Buying Established Sites. Is it safe? Scammy?

pac1984 said:

yeah the sites for sale on ebay are generally crap! people flipping shit from DP

Click to expand...

That is true they are generally crap, that why when it is hardly anyone looks there for sites, they think all are crap not most are crap.

Look hard enough you will find one and chances are its cheap. :cow_yello

pac1984 said:

i have sold sites making that much a month

There are a tonn of reasons

Need cash for house?
Need cash for car?
Your a site flipper?
Need time for another larger project
Need funds for a larger project?

...
..

Click to expand...

Would it not be cheaper to take a loan (if you need quick cash)? Paying it off with your revenue, and then continue profiting from the site when your loan is paid?

Need time for another large project? Why not just outsource the work the site need? Many profitable websites doesn't seem to require so much work - and finding someone to do it for a piece of the profit cant be that hard? you still keep some profit with very little work, why would someone give their profit awawy just like that?

I think this is a very intresting subject and would love to hear more experiences from people successfully buying sites and why they earned or wasted their money on the deal, or people selling sites which the buyers profit from.

I can only see 1 reason for selling a site, which is owner predicting that he will profit more from selling than keeping the site - and chances from profiting from such sites if you aren't very experienced seem slim.

I say it's a gamble. I've bought a few sites before and I've had good experiences and bad ones as well. I've had two sites that I bought closer to the 5k range, but they turned out to be really good made over 10x the investment.

I guess it comes down to the ability to analyze the site and its potential and making sure you get to understand everything about the site and get proof of EVERYTHING.

Quattro said:

I say it's a gamble. I've bought a few sites before and I've had good experiences and bad ones as well. I've had two sites that I bought closer to the 5k range, but they turned out to be really good made over 10x the investment.

I guess it comes down to the ability to analyze the site and its potential and making sure you get to understand everything about the site and get proof of EVERYTHING.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply!

Would be really intresting to hear more details of your experience (and similar experiences). What did you miss (and what is common to miss) when you analysed your sites that failed? Any special signs that made you see the potential in the successful sites?

Can one expect more potential among in the higher (1k+? 5k+?) price ranges, and more crap sites in the lower price ranges? Or are the higher priced sites just sold by people better at making money by flipping crap sites?

I bought one site a few months ago that basically made a steady 1k per month for around 16 months, revenue details, analytics and such were all delivered to me for those months.. $700 per month was coming from one network.. who just happened to have changed their earning model from CPM to performance ads, USA based. 85% of the traffic is coming from the UK. So it went from 1k to $200 a month, while I paid the premium price for it.

Ofcourse I was stupid for not thoroughly investigating that network first, it was still a bitter pill to swallow. Overall my buying experience has not been good on those sites, just like my selling experience.. wanted to sell that site a couple of months later, talked to some Indian guy on the phone. Everything went really fast, except the payment (which never came). He could only pay through bank wire, so I was like OK, that's going to take 9 days then I'll give you site access. Then he wanted to test the 'system' before making payment, than he came up with this story that he had wired the money but that it got refused by my bank and know he lost all of his money (my bank told me there never was a transaction). So in the end I was the scammer Never heard from the guy again.

But I'm sure other people have good experiences selling/buying sites online

exactly the kind of reply I was looking for, thanks!

add to the list of things to check before purchase:
- check income sources for recent/upcoming changes/news and how those might affect the site

would love to hear more of your good/bad site buying/selling experiences!

i am thinking about buying site's and flipping them also anybody have good literature about buying and flipping?

Buying websites can be a great investment. I bought my first site for around $7000. I ran it for two years at about $1500/mth revenue (around $1000/mth profit). I sold it almost two years ago for $18000. The reason I sold it was that I just got tired of dealing with the site (it was a busy forum and I wasn't very experienced at the time with them). Mods and admins were fighting, site got hacked several times, etc. So I ended up selling it to someone who was experienced with large forums.

Other times I have been ripped off. I sold one site someone who paid me by paypal ($1000) and so I transfered the domain to him. He then did a dispute and even though I said the money was for a digital transaction, paypal gave him his money back. So I went to my domain provider (godaddy) and told them that I transferred the domain by accident to another account. Then a week later the domain was back in my account. I was lucky that I had transferred the domain to someone at godaddy and that one of the employees at godaddy advised me to do this.

Other times I haven't been so lucky and lost the site or my money trying to buy one.

Now, I always use escrow for sites and insist on having the persons phone numbers, address, and all other details which I then verify. I also check the referrers and make sure that a large percentage is from SE. One important thing I look at is how many sites like the one I am looking at are for sale in the last month or so. An example would be movie streaming on Flippa now. There are at least two there without looking hard. IF there is a lot of the sites, then there is a reason people are bailing or that was the type of site listed in the last DP ebook on site flipping.

No matter what you do though, it is a crap shoot. There are a lot of honest sellers and buyers out there. There is also a thousands more that are trying to make a quick buck by scamming or site flipping (thank DP for that)

well, I don't know about this from first-hand experience as I've never bought or sold a website, however as someone who has good experience with many aspects of web development and growing experience with internet marketing / black hat methods I can say this....

basically, a money-making website is often not something that can be left "static" and just sit there raking in cash for an infinite amount of time. Many internet projects (websites), ESPECIALLY those built with black hat methods, have sort of a bell shaped curve of their life timeline in that they peak and then die off, either gradually or quickly. Unless you maintain a spot as a top website for a niche, the site is going to hit a point where its at its best with google then it may instantly die off at some point, if black hat methods were used and the site is sandboxed, or may gradually be replaced by other websites in the searches.


It certainly is possible to have a site made with just initial work and then stay up in the search results for a long time but often the people making these are looking for a quick buck so they use whatever methods possible to drive it up to the top of the results quickly and don't give a shit how it ends up a few months later.

There is a lot involved in putting out web content, by this I mean you need to be familiar with the process, have a team of writers, re-writers, article spinners, etc or you are not going to be able to add a good volume of content regularly. Then the only other methods to get new traffic are not passive, rather they are things like social media marketing. This can be automated and made passive in some sense, but this isn't going to come with a website.


Overall, my point in this is that its better to learn the ins and outs before even considering buying something because you may find after buying it you don't know what to do to maintain the traffic or may find that it suspiciously takes a nosedive.

I have sold many sites on DP, sitepoint and flippa in last 3 years, flippa is the best place for me to sell a website. DP is full of shit, all peoples are looking for cheap one, they only pay 5 to 7 times monthly earning. On flippa there are many potential buyers, I have sold almost every site listed on flippa except one site and other one I got a bad experience. The highest bidder never responded to my email and never got paid.

nutsforsports:
have you ever bought a site and then experienced alot less traffic/earnings from it than you expected when you bought it? If so, why do you think it happened?

mamboo:
would you say DP is a better place to buy sites (if sites are sold for higher price at flippa)? Do you have experience in buying sites and profiting from their revenue (not just by selling)?

techit99 said:

I fell for this in my early days, luckily for only $300.

Stay clear. To buy an established site it would be only worth it if you could add value through your own methods. If your methods are good enough then you may as well start from scratch, or better still buy an aged domain name and do something with it. Sometimes these old domains come with backlinks and traffic.

Click to expand...

would you mind share what made you fail? why was your revenue/traffic less than expected? could you have prevented it? (by checking where traffic/revenue was from etc)

access,

I have bought a couple sites that ended up having less traffic than advertised. That was in the beginning when I was new to it and didn't know some things. Like, for forums that there is scripts that will take random users from the database and make it look like they are active. Photoshopping stats and such. Basically it came down to me not doing my homework on a site.

I personally would rather buy from flippa than dp. Much better quality sites even though you will pay a bit more. As always, you have to dig to find sites worth buying.

The price in which people set their auctions for depends on what they think it is worth too.
I flipped an entire business once. Bought it for $7k, did it for a few months, didnt like it, but grew it, and also gathered about 100k leads in the time, so the value of the leads themselves were worth the business. targeted co-reg leads (business was co-reg), sold the biz for $55k