ analytics provided by sites such as Alexa. You will need to have analytics data from a much more reliable service, such as Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides a complete set of analytics information from unique visitors to visitor demographics and a lot more. So make sure you have set up Google Analytics for your website.

Most buyers will also look for analytics data from the past moths. So if your site doesn’t have analytics data available for, let’s say, the past six months, then we’d suggest you set up Google Analytics, and wait a few months before trying to sell a website.

2. Increase website earnings – Make sure that your website is earning some money, or at least is earning more than when you bought it. An earning such as $50 a month is negligible, so you can just forget selling your website at this time. You will only make a few bucks out of it. Work on the website for a few months and increase its income. You can then sell the website for a decent profit. It takes time and effort, yes. But it also pays well.

3, List all assets with full description – It is very important that you fill out full descriptions for your site. Tells the world everything you can in the shortest form possible. Also, give information for any other assets your site might have, such as social media profiles. This will let the users know exactly what is included in the purchase. Having social media profiles will drive up your price, which is a good thing for you.

4. List your top keywords – Also in your descriptions, list the top 10 keywords your site is being searched for. Mention how much monthly hits these keywords get. You can use Google’s Keyword Tool to find out search volumes.

5. Suitable auction length – The length of your auction should be just right. Not too long, so as to lose the interest of customers, and not too short so that not all the people can see your listing. Generally, a duration of 1 week is best, give or take a few days.

6. Revenue details – Give out your complete revenue details to your potential customers, along with the analytics. Also share things like your subscribers, emails lists, the CMS used, and so on. Show them your revenue statements. Some blogs maintain quarterly income reports to show to their visitors. You can do that too to attract customers outside of Flippa.

7. Capitalize names – It is a good practice to capitalize the words in your domain name listing, so people can easily read the name. For example, www.smartearningmethods.com won’t attract much attention, because it isn’t that easy to read at a glance. But www.SmartEarningMethods.com will draw a much better notice.

8. Reasonable BIN price – A Buy It Now price can make or break a customer. If you set a reasonable BIN price, customers might be more eager to buy your site. Some people, however, set crazy BIN prices, which drives away potential customers. Please realize that this is an auction website, not a bargaining counter where you need to ask for a $1,000 to get at least $500.

Tips for buying websites

9. Request Analytics data – As mentioned in the very first point, analytics data is very important. Never buy a website without looking at its analytics. It’d be as foolish as buying a second-hand car without looking under its hood or test driving it. As a buyer, you have the right to request analytics data from the site owner. Request data for at least the past 6 months, so you may know whether the initial information about the traffic given to you was the normal amount, or just a momentary spike.

10. Background checks – Always do your homework before buying a website. Check whether it has a clean background or not. Use the WayBack Archives for a site to see if it wasn’t previously involved in scam or spam, hate speech or racism, and/or pornography. Any of these things might lead to poor search engine rankings.

11. Check backlinks – Backlinks are extremely important to a website. You should always check where a website’s backlinks are coming from, because that’s usually where the traffic comes from (except from search engines). Your website’s search engine ranking depends largely on the quality of backlinks to your site. Bad backlinks will harm your website more than helping it. To check the quality of backlinks to a website, use SEOmoz’s Site Explorer.

12. Make sure the transfer is secure – Always, always perform background checks on the seller before agreeing to buy a site. Check DomainTools to find information about a website owner. Also, ask them how they will pay you, and what guarantee you will have. You can’t allow anyone to cheat you in this matter.

Those were the major tips we had for you. Hope they help you out in some way. If you have questions, then just shoot them out way, and we’ll be obliged to help 🙂