Selling $20K per month of websites on Flippa - a simple(ish) formula

I recently did some research for a blog post, which dissects the business model of eight website traders who list on places like Flippa frequently and ALWAYS sell, earning upwards of $20,000 each month, every month.

These we're all sellers who

• Had an overall average clearance rate (percentage of sites sold to the total listed) above 80%
• Sold at least 15 sites per month
• Attracted a minimum average of 3 bids per auction
• Sold sites that generally had no traffic but there were some exceptions

All of these sellers essentially sell starter sites - brand new sites mostly with no traffic and no revenue. At first, I thought what I would expect most seasoned buyers and sellers to think - " ‘turnkey sites? Not for me!" but after dissecting what I found, I realised there were some important lessons, even if you sell higher tier sites, as these sellers have managed to fine tune and scale the process of making a consistent, repeatable income on Flippa.

This post is a summary of the most important things each of these sellers did and what they had in common. I hope it makes either useful information or at least interesting reading for anyone with a passion on this topic.

The Domains
Most of the domains used were .com or .net but surprisingly, .info appears to sell just as well. Final prices were however, lower for .info domains ending an average of 32% less than their .com counterparts.

Nearly all the domains listed were keyword domains, usually with a modifier like ‘best’ or ‘my’ or two keywords joined with a hyphen.

The Sites
There were quite clear ‘types’ of sites sold and what’s probably most important here is the difference in average prices them.

• Content sites - These mostly include product review and comparison sites, and typically these type of sites fetched the lowest final prices.
• Mini Applications and Online Shops. These are typically not a full blown application and usually based on a free script or API (for example url shortening, or an online store that listed a just few products which linked directly to Amazon). These achieved the median price.
• Directory and Portal type sites,- They included game and movie review, and local web directories. Again, these typically achieved the median price.
• Products and Services. These attracted the highest average number of bids and the highest final price. They tend to vary between Clickbank mini-sites and SEO product reseller sites that resold anything from guaranteed traffics to Facebook Fans.

Very few of the sites listed were niche content blogs / autoblogs and few seemed to have Adsense as their choice of monetisation. Also, a high proportion of the sites listed dealt in the niche of helping others make money online. These sites also fetched higher prices on average.

The Listings
With little exception, nearly all the sellers followed this pattern

• Listing duration of just 1 day
• No reserve and a $1 starting price
• An average buy it now price across all sellers of $242

Listing Copy
Common features amongst all listings included

Trust - Each buyer aims to establish the reader’s trust both in the listing and through their high feedback scores (average is 12 with one buyer having -13, although this was an anomaly).

Solving the buyer’s biggest fear - For internet business newcomers, I’d expect the two greatest fears / concerns would be not attracting enough visitors and technical knowledge. The most common thread amongst all of these sellers was that their listing offered some form of both link building (or traffic or guaranteed rankings) and technical support if buyers needed it.

Social Validation - Here, social validation is shown most effectively through testimonials as used by a few of the sellers, but mostly shown through claims of their other sites selling quickly, or selling at the BIN price.

Scarcity - As a more experienced buyer / seller, this is probably the part that will trigger alarms, but unfortunately creating scarcity is one of the most common tactics used by all of the sellers I looked at.

Bonuses
Almost every listing here ‘value-added’, offering a range of bonuses for the winning bidder. These included

• Free hosting (for anything between 1 year and life)
• Ebooks and Videos on everything related to SEO and building traffic
• Free marketing and business consultation
• Keyword research and PLR content
• A whole other website on a niche of your choosing (?!)