Website Flipping Market Saturation

The value of blogs has shot way down since the SF community started to flip wordpress blogs.

It is all about traffic and results now, and if you can add potential you are golden.

Buyers want to see sustainability, in a market place, where so many buyers have been screwed by so many scam artists selling them copy and paste affilaite pages with no real product, you really need to come forth with some good statistical data to make a legit sale.

If you have a list of any kind, this is looked great upon buyers in the SF community because it shows potential earnings, through advertising or even through product offers.

Blogs with readers, usually will sell well. Just around 4* their monthly earnings. However, if you setup an entire blog, just around 10-15 unique articles, have around 500 uniques per month, you will be able to sell this blog for abotu $300.

Forums sell nicely. However, setting up a forum, and setting up a reader base takes a lot of time, and I assume that you don't want to wait 3-6 months to flip your site.

Websites with a product sell usually around $250, your just selling an asset here.

A big trend I saw in the SF community was a lot of people building websites with a product or a membership site, doing a WSO here or selling a Digital Point Forums, and then heading over to SitePoint to sell for 4-6 times the earnings.

This model is not so bad, I don't agree in it, just due to business ethics.

The bottom line is...

The market is not saturated if you have a good site to sell.

If you are thinking about selling a ten paged ebook with a mini site or a scrapped together blog with a bunch load of RSS feeds, please don't step your foot in the door, because the communitty doesn't need that anymore.

Yep, LMC got it right.

The market is saturated, or it looks to be... because everyone's doing the same things.

Everyone and their dog is selling either a) the ten article blog with the slightly customized Revolution Church theme or b) Clickbank product sites.

Buyers look at the front page of the Startup Section on Sitepoint, or Sites for Sale on Digital Point, and see dozens of sites, all looking similar, all with no traffic. They wonder that if so many people can offer it for $300, surely it only costs $50 - $100 to produce.

You need to step up, sell sites that are different... look what's hot and unsaturated and capitalize on that. Sites with revenue, traffic, subscribers will ALWAYS sell, as long as you put them in front of enough eyeballs... while custom script sites work best. Hint - Twitter apps even with a little traffic are very, very hot right now.

Good luck.

Jason,

I agree also with Jason on the Twitter Apps, back when Facebook Applications went huge, i sold three of them, both with almost no traffic, maybe max 100 users, but they were accepted by facebook which is a valuable asset, and I got $1500 for each one.

Iphone Apps, Blackberry Apps, Twitter Apps, take the newest and baddest trends and build a site around them, and they will sell.

A nice little tip is to create a site and add as much value to it as you can by building a YouTube Channel, Twitter page with followers, Squidoo pages, etc...

Build a site with ASSETS!!!

The market is indeed saturated with cookie-cutter websites and blogs.

There is still a market though for quality sites and blogs that are in some way unique from what is out there. The value can be in that they either already have garnered some traffic through initial promotion, have something of a list started, or have really taken a giant step forward that will serve the buyer greatly as they take over the site from there.

Yea, I would agree its time for flippers to start adding a little more to their websites perhaps instead of just a 10 article blog, maybe take 3 days and hash out like 50-60 unique articles, and make a couple youtube videos and let it set for 7 days, do some social bookmarketing and get some traffic screen shots, even if it's only a screen shot of 100 visitors its a better site to sell then one with 10 articles and not a single visitor

Could you point to some high paying twitter flips? All I found were sites selling for 150-300 dollars. Thanks!

Like everybody telling startup sites are not selling as before.Also I can easily tell Clickbank ready site flipping also getting saturated.


In short :a money making site can sell well,even if its a proxy site with free template

I think that if you want to get serious about flipping websites, you should look for venues outside of the flooded SF website.

I have heard of.people having nice success with selling the sites to people directly in the niche.

If your websites stand out, you don't have to worry about saturation.

If you are building that usual Church theme blog, obviously that's saturated.

Site flipping
Domain flipping
Penny Domain buying and selling
Site leasing
domain parking

All are good models and still works...

I have noticed that all my flips sell if there is some reason to buy my sites.Like decent SERP placement or some type of track record.

Blame the oversaturation to blackhat ebooks.

Yes, Market is Saturated, But I think you need to build up your reputation on Sitepoint, you need to be different from other's to sell your websites,blogs,minisites.?

The problem is that you have to keep coming up with ways to be different because as soon as you get a successful model going, there are a bunch of people that adopt that same model. Some of them even just copy your sales letter and use it in their auctions!

I read ebay site flipping market is down.crappy single page amazon affiliate sites were selling for $97 before. many buyers leaved the market,bcoz of this cheap ugly site sellers

Yep. Many sites sold at ebay were really crappy. Not to be funny, I always check out the websites for sale at SitePoint and found this website was relisted for three times and never get sold. So, I did have a look at the website, it's looked familiar to me and I remember, it's a package from WF Special Offers and that chap just loaded the whole thing to his server.

So, the learning point is, if you want to be success in flipping, you got to be unique, better, outstanding and use your creativity to add value - at all times.

P/S: I think Revolution is really over-used and kinda tired looking at them - Boring.

Flipping startups on Sitepoint no longer works. That part IS saturated. It's all about getting traffic and revenue to the site now. Traffic I can get EASILY. Turning that traffic into revenue, a whole different story.

I will always be opposed to the word "flipping." It is used in the real estate world, but those who are truly professional call themselves "wholesalers" (I used to be an investor).

"Flipping" seems to show contempt for your clients, as though the fast buck were the only concern. Really, you can and should be providing a valuable service.

I believe that what you call yourself or your service can alter your circumstances, often for the better. I would not want to call myself a "flipper."

Site flipping would never get saturated for a person who is expert in SEO.

Buy site > do SEO > improve SERP > get traffic > Resell.

This is how it goes, he can profit a lot. Traffic will also increase the income.
so a good money, income + Resell - buy

It all changed once this whole 'recession' hoo ha got rolling. It took only about 1 month before the whole marketplace changed. Where people were willing to buy for traffic and potential, they stopped buying all together.

People are still buying though, but a lot more carefully. From my observations, there are still just as many interested buyers, but they want to know they are going to get something they can be confident will earn money for them. Hence, the most solid sales come from providing someone a real product they can move, or established revenue. If you want to sell a site that is monetized via affiliate revenue, it has to be solid payouts and a good marketing model.

In a nutshell, people want to buy sites that will make them cash. You just have to create something that is doing that, or definitely will do that, and you will get a sale.

I just got into flipping websites but the idea I have for them is to create a blog that is ranking in Google and other search engines, my theory is you don't have to be page 1 at the time of sale but there needs to be a good potential for someone to come in and get you to page 1.

Right now my site isn't listed in Google for my keywords but its listed in MSN and Yahoo....When I'm done with it I'm hoping to sell it for $500-$800....I spent $300 on it to generate articles for it. SO HOPEFULLY A well developed site with over 60 articles will sell well. And its taken me about a month to do it. I intend to put the site for sale on the 19th At least thats the goal.

Mithun,

Make it easy for other people. Just take an example -- products sites today sell really well, even without sales or anything. Product launch is a very good way to make money - but many people don't know where to start. You give them a solution, and they happily pay you top dollars for it.

Same thing can be done for membership sites, affiliate marketing (for example, landing pages, presell pages).

That's the case with startup sites. Lots of site flippers do the exact same thing. People don't want to think, they just copy what everyone else does and is successful at. The market thus gets saturated. Think something, think how it could help, think of potential objections, solve the problem and g'dang! You'll be in gold.

People need to see the potential. Everyone thinks what they do is good, but you need to make others think that it is what they want.

-- Armaan

How many millions of ebooks are out there?
Do you think the ebook market is over saturated?

Flipping websites is the same ...

Yes there is more competition, but that only means that you need to build better, bigger and more profitable sites in the first place.

All the best,
Tony

Thanks Desmond, I'm just starting to build a list for site flipping so hopefully I'll be able to build up to that. Does sound like the way to go if you can get some good, hungry buyers.

Desmond is on with the list...

I have a list of 600+ buyers and it really makes profits soar because you no longer have to pay listing fees to any site.

Now a $150 startup simple website, can sell for $150, and I can keep $150.

Instead of losing $50 or so on fees...

Like any business, you must be organized, minimize expenses, and add value

Hey LMC, awesome mate ! I tend to focus on long term flips. So I can keep the site if it makes me money or flip it if it doesnt make me. Also hey nice website dude! SiteFlippers.org! cool one!

I usually do product flips, they are much easier for me since I write pretty good.

It is not website flipping which is getting saturated but SITEPOINT. Sitepoint is getting saturated!

G'day,
Akky

10 types of Site Flipping?

That isn't completely accurate in my opinion...

Really you have site flipping, trend flipping, idea flipping, and site acquisition.

In your ten types, you might be talking about flipping a blog, an affiliate site, an ebook, etc, but really these are all just properties with assets.

It really is an easy process, think about flipping houses.

You can buy the house by the water for a few million in hopes to flip it to some celebrity

Similar to buying a really profitable site for a $10,000 or more, expecting to bring more value and selling it to a corporation.

You can buy the shitty old house falling apart for really cheap, in hopes to fix it up and sell it for a profit.

Similar to buying a website with very little to it for really cheap and adding what you can to bring more value to it.

You can buy a house that is in a good location, has a nice value, in hopes to rent it out to make a profit.

Similar to buying a website with traffic, PR, and revenue, holding onto it to recoup your investment and then selling it for profit.

You can build 50 houses on 50 plots of land in hopes to sell them and make a lot of money.

Similar to building a website, adding assets to it, and then selling it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The process is not hard, there is not much to it, the reason most people are failing at Site Flipping is that they are not trying it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++

Hey,

Yes it has been built over a long period of time, but pretty much it works to the point where I create a site, send out to the list, and in less then a few hours it is sold.

There is a program sold on offers forum called flip mastery. You can still get the discount of 20. Search for poster kate anderson. I just got it last night and she covers program in detail.

The marketplace (any marketplace) goes up and down, it's just the way that it is, and like I said on my board, it's time to get more creative and give more bang for their buck.

We have to stand out from the competition, and whoever said that the market is filled with "cookie cutter" sites hit the nail on the head. Even those with lists, established reputations and a solid customer base (like me) have to go one step above our previous efforts and do better than ever before. (I only have a small list of website buyers because I don't advertise my newsletter all that much, so for those struggling to build a list, it's not about size at all.. just make sure to invite anyone who has purchased from you in the past to join your notification list.. buyers are the best subscribers, after all).

And as for the current (and temporary) marketplace slump, I find it's the kick in the butt I needed.. Nothing motivates me more than challenging myself to do better, and now is the perfect time to give it all I've got.

PS: I just flipped a $897 site today on SP that was a completely new start up, so they are still selling, we just need to find new, creative ways of adding value to the websites and if it means we flip less for more, so be it.. Quality over quantity will put you leaps & bounds above 99% of those out there.

And thanks for the plug, kyhawk.. the website URL is http://www.FlipMastery.com

LMC..

What kind of offer you gave to your list to join your mailing list?

Ebook about site flipping? A website?

Well, your lists are buyer right, so what kind of offer that we can give to buyer in order to get them into the list?

Thank you for replying

You should also build a squeeze page specifically for your customers, and include the link within your listings. That way, even those who may not purchase your current auction can subscribe to receive notification of future listings.

If you do want to offer an incentive, you could perhaps offer a special discount for list members only, or better yet, pre-notification of upcoming listings even giving them an opportunity to purchase your packages before you list them (works well for me, and saves you listing fees).

I also offer those on my list with extra content or packages such as a "List Building Package", from time to time, where if they BIN one of my packages within a specified period of time (24 hours, etc), they will receive a bundle of extra goodies, including an original report, articles or an autoresponder sequence and squeeze page..

Anything you can do to entice someone to join your newsletter is worth doing, especially if these are people actively looking to purchase start-ups on SP.

Kate and Desmond have it right...

One thing I also do to grow this list...

I use my IM lists and Niche lists and use a message like this:

Hey (firstname),

I know this is a bit off topic, but my web designer brought up
a good idea to me that I can use for some side income.

Basically, I know a good amount about (the niche), and so
I will be building a few websites with my designer in ( the niche).

I just wanted to see a show of hands of who would be
interested in receiving a website. With this website you can
write all about (the niche), and even earn some extra income.

In any case, if your interested check out, this link.

Just an off topic rambling email, tomorrow I am sending you the
Top Ten things not to do (in the niche), and I hope you enjoy.

Now I am pulling in my customers into my site flipping funnel as well.

Desmond, Kate, LMC

I guess those are great ideas. Please tell me what are your opinions if for this purposes I drive PPC traffic to my squeeze page contain such offer? Is this worth to try?

magnoliaone,

Yes this will work, as I have done it before...

However, be sure to show samples of sites you sold, maybe a testimonial from the buyer of the future income the site has pulled in...

I'll let my listings speak for themselves
Auctions by sbucciarel

Add value to a site and try to differentiate from the crowd. If you can get traffic and some revenue going it will sell easily but startups are still selling ... just slower than they were.

Today is a perfect example of why I love site flipping.

I just listed two sites ... one is a crazy Emo site I built that from the beginning, got about 1,000 uniques per day. I listed it for $457 BIN. Instead of bidding on it, some guy pm's me and said he'd buy it for $500 ... that I was selling it too cheap (that's a first for me). As soon as I see all the interest, I close the auction. Then another pm comes in and another guy wants it. I tell him that I already got a $500 offer and he offers $550 for it. SOLD. Awesome. Listed another one also and it just sold also, so within two hours of listing, it's $1000 day today ....

so oversaturation? Not if you add value to the sites. The Emo site is getting 1,000 free, organic visitors per day and the other site is a PR4 Green site ... and neither of them look like any other site listed on Sitepoint. Be unique and add some value to the sites you sell and you'll do very well.

Great thread. Thanks for all valuable info.

Hope this question isn't offtopic..
Obviously this thread mentions alot about making a site unique to sell better/faster and higher profit.
Your all talking about how easy it is to make 500/1000 or even 5k flipping sites.
Is it possible to create an ebook/report product site (report +salespage,few squidoo lens,indexed) get enough sales to total $200 and flip for about $2400 (12mths x$200)
in 1-2weeks worth of sales.
OR is that the kind of sites that are considered startups(that seems to 'saturate' the market)?
Thanks.

design,

Do this:

- Report
- Salespage
- Custom Graphics
- Upsell Product
- Few Squidoo Lens
- Indexed
- Integrate Forum
- Help Desk for Product Support
- Mailing List
- Autoresponder Series
- $350 in revenue

This should be enough value to get between 9 -12 times the income, and hit that $2400+ mark, and that can all be done in about two weeks.

I've hit the $1,200 mark with

design
content - heavy on photos
blazing traffic due to Google images
Adsense income and a few clickbank sales

So there is more than one formula that works.

Seems my thread is Pushing out many Creative ideas.
Thanks for all warriors for posting in the thread.

Seems more ideas are coming after this post

One thing about the two week thing ...
You can't list in Established Sites until the site is 1 month old on Sitepoint, so 1 month is the minimum you have to develop a site to sell in that Marketplace.

Face Book Apps seem to be a hot product. You can easily create them and flip for good profit. Do a search on Google for face book apps and you will find plenty of information on how to create them and flip them.

Not only gfacebook app, are hot but also twitter app are hot now. Just make a simple app , ad some users. and flip it for good $$$

Could anybody tell abt Autoblog Flipping? Is it saturated Now?

I've been in site Flipping business since 2004, and I must say that for the past 2 years it seems that the market is saturated already but not die yet. There are still many successful flipper out there.

But if you have a quality site to offer I am sure you can still make good money from flipping.

Blogs are an interesting selling subject it seems in my opinion that a small just established blog has a limit of about $300 which would have 10-30 unique articles and about 10-50 unique views a day and perhaps makes $20 - $50 a month.

Then the second tier of blogs with around 100-500 unique views, 100-200 unique articles and making $300-$1,000 a month tend to be underpriced and sell for less than the blogger wants them too.

The justification for this is because the Blogger if they have done it correctly without stealing content and writing unique articles which are gripping and of quality will of put too much time in to the blog and not be able to receive the correct amount.

I am currently at this stage and after 1 year and 7 months I realise I couldn't sell my blog for a figure that I would be happy with instead I have to stick at it and wait until i can build my monthly income and monthly traffic up until its worth more.

At the end of the day when selling a website people look at:

Income
Traffic
Subscribers
Readership (comments per article)
Domain Name
Branding
How many articles
How many pages
Any SEO rankings
Any PR
and a couple of other important factors.

Well you all didn't leave much to say!

I will add this though, because everyone is right and it's absolutely true, you just need to be unique, honest, and real!...

One of my companies develops Facebook applications... we make about 10-20 apps each week, based on orders and either completely custom or from the turnkey scripts we sell, now I don't know, probably at LEAST 1 client bails on us each week or tries to rip us off when it comes time to payment, etc.. probably more So the point is that we're left with a TON of Facebook applications. Naturally, we still try to get paid for some of the time we spent working on them and offer them at discounted rates and sell them. And they sell really well. In part it's due to the talent of our graphic designers and the irresistible templates they create The bottom line is that we're easily able to generate over 5 figures each month just from flipping 5-10 products on the side... The reason, well first of all, well designed Facebook apps are killing it right now, particularly RPGs which we do a lot of... So people want them. Secondly they're unique and attractive, so people want them. Finally, we offer outstanding support and our clients and members of the communities we're active in know this, so people want to do business with us.

Of course, this can apply to websites too, even just taking the extra time to make your site look REALLY nice can pull you a few hundred extra in an auction. Visuals are important for a lot of people, and can help create enough emotional attachment to generate a bid or purchase.

And lists can't be beat for selling things quickly.

We've got some very specialized lists that usually result in at least 10% of the recipients converting every time, usually more. And these products are usually between $50 and $150 each, so it's great Here's what we did. Start with a FREE offer email submit. On the success page, have another offer for "buy one get one free" or a coupon, something... "buy one get one free" works great for digital products (And since they're digital it shouldn't really matter to you that you're giving something away... right ) Anyways, from the recipients who got this coupon and used it, we took their emails and send them yet another paid offer. From the people who got this second paid offer and responded, we added them to the final list, and then repeated the process a bunch of times. Now we have a list of nearly 1500 that generates at least $500 every time we send a mail out, so try that for sure if you're having trouble generating a really responsive list. I guess technically it's just a triple opt-in, either way, it rules and it's working great for us!!

Thanks. Just tryin' to connect the dots...

Darrel,

I use IContact.com for my mailing lists... I build multiple lists not just one.

Then export the data from the list into an excel and sell the excel spreadsheet with the data to the new owner...

Any list management program should allow someone to import the list from the spreadsheet.

The key is to do something different. As you said there is just so many flippers now. Creating value will never old and I've bought a few sites simply because they were unique and had a solid foundation. If you're talking about simply creating sites to sell, then it's not technically flipping in my opinion, though it seems to be incorporated into that term. Flipping originally referred to taking something and adding value then selling for a higher price. It's the value that's important. As has been said some of the best indicators of value in a site are traffic, revenue, subscribers/email lists etc. In particular, I look for sites that have been consistent for over 12 months...

The revolution theme is well on its way to being saturated both here and on sitepoint. Look how many WSOs are blogs using the Revolution and the Church theme, and no customization at all. Buy a PLR ebook, take 20 minutes to put together a Revolution theme blog with some PLR articles and offer the PLR ebook for sale then try to sell it on Sitepoint, that's what I see lately. Same in the WSO thread.....

I think everyone is sick to death of seeing them. I don't think they're selling very well on Sitepoint ... probably sell a few of them here at $17 per shot but that's because they're so cheap. The only value they will ever have is if the new owner adds some killer content and gets some traffic going to them.

I am sick of seeing them and I own one! In January I bought a self-improvement blog from an OTO page, a pretty blue Revolution theme that I'd never seen before and I loved it; now I don't love it so much and I want to change the theme because all I see is that theme here and on Sitepoint.....

Actually, from what I see on Sitepoint, there is no saturation of sites that are worth buying ... there is saturation of sites that have little to no value. There are a lot of people just trying to make a quick buck but their model is not sustainable.

Anyone else notice on Sitepoint this guy who was selling the same traffic selling website over and over with a new listing just about every day. For awhile they were selling. When I looked, he had sold over 20 of these clones. Now he's not listing them as much and he has over 20 that have not sold and he paid $16 for each of those to list them, eating up the small profits he made initially. Not only did he flood the site with these clones, but the poor suckers who bought them have flooded Sitepoint with these amazing offers of "swarms of REAL traffic" ...

If you want to make maximum dollar for a site - or any business - you need to show at least sustained and ideally increasing income.

Most blog type sites, unless they are AdWords based are at the mercy of forces beyond your control and are virtually worthless from a business value perspective.

Today two people listed blogs with the revolution theme in the WSO thread, I was hoping to never have to look at that theme again, I guess they haven't been reading this thread or they don't care and just want to make a quick buck. I'm so sick of looking at blogs with that over used theme.

Unbelievable! There are a lot of "green" buyers who apparently don't do any research at all before they hit the buy button. He's selling these on two other forums also so there are many of these clone sites out there.

Edit: Just checked .... Don't see any sites he has sold for over $200. Most of these clones are going for $85-145.

Ah .. I see the site you mean. That's one of his sites but it's one of his buyers who is striking it rich with it. Hard to believe that anyone would actually buy traffic from those sites. They just look like scams.