All the sites that are for sale online differ in many respects: from the basic underlying business model, to the way customers are attracted, marketing is done and money is generated.
Most of the sites sold online fall into one of the following categories based on the reason for the site’s existence and the real reason why it is for sale. Here is a brief outline of what you could buy if you were to visit one of the most popular online site flipping venues:
- Honest and successful sites
- Leftovers of successful sites AKA spent shells
- Other people’s failures
- Low-end clones
- Expensive clones and high-end fraud
Now, I will try to elaborate a little about each type and provide a little bit of an insight of what they really are.
Honest sites
These are honest to goodness, successful sites. They typically are based on a good idea, originality and a lot of hard work. An average age is measured in years — sometimes even more than 10 as of now. You typically won’t find any of these at Digitalpoint, most of these are sold at Flippa — see my previous post about where to buy a website for details.
The reason for selling is different for each site. From what I gather, most of the time the owner is simply tired of doing the same thing over and over again for years, regardless of how successful it may have been and s/he just wants to get some money and be done with it. No matter what the site is, running it for many years with all the associated effort, pain and stress is exhausting, so the desire to sell is usually understandable.
Because the owner has put a lot of sweat into the site and because it’s typically successful in terms of revenue generation, the owners are usually asking for huge amounts of money, which a newbie to site flipping can’t afford. Even if such a newbie has the money, it wouldn’t be advisable to spend it on something like this, unless s/he is prepared to invest the same amount of effort the original owner did and s/he is sure that the business model is still going to be sound a few years down the road.
Typically, sites like this sell for tens of thousands of dollars, very seldom below $10K.
Success leftovers
These are the sites that were once the honest ones, with sweat and revenue, that for some reason no longer perform. Time passes on the internet extremely fast, so what was a cool idea just 6 hours ago may already be last century now. Therefore, the lifetime of certain sites is limited and no amount of hard work or backlinks is going to bring the former glory back. Take a look at Myspace, for instance: just a couple of year ago, when Facebook and the others weren’t as pronounced yet, Myspace was flourishing. Now, it’s just an empty shell that will not come back. You don’t want to buy a site like that.
Sites that are based on a short-lived idea would also fall into this category. Here is another example: a Forex robot selling site. A person goes on and develops an auto-trading Forex robot that is based on some novel idea or a non-standard market trending mechanism, so they package it into a site, do their announcements and start the sales. The fools line up to buy, because the sales page is nice, it’s a new and shiny object, so it’s very attractive. The developer does some advertising in appropriate forums and at the right sites and enjoys the cash flow for some time.
The time can be different depending on the type of the site: for a forex robot site it’s probably measured in months — before people realize that the sales page was a lie and that this robot’s author is no better at predicting the future than the countless ones before him. Once the novelty wears off and the site no longer generates the cash flow as it used to, that’s when the owner decides to sell it.
The thing is, they can show the proof of income for a long time, probably for over a year. They can show a successful site and will explain the slowdown in sales by the lack of advertising or being busy with something else or some other bullshit like that.
The truth is, they have milked the site and the product as much as was possible and now they want to get a bonus at your expense, by selling you something that has no future.
The typical age of a site like this would also be measured in years, give or take, based on the niche and business model. The asking price would also be on par with a truly successful site, but the prospects and the future for a site like this are much dimmer. This is something that a prospective buyer needs to be able to evaluate and realize.
Sites like this are certainly not a good buying opportunity for a newbie.
To be continued.
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found this site via DP – v good ideas here ill keep reading