I just flipped a no-income blog for $1,000, here's my tips

I wanted to make a thread that I think can help a lot of Warriors, and share my tips about how I recently sold a website for $1,000 that never made me a dollar when I owned it.

I know that just about everyone out there has a website that they setup a year or two ago and haven't touched it since, and have no desire to improve upon or keep up with.

If that's you, this might motivate you to sell these old sites for a nice little payday now, and get rid of the dead weight in your site portfolio.

Here's a little screenshot for effect:



Sooooo......................

Basically, I am a physical product guy, but I decided about a year ago that I found a nice little niche in information products that I wanted to go after.

So, I created several extremely basic squeeze page sites in the niche, (which was weight loss) did minimal backlinking, and managed to get several top rankings for some pretty cool keywords. I setup a tiny 3 email followup sequence and never touched the sites again.

The sites started getting about 100 visitors per day and about 5-10 email signups per day.

I kept trying to find the motivation to keep up with the list, but I was not passionate about the topic at all and just couldn't bring myself to utilize and promote these sites.

After almost a year, I had to decide if I wanted to keep these domain names. Since I wasn't motivated to do anything with the sites and never made a sale from my (admittedly very lame) follow up sequence, I decided that I would rather just cut these sites loose and sell them to someone who is into info marketing and listbuilding.

By this time, I had a list of about 1000 subscribers, so I knew that would be valuable to somebody, but the sites had never made a dollar because of laziness on my part, so I knew it might be more difficult to sell with no income proof.

Still, I put the sites up (3 sites) for sale on Flippa one day and figured I would wait and see what happens.

I got no bids for the first 2 days of the 3 day auction. I started thinking to myself 'Oh well', I guess I'll just attempt to do something else with them, they obviously aren't getting much interest.'

On the third day, I got my first bid, which was cool. It was for $100.

Then, I got one more bid for $500, and I was pretty happy because I figured that worst case scenario, I could sell for $500 and at least make it worth my while to sell, and I would recoup my time investment into the sites.

I stayed up until about 1 AM and the auction was almost over, and there was one more bid that I didn't even approve because it was only $5 higher than the other bid, and I had already been communicating with the $500 bidder so I wanted it to go to him.

So, I went to bed thinking "ok cool, I'm not exactly thrilled with the $500 sale but I'm satisfied, especially for a site that never made me money and for my first Flippa sale."

I woke up the next morning and checked my email. The first email I saw was from PayPal:

"You have received a payment of $1,000" ( my buy-it-now-price)

I was like 'F Yeah!' I went to bed thinking the auction was done at $500 and ended up waking up to $1,000. I was pretty happy for my first site sale!

Sorry for the long story, here are the takeaways that I believe helped me to sell the sites for a good price and to get the maximum cash possible for the sites.

Anybody with a crappy old site they don't want anymore can follow these tips to get a decent little payday for themselves:

1) When selling your site, remember that you are trying to appeal to the one person out there that wants your site more than anyone else does and is willing to pay the highest premium for it. In any auction there will always be one person with whom your site fits in with perfectly and is exactly what they have been looking for or trying to accomplish themselves.

This one person is the one who is telling himself "I'm getting this site no matter what" and believes that the site has much more value to him because he is the one who can utilize it best. He sees it as a rare opportunity to buy it and is willing to pay much more because of that. These people are usually more willing to make larger bids and risk more on the site than a person who has less emotional involvement in the niche or business model.

The key to getting the maximum price for your site on Flippa is to appeal to that one person and make the BIN price high enough where it will be a great deal for you and yield you a higher sale price than the normal bidding would, but low enough to where that person who really wants your site still sees it as attainable.

That way, you can usually get them to spend a little bit more than they originally wanted to, but you won't scare them away with a too-high price.

2) Take the time to write an in-depth yet easy to read listing that covers all of the main points that a serious buyer would want covered. The bare necessities are a section on an intro/overview, potential, why you are selling, what they are getting, a background of the market potential, and any other appealing factors about the site.

Make it detailed, persuasive, and show prospective buyers the opportunity of the site by showing ways that their investment can easily and quickly be recouped soon after the sale.

Simply by making the description somewhat longer and more detailed, and especially well laid out and clear, you will increase the perceived value of the website you are selling because bidders can tell you care and make the assumption that if you put a lot of time into the listing, you must expect a good return for the sale and that you have something of real value to them.

3) Be strategic about accepting bids. This worked out in my favor bigtime and I hadn't even tried to do it at the time, but here is what happened:

When I went to bed, the auction was almost over and the highest bid was $500, with another bid for $505 that I never approved, which meant that people could see that there was a pending bid, but they could not see the amount of that pending bid. This will drive people absolutely nuts!

So what happened was while I was in bed, another person had placed a second bid, but I couldn't approve it because I was sleeping. So, I had 2 pending bids above my $500 bid, which nobody could see how much they were for.

Remember I said there's always one guy who wants your site worse than anyone else? The suspense of not knowing how much those last two bids were for was probably driving him nuts!

So, in his mind, if the current bid was for $500 with two pending bids left and the BIN was $1000, it was in his best interest to guarantee that he got the site by doing the BIN, considering he figured the other 2 bids would be close to the BIN anyway. He had no idea that the two pending bids were nowhere near the BIN price, but he wanted it so badly he just couldn't risk it.

4) Sell your site based on it's best assets, and if it has any negative associations with it, explain them and rationalize them. I sold this site not based on the looks or content of the site, but instead I sold it based on the search rankings that it had achieved and the email list it had grown. The site itself was ugly and poorly done, but it was the rankings and the list that sold.

And, even though the site had never made a dollar, rather than trying to ignore that ugly little fact, I confronted it head on and gave a detailed reason for the lack of income.

5) Be very responsive and nice to all commenters and messagers. You never know who your final buyer could be!


I know this got a little bit long and a little scattered, but I just wanted to type this up quickly for all the people out there who are letting old sites die when they could be making a nice little lump sum off of a site they were just going to let lapse anyway. I know for me, it was very cool to make $1000 off of a site I literally wasn't even going to renew! Basically like found money.

Hope you enjoyed this Let me know if I can answer any questions in the comments.