Ultimate Guide to Buying & Selling on Flippa
People have been buying and selling websites since the first TLDs went up for sale in the 1980s. But the business model of buying and selling websites — especially for smaller, independent site builders like you and I — has really only taken off in the last half-decade or so.
Some people are making serious money.
The Wire Cutter, for example, started as a relatively simple Amazon affiliate site publishing about one article per month. It sold in late 2016 to the New York Times for a reported $30 million.
There are also sites like 10beasts.com, which, aside from its spotty marketing tactics, sold for $570,000.
Or Epic Gardening, a smaller independent site that increased revenue a reported 400% by purchasing a site in the same niche and merging it into itself.
It’s not just us “little guys” getting into the game, either.
Hearst Media, a massive media company who owns both magazines and websites, buys digital assets all the time. In fact, they just closed on a massive deal worth $225 million, acquiring Rodale, a company that includes titles like Men’s Health and Runner’s World.
And, of course, it’s tough to miss the rise of the website brokers. Firms like FE International, who brokers website deals of all sizes, have shown slow and steady growth (and bigger and bigger deals) for the last several years.
In my view, it’s a market poised to explode.
In the middle of it all is one of the biggest and oldest website marketplaces of them all: Flippa.com.
And Flippa is different.
People buy and sell websites on Flippa, but they’re not a broker. They’re more like eBay. And, for the most part, they’re the one of a kind.
And because they’re both big and a relatively unregulated marketplace, the result is something akin to the wild west.
You can buy and sell great websites there. But it’s also full of more… nefarious types.
Today, I want to talk about how to buy and sell websites on Flippa without getting Screwed.
Is Flippa legit? Do people really make money with Flippa?
The short answer is yes.
The long answer is: yes, but it’s really easy to lose money, too (I know because I’ve lost money buying bad sites — more on that below).
But yes; plenty of people make money on Flippa.
Here are a couple of my favorite Flippa success stories (p.s. I know these aren’t content sites like we create, but they’re my favorite stories, they’re fun, and I think they do demonstrate the business model).
In 2015, a cheeky 22-year-old Australian bloke named Matthew Carpenter had a delightfully evil idea: what if you could send something to your frenemies that would be completely harmless but would still ruin the next 10 minutes of their lives?
What if you could anonymously send them… glitter?
It was obviously brilliant, so he let ‘er rip, shortly after launching ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com.
What he didn’t expect was for its virality to explode the very first day it went live (thanks to a single Reddit post). Carpenter told Fast Company orders were “in the thousands” in less than 24 hours. According to a later interview with the eventual buyer, Peter Boychuk, that first marketing push generated $20,000 in orders. His traffic? Millions.
The public reaction was explosive and kinda funny.
Obviously, Carpenter didn’t expect his little site to take off like it did (who would have?), and he didn’t have the operational capacity to handle all those orders without going insane.
So he listed the site on Flippa.
It was bought by Boychuk, a veteran online business owner with a background in ecommerce, product fulfillment, product sourcing, and customer service — exactly the skills and systems needed to run the business.
It was sold for $85,000.
Here’s another story.
It’s another cheeky idea that should not have a place in a free market. But people, for whatever reason, seem to love it.
It’s a website called PotatoParcel.com.
The premise is dead simple: they’ll write your message on a potato and send it to someone. Really.
It was started by a guy named Alex Craig in mid-2015 and generated $2,000 in revenue in its first 48 hours. According to Craig, people use the services to add a bit of comedic flair to otherwise mundane messages, like, “Congrats on the baby, here’s a potato,” and “You should probably get tested.”
And it worked.
Not only was it sold on Flippa for over $40,000, it was also featured on Shark Tank (and, believe it or not, they made a deal with Kevin O’Leary).
These are goofy examples. They’re not content sites. I know. But they do show people are actively buying and selling sites.
And if we filter Flippa’s listings to show recently sold sites, we can see that there are a considerably larger number of “regular” sites trading hands every day.
So, yes, people are definitely making money on Flippa.
But how does it work?
How Does Flippa Work? Marketplaces vs Brokers
One of the most important things to understand about Flippa is that it is a marketplace.
Almost every other company in the website buying and selling space is a broker (e.g. FE International).
Marketplaces are different from brokers in a couple of key ways, and before we talk about the benefits and drawbacks of each, it’s worth discussion their respective functionalities.
A marketplace is a platform that allows buyers and sellers to connect themselves. One form of a marketplace is an auction site. Flippa is an auction site.
So (nearly) anyone can post a website for sale, and (nearly) anyone can buy it.
It’s a lot more like eBay than it is like working with a brokerage.
A brokerage, on the other hand, is something like FE International or Latonas. They don’t just let anyone post sites for sale. They have a selection process.
They also have advisors, a legal team, and a tech team to help facilitate deals.
Because of these differences (and I’m generalizing here), marketplaces like Flippa tend to serve the lower end of the market, and brokers tend to serve the higher end of the market.
However, brokers do sell “smaller” sites if they’re good businesses. So why do people like Flippa?
Pros of Marketplaces
Aside from just being one of the first platforms to really give website owners, site buyers, and investors a place to connect with each other, marketplaces like Flippa have lots of upsides. Here are a few of the major ones.
Marketplaces tend to be bigger.
Marketplaces tend to be bigger in both (1) the size of their inventory and (2) the size of their user base. Flippa is no exception.
SimilarWeb estimates Flippa generates 1.9 million visitors a month.
That’s vastly more traffic than even the biggest website brokerages.
It’s even more traffic than platforms that facilitate general business deals like BizBuySell.com, which generates about 1.1 million visits per month (again, according to SmilarWeb).
Flippa also has way more websites for sale than anywhere else.
Filtering to show websites only, as of the time of this writing, there are nearly 3,000 listings.
If we expand our filters to view all assets, that number grows to just over 3,300.
Compare that to a top brokerage, like FE International, which currently has 24 public listings available (all types).
Clearly, with 3,300 listings, there’s going to be a huge quality difference in Flippa’s 3,000 listings compared to FE’s 24; still, in terms of raw selection, marketplaces tend to have an advantage.
You can find cheaper sites.
This is probably one of Flippa’s major advantages: the price points are way, way lower.
It’s not that there aren’t higher priced sites listed on Flippa. There are. But there are also very small sites listed — sites that earn a couple hundred dollars a month and sell for under $20,000 (a pretty low price point for a legitimate website).
Like this one:
I didn’t do any due diligence on this, by the way, but at a super-quick glance, it looks like a decent site, and the price point is pretty low.
It generates just under 70,000 pageviews per month, which yields $144 in monthly revenue. If you were looking to break into the tech space, this could be a solid buy.
The reserve price is $12,000, and the buy-it-now price is $16,000.
If that feels cheap to you, note that it’s also probably overpriced. At $140/mo, using an industry-standard 30x multiple (30x the monthly profit), we’d probably expect this site to go for around $4,200.
But there are already people bidding up to $7,200, which brings us to our next point…
Sellers can sometimes snag higher multiples on small sites.
From my vantage point, this happens less as prices go up, but the low-end of the market tends to include a lot more impulse buyers and hobbyists — folks who just want to drop a couple grand to get themselves a little bit of passive income and an asset they could potentially grow into something bigger.
And remember, this is an auction house.
Emotions play a part, especially in lower-end sales. It’s less about accurate business valuation and more about just winning the auction.
These folks may also be less likely to know how to accurately value a website. Or they might be buying a site because of the authority (in the SEO sense) it possesses, which I think is the case for this site.
This auction for this site didn’t meet the reserve, so it ended without a sale.
But plenty of people were ready to buy this site, and they were ready to do so at a staggering multiple.
This site generates $253/mo.
The highest bidder was willing to pay $13,000.
That’s a multiple of 51x.
This is probably because the site has over 7,000 referring domains, which is a lot of added value, but still — a 50x multiple is almost unheard of when buying and selling bigger businesses.
The multiples can be lower for mid- and high-range sites.
The wacky multiples you can get on the lower end of the spectrum does not hold for the higher end of the spectrum. In fact, the opposite is true.
On Flippa, higher-priced sites (think over $50,000) tend to be priced below a 30x monthly profit multiple.
It’s not always true, and there are certainly counterexamples.
But in my experience searching thousands of different Flippa listings over the years, I’ve found that, for the most part, higher-end sites can be cheaper.
Like this one:
This site generates $2,237 in revenue.
It was sold for $25,000. That’s a multiple of about 11x.
That’s not even a year. The buyer of this site will likely be in the black by the time the close date circles back around on the calendar.
Admittedly, I picked this one because the multiple was so hilariously low. So here’s another site a little closer to the sorts of assets our community likes to create.
This is a content-based site that makes money with Amazon affiliate commissions, display ads, and advertising sales (right in our wheelhouse).
It generates $2,454/mo in revenue, and it was sold for a cool $50,000.
That’s a multiple of just over 20x.
It’s nearly impossible to find a listing on any broker with multiples this low. Brokers these days, especially those operating up-market, have advanced valuation formulas and price businesses using highly standardized methodologies.
On Flippa, people just kind of… pick a number.
And because of this, it’s possible to find some real deals.
There’s less red tape.
Listing a website on Flippa isn’t as easy as posting something on eBay, but I’d say it’s a lot closer to that than the experience you’d have at a brokerage.
There are only five (relatively simple) steps.
The steps are:
- Basic details
- More details
- Promote & pay
- How do you get paid?
- Verify revenue and expenses
As long as you have records of your site, none of this should be a problem.
As a disclaimer, it’s worth noting that I don’t know what “verify your revenue and expenses” actually entails. Additionally, I know Flippa shows both “verified” traffic and revenue in its listings, but I’m not sure what mechanism they use to verify either.
There’s an open-forum style Q&A between buyers and sellers.
This is one of the things I’ve always really liked about Flippa: the public question and answer format for all website listings.
For my money, allowing public scrutiny and open questions on listings may have been one of the things that prevented Flippa from devolving into a complete and total disaster.
It’s a kind of self-policing, which is sorely needed with such a lax buying and selling process.
It works like this.
After any listing goes public, as long as you have an account, you can review the site, it’s financials, its traffic, and it’s business model — and then you can ask questions directly to the seller on the listing.
This has a couple of benefits.
First, it gives you a forum to get questions answered directly by the seller as quickly as possible, which is obviously useful.
Secondly, though, it aggregates public questions, which means you can see everyone else’s questions — not just your own. This is great because other people may see problems you might not have seen.
It’s almost (not quite, but almost) like crowdsourcing due diligence. If a site seems too good to be true, the comments are usually the first place I’ll look — even before digging into the data myself — to see what people are calling the owner out on.
Cons of Marketplaces
It’s not all bunnies and roses, of course. For all the benefits of shopping for websites on a marketplace, you definitely sacrifice some of the luxuries of going through a brokerage or buying privately. Here are a few of the big ones.
It’s easy to get scammed.
This is the elephant in the room.
Flippa has had its share of reputation… difficulties over the years, and almost always, it’s due to the ubiquity of scammers on the platform.
There are so many different types of scams, it would be almost impossible to list them all. We’re also going to spend a good chunk of time talking about common scams and how to avoid them, so won’t go into much more here.
But suffice it to say scams are the preeminent problem of the platform.
You really have to hunt for quality sites.
Despite the scams, there are great sites for sale on Flippa.
You just have to dig for them. And dig. And dig. And dig some more. Remember, there are 3,300 businesses currently listed on Flippa, and a significant portion of them are scams.
I’m sure you can do the math.
Sifting through mountains of auctions can leave you feeling a bit like Sisyphus.
Compare that to what you’d get at a brokerage.
This is taken from FE International, my favorite brokerage.
I like them because they only work with good businesses. They have a team of people who look at sites, and they only list legitimate, defensible businesses.
That’s not to say that businesses listed through brokerages don’t have hiccups. They do, especially if you’re going through some of the less reputable brokerages.
But working with a brokerage still drastically reduces your risk.
It’s also just a lot less time-consuming.
We’re going to go over how to find good sites on Flippa below, and a big part of that is figuring out how to maximize the efficiency searching through hundreds of different listings.
Even if you maximize your efficiency, though, there’s no denying it’s a painful process (unless you just enjoy browsing, and, hey, some people do).
There’s no help.
If you want to buy or sell a website on Flippa, you’re more or less on your own.
They do have a support system. They do have an Escrow system. And they do have tools that help you value your website.
But unless you bribe someone (kidding; don’t bribe people), no one at Flippa is going to be involved in your deal.
That’s not true at a brokerage.
Most brokerages these days have dedicated brokers (also called advisors at a few of the major firms) whose sole job it is to help facilitate the sale and transfer of good online businesses to good buyers.
They’ll set up phone calls. They’ll help answer questions. They’ll help with due diligence. And they’ll help with mediation.
This makes the whole process not only a lot safer but a hell of a lot more convenient.
Beyond brokers, though, most brokerages also employ legal and technical teams. Legal teams act as an unbiased third party who can help draft fair contracts (saving considerable money on legal fees), and technical teams help with the transition of the actual assets from one owner to another.
This is also way safer and tremendously more convenient.
When I bought my first site on Flippa, I essentially crossed my fingers that I could trust the guy and googled “how to transfer a website.”
It’s still an auction.
Lastly, it’s an auction.
In my view, this is a massive drawback because it means you’re competing against other buyers instead of negotiating with a motivated owner.
And this, in turn, is bad because it means the actual value of the business changes based on what people feel like bidding that day. This is fundamentally weird to me. The value of a business should be based on its performance, not the oft-emotional chaos of an auction.
Call me old-fashioned, but I’d much rather base business valuations on things like revenue history, risk, complexity, and any (or all) of the other metrics good brokerages use to set fair prices for online businesses.
How to Buy Sites on Flippa (without getting screwed)
Buying a site anywhere can be tricky. On Flippa, there are even more variables. It pays to have your ducks in a row before you jump in the deep end and spend tens of thousands of dollars. Let’s dig into how to go about buying sites on Flippa (without getting screwed).
Quick Prep
Super quick prep here: you need to sign up for a free Flippa account. Otherwise, you’ll be running into stuff like this on most listings:
Basic Filters to Look for Sites
The first thing to do, of course, is to find a site to buy.
That’s not necessarily easy on Flippa since the marketplace is filled with scams and low-quality sites.
It’s not just that, though. We also want to find good businesses — established businesses that are making money and are likely to continue to do so. Here are some basic steps for finding those.
The first line of defense will be Flippa’s built-in filtering system.
1. Set “safety” filters.
These are the easy ones. Tick the boxes for verified traffic and (if you’re really, really risk-averse) verified revenue.
The reason we don’t always want to only look at sites with verified revenue is that revenue can be difficult to verify, and almost always, webmasters will include visual proof of their financials and will be willing to give you some sort of access to those accounts or we’ll have recorded videos showing those accounts that they posted along with the listing. And because revenue can be so difficult to verify, selecting that filter can eliminate a huge chunk of the listings.
Here are my settings:
1. Filter by asset type.
At risk of sounding obvious, we should start with the basic type of business we want to run. Flippa sells four kinds of assets: websites, Amazon FBA businesses, apps, and domains.
You can pick whatever you like, but since we’re all about buying and selling websites, we’d pick websites.
You’d then see a page like this:
Here, you’ll find a few different selections of sites you can browse (featured sites, editor’s choice, etc.). These sites are typically higher quality than the average site on Flippa, but we don’t want to rely on their editors to find the real hidden gems. So, I usually just click “See all websites.”
2. Filter by age.
The age filter is probably one of the easiest ways to filter out the most blatant scams. If a site hasn’t been around for long, there’s a much greater chance that the $10,000 it’s earning every month (or whatever) is fake.
It’s also good to filter by age just to make sure you’re buying an established business because, in general, the more history a business has, the safer it is.
To filter, I usually set the minimum age at one year.
One year is more or less the bare minimum for buying sites. Even if a site sees crazy, viral-type success before its first birthday, the risk is still a bit too much, I think.
Even if the minimum age is one year, it’s worth paying special attention to sites that have been around for longer. I’d be much more comfortable buying a site in the 3-5 year range than one with only 12 months under its belt.
3. Filter by monetization type.
Think of the monetization filter as more of a business model filter.
Ads, dropshipping, amazon affiliate, FBA… they’re all totally different business models that require different sets of skills. Unless you have tons of resources you don’t mind “learning” with or a partner who has the skills to run it, I wouldn’t recommend buying a site operating under a business model you aren’t familiar with.
Here’s the tricky thing…
There are two filters on Flippa that both kind of do this: Monetization and Revenue source.
Because the two are so similar, and because it can be a bit confusing when you’re setting them up, I’ve found it’s often best to play with both of these filters concurrently.
Here’s the “monetization” filter:
It’s mostly just a simple selection here. And there’s no rule against selecting multiple business models. If I were searching for a site, for example, I’d be looking at sites monetized with ads or affiliate sales since that’s what I’m best at.
You could make a similar selection with the “revenue source” filter.
4. Filter for website type.
This filter can help you find certain types of websites (content, ecommerce, etc.).
It may feel redundant, but it’s useful if, say, you want to just see all the blogs, and you don’t particularly care how they’re monetized.
If that were the case, you might turn off the asset and monetization filters and just select “content” from the website type filter.
Importantly, I want to deselect forums and directories since those aren’t the kinds of sites I know how to run.
5. FIlter for revenue.
The revenue filter will help you find businesses in your price range. Legitimate, established websites on Flippa typically sell for 20-30x the monthly profit, which should give you a good idea of what your revenue range should be.
This one is going to be mostly up to you, and it’s not really rocket science. If you’re buying entry-level businesses, set the range a bit lower, and if you’re looking for higher-range businesses, set it higher.
I’ll just add one caveat: set the range a bit wider than you think you want (a lower minimum revenue and a higher maximum revenue).
Why? To take advantage of the inherent volatility of Flippa.
Anyone can post anything on Flippa, and not everyone knows how much to charge for their website, so it’s often worth looking slightly outside the parameters of your comfort revenue levels.
6. Filter for traffic.
You can filter for traffic with two different filters; there’s a pageviews filter and a monthly visitors filter.
The only reason to use pageviews instead of visitors is if you’re looking specifically for a site monetized with display ads, which rely heavily on pageviews instead of visitor value.
I can’t think of a great reason to set a maximum traffic number since I can’t think of a situation in which you’d want traffic instead of more traffic.
Minimum traffic may also not matter much since revenue per visitor can vary wildly from site to site.
So, really, this filter is just to weed out scams; specifically, it filters out sites claiming to have revenue but don’t have any traffic.
Take Advantage of Public Q&A
Every auction on this platform has a public Q&A section. It’s set up as a comment section below every listing.
This is probably one of the biggest advantages of marketplaces like Flippa (and it’s one of the few safeguards available to you as a buyer in lieu of an actual brokering service). It allows an entire community of potential buyers to scrutinize the site and ask questions collectively, making it much more likely for anomalies, discrepancies, and any other suspicious activity to be brought to everyone’s attention.
Here’s an example from this listing:
Not only are people calling out some of the anomalies and giving the seller an opportunity to provide an explanation, but it’s also possible that other potential buyers may just think of really good questions or see things that you might not have seen.
We’re going to be doing due diligence a little bit later, but the Q&A section is still a great place to ask questions that may be a problem even if the due diligence checks out.
In particular, I like to ask about (1) anomalies in traffic and income data to see if there is an easy explanation and (2) stuff I might need to run the business after it’s transferred.
I might ask stuff like:
- Why was income lower for July?
- Why is traffic decreasing instead of increasing?
- Will you be able to train the new owner on your advertising campaigns?
- Could you explain why January had so little traffic?
- How did you build your backlinks?
Here’s an example of the kinds of questions people ask (you can also see the seller answering some of them).
Avoid Common Flippa Scams w/ Due Diligence
Okay, first things first.
I’m not a due diligence expert, although I have done my fair share of due diligence for a number of sites. If you feel like you’re in completely over your head, there are firms who will do due diligence for you, like Centurica.
But what if you want to do your own? Let’s go through it.
There are actually tons of different scam set occur on flip it, and if you’re really interested into covering your bases completely, you should check out this thread on Warrior Forum, which details lots of the nuances of Flippa scammers.
For our purposes though — because we’ve already eliminated a lot of crap with smart filtering –we really only need to know how to navigate the scams common to the specific types of businesses we’re trying to buy (content sites generating money with ad revenue or affiliate sales).
Here are a few of the most common scams we need to watch out for.
1. Fake Traffic
It’s very, very important to understand Google Analytics cannot always be trusted.
Even if a website has verified traffic (according to Flippa), it’s possible for that traffic to be fake. How? Well, there are a number of ways to fake even organic traffic. For example, some fake traffic services will use bots to scan the search results for your website and click on them, behaving in exactly the same way a human would.
The best way to prevent getting duped by fake organic traffic is to request access to Google Analytics and look for signs of foul play. Google analytics access to something you should have before you buy any site, anyway, and any serious seller should be willing to give it to you.
The metrics we want to look for if we’re trying to spot fake traffic are bounce rate and time on site.
Generally, bots tend not to linger on pages. Or, if they do, they all stay on the page for the same amount of time. So we want to look for either extremely low session times or exactly the same session times across all pages.
Instead, you want to see session times that indicate people are staying on a page to actually read it, and you want to see bounce rates that indicate at least some people are clicking on other things on the site.
Additionally, bots don’t tend to click on anything else when they arrive, so extremely low balance rates can indicate something fishy. Just be aware that it’s also common for bounce rate to be skewed by Google analytics installation errors, so if everything else looks good except for bounce rate, it could be worth looking into the technical side.
That said, sophisticated bots can manipulate these metrics, too, so I like to take it one step further…
If the site you’re looking to buy has mostly organic traffic, another good way to verify the traffic is real is to look on Ahrefs or SEM Rush.
In Ahrefs site explorer, you can keyword rankings, how many keywords top pages rank for, and estimated historic traffic.
Both of these tools estimate traffic, but crucially, their traffic estimates are based on rankings in Google and cannot easily be inflated. No, it’s not foolproof, but it’s certainly another good line of defense.
2. PBN-Powered Rankings
If you’re not an SEO, this may not be something you know to watch out for.
Here’s the Cliff’s Notes explanation of a PBN. A PBN, otherwise known as a private blog network, is a group of websites that artificially boost the rankings of another site.
Google doesn’t like people linking to their own sites in order to manipulate their algorithm, which is what a private blog network does.
Why is it dangerous? Mostly because of Google is not shy about handing out penalties for using PBNs if they find them.
Buying a site powered by PBNs = extreme risk.
Finding and identifying PBNs can be tricky, but generally, PBN sites are pretty small and have been built on an expired domain. Here’s a more detailed guide on how to spot them.
3. Fake Income
Fake income can be a little harder to spot than some of the other scams. First, because sellers will be a lot more reluctant to let you into the backend of their financial accounts, and second there may be multiple revenue streams to verify.
Probably the easiest way to get around this his to do a screen share with a software like Skype and have the seller walk through the financials with you live.
When bigger due diligence firms do income verification, they use a combination of screenshares and access to financial accounts. So both is ideal, but if you can’t have both, or if your seller is a bit tentative to let you into their accounts at first, a screenshare is a good start.
Place a Bid or Buy
If you feel good about the site, its traffic, its revenue, and its seller, you can go ahead and put in an offer.
Flippa gives you two ways to throw your money into the hat: you can place a bid, or you can buy a site outright for a preset price as long as the seller has set one (the “buy it now” price).
If you place a bid, Flippa will ask you for your maximum bid, and then it will automatically place incremental bids on your behalf until you reach your maximum.
Flippa also offers a free escrow service you can use to ensure both the funds in the house that you are buying are transferred safely (read more about their escrow here).
Get the Site Transferred to You
Listen, I’m not a very tech-savvy person, so I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail here.
It’s mostly just important to understand that after the purchase is made, the technical transfer of the asset is entirely up to you and the seller. It pays to be prepared for this (I’ve — rather embarrassingly — been in situations in which I bought a site and neither myself nor the seller knew how to transfer the asset, which was just a headache for everyone)
But basically, in order to get a website transferred to you, you need to:
- Ask the seller to backup the entire site (just in case!)
- Transfer ownership of the domain
- Transfer site files to a hosting account you own
If you want to take a whack at it, Flippa has a guide.
If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, you can always hire people to help. Both domain registrars and hosting companies will often help you transfer domains and files, even if it’s to/from a competing company. Hosting companies like WPX, for example, will take care of the whole thing for you.
How to Sell Sites on Flippa
Quick disclaimer colon we don’t recommend selling sites on Flippa as a first choice. As long as your site is making $1,000 a month or more, it’s almost always better to at least inquire with a broker, Sons Brokers can typically sell sites faster and command higher prices.
The broker we usually recommend is FE International. You can get a free valuation here.
That said, because selling a site doesn’t involve looking out for scams or doing any due diligence, it’s usually a lot more straightforward and mostly involves gathering traffic and revenue data to present to buyers.
Here’s a quick rundown.
Prep to Sell
There’s really only a few steps here, and they are pretty simple.
Gather Traffic Data
In order to show verified traffic on your listing, you’ll have to (1) have Google Analytics installed and (2) give Flippa access to your Google analytics account.
Here’s the exact process as outlined by Flippa’s help desk:
Again, very straightforward.
Gather Income Data
Income data Maybe a tiny bit more of a headache depending on how many Revenue sources you have and where they come from.
Most content sites will generally only be dealing with display ad revenue and/or revenue from one or two big affiliate programs (like Amazon).
As best you can, you want to show a detailed history of the revenue from all sources for as many months as you can.
it’s typically best to present this data in several different forms:
- A Spreadsheet showing profits and losses
- Screenshots of the back ends of relevant financial accounts (e.g. Adsense, Amazon)
- A simple, alive video walkthrough of the back ends irrelevant financial accounts
Here’s an example of what a simple P&L statement might look like;
Don’t worry about creating one yourself, though. Just make a copy of the one I created. If you’re not sure which expenses to include, here’s a solid guide.
Screenshots of your back end financials can be uploaded as simple images, and videos can be uploaded to YouTube. Here’s an example of video verification from a recent Flippa listing.
Gather Any Other Proof You Might Need
Leslie, it’s probably a good idea to provide verification for any relevant social media accounts, especially if they have large audiences, or if they are in any way crucial to the business.
You can verify these much in the same way you verified your traffic information: with screenshots, screenshots, or video walkthroughs.
Here’s an example from the same listing as above, a site that relies heavily on social traffic:
And, of course, if there is anything else necessary to run the business, it’s probably a good idea to provide proof of that as well.
List Your Site
The listing process is pretty straightforward, so it’s not worth going into too much detail here.
You’ll mostly just have to fill out a few simple forms. The first will have pre-populated questions that ask you about the business (be as descriptive and thorough as possible):
And the second allows you to pick auction settings, including the starting price, auction type, and auction duration.
Then, of course, they’ll allow you to buy premium listings that include extra promotional features.
After that, it’s more or less just a matter of payment and waiting.
Answer Questions & Finalize the Sale
Don’t get lazy at this point, though. Selling your site isn’t just a matter of waiting for the money to come in. Buyers will expect you to be available to answer questions in the comments and also via direct message.
As a rule, it’s best to be as thorough, quick, and transparent as possible when answering questions.
If any buyers express explicit interest, it may also be worth sending them a direct message to try to negotiate further.
If somebody wins the auction, or if you can finagle a deal with a buyer directly, the rest is just a matter of getting the money in escrow and transferring the asset just like we discussed above.
Over To You…
What did I miss? Have you bought or sold sites on flipper? If you have, I’d be eager to hear your experiences, and insights, so drop me a question in the comments below!
