What Kind of Site Attracts Flippa Bidders?

Do you think anyone would really be interested in buying your website? Would putting it onto Flippa just cost you the fees? These were my concerns until I bit the bullet and put one up for auction.

Flippa is a website marketplace. If you have a website to sell it allows you to meet potential buyers from around the world.

How do you know that your website will sell?

You can never actually know in advance, but here are a few pointers:

  • Does it have a Google PR of 1 or better?opportunity for sale
  • Does it have an Alexa rank < 2 million?
  • Does it make a profit?
  • Is the domain name short(ish)?
  • Is the concept in “fashion”?
  • Is it at least a year old?
  • Is there at least 100 article posts?
  • Does it rank in Google™ for a good number of key words?
  • Is the content unique?

The more of this wish list your site can meet the more people will be interested in it.

The last question to ask yourself is Can the buyer make a profit from your site?

This is the most important question of all. People use Flippa.com in order to make money. Even if your site has never made you a penny, it must have potential. The more potential a site has the more potential bidders there will be and the higher the bidding will go.

Can you sell sites that are just not doing ANYTHING?

Sometimes a website concept just will not ‘work’. It might work for someone else though who looks at it from a new perspective. If you have a powerful domain name that might be enough to attract bidders.

I have sites like that too; we all have ideas that just don’t work out for us. I work on the principle that if I have a site for sale then it must have some obvious potential, so I am building those sites up with new and well-written content before I put them up for auction.

Content is the most time-consuming part of building up a site. You need lots of posts that are interlinked extensively to start ranking for many keywords on Google™. Most people do not want to start a website from scratch with zero content, and they are certainly not going to pay very much for the privilege of buying your empty blog.

Links in and out of your site count, too

Links IN

Even post-Penguin you can get legitimate links in. Your content has to be good; that way people DO link to it of their own accord.

You can make it easy for people to link in.

  • Install social media plugins, even though it is probably worthless, it costs you nothing
  • Install Zemanta. This will offer your blog posts to other Zemanta users to link to at the end of their posts
  • Install RePost.Us. This is another free plugin that shows your posts to other users
  • Use graphics that will attract people

Links OUT

Links out are easier to control but many people refuse to link out, thinking they would only be sending their visitors somewhere else. NOT linking out is unnatural in Google’s™ eyes and unnatural is going to hurt your site.

If you sell your site you will sell it complete. Any links you have out from your site will probably remain, though the buyer may make them no-follow.

Build links between all your sites whenever you can. If you sell your site the potential value of those interlinks goes up massively. They will be coming from different IP addresses from your own and they will be exposed to a different group of users, hopefully a larger group, too.

Browse Flippa listings

This will give you some ideas of what sites actually sell for. Some of them amaze me.

Check out the Ending Soon category (Link opens in new window) rather than the Recently Sold one. Flippa seems to list all the high price auctions first in the Recently Sold category, so it is easier to get an idea of what people will pay and what they want from the Ending Soon sites.

What will you do to make your site attractive to bidders?

How will you improve its Alexa rank?

Will you write all your own content?

Written by Phil Turner, an ex-teacher from Ireland. Phil believes that to succeed in anything you have to help others and share your own knowledge. He makes a living mostly by writing on his own sites, which include HowToMakeExtraMoneyWriting.com and 21CWoman.com.

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