Anyone use the flippa trick?

Exactly why I stopped selling sites on Flippa. Had users acting they were interested in buying and wanted to watch traffic via analytics. Would check first page comp and see the same email under 'who is' of the people that was interested in buying. O_o

Pretty common tactic.

Of course, that tactic assumes that the information is correct and complete. And worth your time to begin with.

So does it work to just copy the flippa listings or is it a waste of time, and I doe still sell sites on flippa, should I stop that or not?

You can do what you like. problem is that others do what they like and are not very ethical about it. Especially when it comes to flippa

Ideally you should avoid creating sites that rely on just finding a juicy niche for their USP.

You can try to add things like

- Additional Revenue Streams (for example if you rely on Adsense, try affiliate programs, CPA or a product of your own)

- Additional Traffic Sources (e.g. PPC, Media Buys, Social, Referals from other sites and blogs)

- Offer something and start a mailing list - buyers love qualified lists


All of these things are much more difficult to replicate.

.. what made me laugh when reading this thread is that just a matter of hours ago someone told me that some knucklehead had released a WSO (which is apparently selling really well!) that teaches its readers to do just that - head over to Flippa, fish for sites that have sold, replicate them and try beat them with your better SEO skills.

Generally speaking -

learning from other successful people, finding out how they are doing things and then implementing this knowledge in your own projects: awesome and usually profitable in the long run;

copy-pasting what others have done without putting any original thought into it: might make a quick buck here and there but as soon as the "method" gets saturated you're right back in square 1.

But looking at it from seller's perspective (my apologies for going a little bit off topic) - the fact that more and more people are doing this does present a little bit of an issue. In most cases, when someone acquires a site they expect the site to keep getting similar traffic / generating similar revenue after the sale as it did before the sale. However, in a case where during the Flippa auction 7000 newbies see the "awesome" site, replicate it and start targeting the same keywords then in many cases some of them may actually succeed, and as a result the recently sold site will lose some of its rankings (and therefore revenue), and even though the buyer may be a sensible person and understand that no-one can guarantee stable SE rankings, it will leave a bad taste in their mouth and odds are that they won't be very happy with the deal.

.. and all of this is exactly why I'm listing less and less sites on Flippa (and when I do, I often opt for confidential listing and only release sensible details upon singing a *written* NDA (none of this Flippa "digital signature" rubbish) and put the main focus on my own list of serial buyers, who also appreciate the fact that the sites they buy don't get shown to thousands of people prior to the purchase.

It is a generic trick which has been used by many people who are using Flippa. However if you really want to build a niche site, you should learn how to do it. It is always better than copying.