If you are planning to buy or sell a website, you probably already heard about Flippa. It is the largest online marketplace for websites. Most people who list a website for sale there, however, end up selling it for peanuts (e.g., $100), or not selling at all.
How come? Most of the times the seller didn’t do his homework. If you want to maximize your chances of selling (and your profit), the 10 tips below will help you.
1. Make Sure Your Website Is Making Money
This is the most important factor. If you want to sell a website successfully, it must be making money. Even if your site has a huge traffic, listing it before monetizing that traffic would be a bad decision. You would be able to sell it, but the money you would get would be far below the real value of the site.
If your website is making $50 or less per month, forget about selling it now. Try to improve your traffic, increase your revenues to at least $300 per month, make the revenues stable, and then list it. If the $300 are coming from Google AdSense, for example, you could sell the site for as much as $8,000. Obviously, the more you can grow your revenue before selling, the better. The $300 is just a ball park figure.
Remember that you’ll need to show proof of revenue, and that most buyers will calculate the revenues as the average of the past four or six months.
2. Make Sure You Have Google Analytics Data
Most serious buyers will want to see your Google Analytics data before making an official offer. They will use this to verify your traffic levels, and to make sure the pattern is compatible with the revenues you are claiming.
Again, people will want to see data going back to six months at least. If you are planning to sell your website, therefore, it would be wise to install Google Analytics on it at least six months before the sale.
3. Work On Your Trust Rating
Each member on Flippa has a trust rating, and most buyers will check it before placing their bids. In other words, the higher your trust rating, the higher the chances of selling your website.
As a result you should take all the actions that will improve your trust rating (e.g., connect your Flippa account with Facebook and LinkedIn, verify your phone number and so on).
4. Set The Auction Length for 7 Days
In my opinion seven days is the optimal length for an auction on Flippa. With that length of time you are sure that most buyers will see your auction (e.g., those who log during the week and those who log during weekends), yet you’ll create a sense of urgency on those who are interested.
Many people set the auction length for 30 days, and their auctions become dead as a consequence. Many interested buyers will refrain from bidding because there is plenty of time to go, others yet will see the auction once and then completely forget about it, for the same reason.
5. Set A Low Reserve / High Minimum Bid
If you set a low reserve price your auction will display the following message: “Bidding open and reserve has been met!” bright green color. This is a big encouragement for potential buyers, and it stimulates them to bid.
And don’t worry about the site selling for less than what you think it is worth. You can always set a high minimum bid. Apart from protecting you from low bids this strategy will also filter the non-serious buyers out.
6. Set A Reasonable BIN Price
The “Buy It Now” price is there for a reason. It should allow a buyer who is very interested in your website to avoid a bidding war and to buy the website paying what you think it is worth.
The problem is that most sellers have an unrealistic idea about the value of their websites, and hence they set crazy BIN prices. This is a put off for potential buyers, because it signals you have no idea about what you are doing.
Ask some friends what they think your website is worth, and then set a reasonable BIN price for it.
7. Don’t Hype Your Description
The more hype you put in your description, the more people will think you are desperate to sell and that your website is not a solid one. Examples of remarks you should avoid include: “Huge potential!”, “A lifetime opportunity!”, “My loss is your gain!”.
Secondly, don’t hypothesize what the website could be earning. Some people list websites that are making $10 per month currently, and they go on saying: “This website has the potential to make $4,000 per month easily!”. If you knew this for sure you wouldn’t be selling the site for such a low price….
8. Answer to Every Comment
Even if you write a crystal clear description people will still have questions, and they’ll ask them through the comment section. It is important to answer to every single comment, as this will not only encourage these commenters to place a bid, but it will also improve the overall credibility of your auction.
Second, do not delete a comment unless you have a very good reason to do so. Deleted comments are red flags on Flippa, because usually they come from sellers trying to hide something on their websites.
9. Have A Plausible Reason for Selling
One of the first things people will ask you is why you are selling. If there is no plausible reason, they’ll rightly assume that the website is going down hill, and that you want to get rid of it before it becomes worthless.
In fact it would be a good idea to include the reason for selling the description of the auction itself.
10. Invite Qualified Buyers
If you want to get more bids on your auction, you can invite qualified buyers directly. First of all browse through the marketplace looking for websites that are similar to yours (either open or won auctions).
Once you find one, browse through the comments, and try to find users with a high trust rating that were asking questions about the auction. These are qualified buyers, and you can send them a message inviting them to view your own auction.
Bonus Tip: Keep Your Auction On The Homepage
When creating your listing, the most important upgrade you can get is the “Listing Featured on the Front Page” one. It costs $29, but it will give your auction a lot of visibility, because most buyers browse the Flippa front page first.
You can purchase this upgrade a second time, too, once your auction slipped to the second page. This would be a good idea if after the first two or three days you have still not received some qualified bids.
About Donny
I’m Donny. I can sum myself up with four simple ways. Online Entrepreneur. Author. Investor. World Traveler
These are some great tips for selling your website! I especially like the tip about making sure your website is up to date with the latest trends.
Websites are nowadays a kind of investment for which you expect proper returns so this blog was great if you want to sell your website on flippa.
I’m always wary of a site that claims a large amount of AdSense monetization without a correspondingly large amount of traffic. For all I know the site owner could have gotten his friends to click on ads for a couple months before he puts it up for sale.
Perhaps I am not making enough money to have people interested in buying my site but I can say that right now I would not sell for a 100,000 because my website it’s my life.
Almost all the sites that sell on Flippa seem to be using wordpress. I’ve tried to learn it, but it seems confusing. I’ve always created simple sites using only html & css. I’ve had no problem gaining traffic and making profit thru adsense & other affiliates. But I don’t know if any of my sites would sel on Flippa, since I don’t have them on wordpress & don’t even use any kind of php etc.
Excellent tips – I am trying to develop my first .co domain and its a journey. I do have adsense and am using a theme at the moment. I dont make that much with adsense but am trying to spread the word of the .co domain.
These are some great tips and if i ever develop a site that gets good traffic – I will make sure to monetize that first before selling it!
I’m interested in knowing the views of buyers who put stress on adsense monetization. What do they think of a site which is monetized by other ad networks than adsense ? Do they give less value to such sites ?
I wonder why would I sell if ever my site if I am making huge amount from it? But I will try to re-consider this. I will try to visit Flippa and check how it works Thanks for this article anyway. Additional learning for newbie like me
I always browse through the SOLD section, the sold website are an excellent source of business ideas and what is in demand at the moment. It can also give me idea how much I could sell my own creations :).
Sometimes getting a lot of traffic seems to be an uphill battle but I seem to be doing pretty well lately. The only problem though is that I don’t get much comments. People comment on my facebook page instead. How can I avoid this? I would also like to make some online friends if ever any are up for the taking
Thanks Daniel for the great post. I will using this as a reference for my self and others.
I completely agree with you and if you have money and want to get rid of initial har work then Flippa os for u…
I didn’t know much about selling in Flippa. U have presented the tips in a clear cut way. I have few blogs making low income I am going to improve that and try to sell it. A quality informative post.
Also, you want to make sure that you highlight all of the features along with how hard it is to manage
Yes PR is also important but if your website is earning good money than this become totally irrelevant.
Yes many buyer want to have such websites which can make money without any effort after changing few things according to their expertise.
There are many experts seating over there and they really knows how to make money from the websites which is not making enough money but they have …
Every successful business need time and patience my friend.
Than Flippa is not for you
Certainly these are great tips. Buying and selling websites are new segment of earning money and many experienced people involved in this.
I agree, very big sites probably should go with a longer auction length.
It helps, but it is not determinant in my opinion.
Excellent and very specific tips.
Great post Daniel. All your tips are spot-on. Further to Point 4 – Set your auction length for 7 days: use this as a guide.
Excellent post. Quite informative. I think Google PR also plays some role in buying/selling blogs. Is it?
the most important things that i keep in mind,
whether the site/blog is making steady real money.
This is not only possible, but it is a wide practice.
Good point Steven.
Awesome.. Very awesome tips Daniel. I would like to highlight no 7 tip – Dont Hype Your Description. Definitely, this is a bad strategy most Flippa seller have done. Who want to belive someone let his/him website or blog 5 figure earning go just for penny? Lol.. Don’t do it! Ever..
Hey Daniel,
I just sold my first site on Flippa about 2 months ago and the most significant factor that seemed to keep the price from going higher was the amount of effort needed to keep the site going and making money. I had done all of the work on the site myself, but almost every potential buyer was not able to do the work and was interested in outsourcing, which of course means less profit and a lower bid as a result. So in addition to your tips in this post I would add that you should consider how you can make the maintenance of the site as hands free as possible to ease concerns of some potential buyers. For example, I could have put more effort into finding freelance writers ahead of time, which could have shown a more stable transition plan.
I see flipa prices are too expensive. Can somebody make a living building and selling websites on flipa.
Thanks for the tips Daniel, I’ve been thinking of selling one of my blogs. Not because I don’t have interest anymore but I’d like to use the sale as a starting point on larger projects.
I don’t see quality sites anymore on Flippa. 1 quality successful site out of 100..
Nice Post Daniel. Website flipping is another way of earning nice income. You just have to make sure that it gets a lot of traffic and making decent revenues as well. But I can’t imagine myself selling a successful website, maybe I’ll keep it and build another website to create several income streams. I’ll probably sell a website if I have like 10 websites and i can’t manage the other websites anymore.
There are several reasons. Maybe you need to the money to start another project. Maybe you have too many sites and need to get rid of some to have time to manage the others.
Hey daniel,
Great Tips.
i think, myblog just have priceless.