Risks buying clickbank sites on flippa

Interesting post.

I looked at both auctions, and the one about Dog Bones had the best sales pitch - including screencasts showing the seller logging into Google Analytics and Clickbank to prove revenue.

That seller also had a very high trust factor and was including rights to the product and other domains assoicated as well. Basically - the seller gave you everything you might want to be confident in making the purchase - including access to the actual clickbank product.

People like to buy sites that are already making money and will pay higher than the monthly revenue if they truly trust that it will do the same for them.

The one that sold for <1x monthly revenue seemed less trustworthy - no videos showing revenue, and a 0+2 trust factor - not exactly stellar.

What are the risks involved in buying these sites?
- You could buy something that isn't what they represented (no actual revenue, no actual product rights, they may take your money and never deliver the site, etc....)

What sort of due diligence should be done to manage these risks?
- Trust factor (higher the better), feedback, ask questions and get satisfactory answers BEFORE bidding

What reasonable expectation of continued profitability should a buyer expect?
- Depends on the product, maybe they are selling it because the product is it's way out, or maybe it's more work then they are letting on. Or maybe in your hands - you'll make even more money than they did.

What should a buyer expect to have to do for continued success?
- Again, depends on the product. You should research the competition to see if it's getting stronger. Again, make sure the product has shelf life. Try and get a sense of the history of the product to see where it is in it's life cycle. If it use to average 900 month, but has dropped to 300 month in the last year, it could be bringing in nothing within the next year - if no one cares about that product anymore.

So let's say on the <1x revenue, I verify revenue before payment (maybe via webex) and it's legit....

then all I have to do is transfer it all over to my hosting, my domain account, my clickbank account...

oh wait... as a product seller on clickbank, can I transfer a product to myself? or do I have to create a new product and start over trying to bring in affiliates?

I will suggest you use escrow.com when buying sites such as these and let the inspection period be something between 3-5 days.

During the inspection period, you can have the seller change the affiliate links or whatever links to yours. This way, you will be able to check if the claims are correct or not.

The risk is that the buyer is misrepresenting the traffic and revenue. You need to see referring urls to verify that the traffic is not useless paid traffic. You need to see verifiable proof of income.

You have no reasonable expectation of continued profitability. Continued profitability will depend entirely on your continued development and marketing efforts.

If it all checks out, ask for marketing tips from the seller. They should be happy to tell you how they market the site.

When I sell a clickbank site, I create a clickbank acct specifically for that site and turn it over to the buyer. That's the way it should be done.

Thanks.

Do you sell product sites or affiliate sites?

What prompts you to sell a site?

What continued marketing efforts should be expected?

You can verify the sales all you want, but it doesn't mean anything unless you know the cost per sale. If the seller spent $5000 on AdWords ads to make $5100 in sales, then it's not a very profitable venture.