9 Reasons You Should Look At Website Auction Sites
Website auction sites are fantastic tools for the would-be internet businessman.
Earlier on, I was browsing Twitter when I saw that friend of the blog, Kyle had gotten his site valued at around $2000. Kyle’s niche site has around 35 posts on it – and in all respects, it’s similar to the niche sites I build. (Though with a few differences.)
Anyway, I’ve never had my site valued, so I asked Kyle where he had his site valued. He pointed me to a couple of website auction sites.
I was like a kid in the candy store this morning, to the point I had to put my laptop’s lid down and leave the internet for a few hours in a bid to reclaim my day.
Website auction sites are fantastic resources – but let’s face it – you don’t want me to give you a link to a place where you can just buy and sell websites. So, here are nine things that I thought of immediately that you can use website auction sites for.
It’s best you check out Flippa.com, because that’s where I was busy wasting my morning when I thought of all these things.
Idea Generation
You don’t have to spend a penny on an auction site before you can get some great stuff from it.
Just look around at the websites that people are selling. Particularly, look at the websites that have recently sold. Some of these little websites are selling for thousands – and if they weren’t worth that, they wouldn’t sell for that much.
There are websites dedicated to little niches that I’d never even thought of.
Thinking Of Websites As An Asset
We can all get sentimental about our websites. I certainly do. But in terms of cold, hard business decisions, you need to think about your websites dispassionately.
Website auction sites are a great way – with their valuations tools – to see how much your website is worth by either getting a valuation or by comparing to similar websites.
This sort of thinking allows you to disengage from the creation process and think about your websites in terms of assets, expenses and all those words that accountants get excited about.
Quick Projects When You Know What You’re Doing
Let’s talk about buying websites for a minute.
When you’re a newbie in internet marketing terms, you should absolutely learn everything from scratch. You should learn one thing at a time, and when you get good at it, you can move on to the next project.
However, once you know what you’re doing, you can look at website auction sites and other websites and see where they are going wrong.
Some of the websites for sale I looked at today had a few things wrong with them that I think I could fix in a weekend project.
You might look at a website that’s making $20 a month through adsense and think, “I know that I could swap out the adsense for an affiliate offer I already promote and it’d make ten times as much.”
Swapping out ads or writing a few sales pages for a website that already exists and has visitors is a lot quicker and easier than starting from scratch.
Website Valuation
Getting your websites valued is probably a good idea.
It’s motivational or instructional, depending on whether your website is good or not.
This allows you to plan going forward.
Essentially, your website is an asset – and hopefully a cash-flowing asset. Getting regular valuations of your site will ensure you stay on the right track.
I’ll definitely be doing this in the near future.
Websites for Buying and Selling
Obviously, the main goal of website auction sites is buying and selling websites.
The way I’d think about buying and selling websites is this: You need to think of them like you would real estate purchases for rentals.
Think about the research you’ll need to do. Nobody (or, very few smart people) go on their local estate agent website and say, “I’m paying two-hundred thousand for that!”
Instead, they see if the house is in a good neighbourhood. They’ll see if what the estate agent is saying about the property is true, and they’ll see whether the property is a good short-term or long-term investment.
Buy and sell websites with the same level of attention, and you’ll increase your net worth. Do it badly and you’re just spending money.
Lift Data From Your Competitors… For Free
This is the craziest thing I found in my short time on the website auction sites I visited.
People are usually reticent to discuss what their websites are or how they make money, because it’s easy to backwards engineer website creation.
I agree with those people – you should never reveal your whole system.
People on auction sites do. You can get traffic figures, sales figures and all kinds of other cool information.
This isn’t just for niche sites either – you can find ecommerce stores, authority sites and even big company websites for sale. All the details are there, and if you didn’t mind being sneaky, you could probably ask for more information from the person selling the site as well.
Bigger Ideas – E-Commerce Section
I’ve been looking for Christmas presents recently.
When I was browsing Flippa, I came across a website that was selling a product that I thought, “Hey, my mum would like that!”
I almost bought a whole website because it sells a $10 item.
Luckily, I didn’t buy it. Instead, I looked up the product through Google images. I found it has an Aliexpress supplier and the whole thing is a dropship operation.
There are tons of ecommerce sites that are operating exactly like this. I don’t recommend doing the whole dropship-Aliexpress thing, but if you were in the business of building ecommerce stores, you could look at the profitable ecommerce site sales and work from there.
Complimentary Website Purchases
If you have a website about men’s supplements, as an example, you aren’t limited to a single site.
You might see a website that compliments yours. Why not buy it?
SEO experts put a lot of stock in being in the first position on Google for a search term. That’s good advice because the top search gets the most views, generally.
But why not be number one, two, three and four?
If you can buy a website in your niche for little money, you can do the following:
- Remove old affiliate links on the new site and replace them with your own
- Get rid of a competitor by buying the site
- Send backlinks to your old site, strengthening its position in the market
- Write more than one review for each product and post them to both of your sites, increasing the viewership of what is essentially the same piece of work
Sell Websites For Easy Money… If You’re Interested In The Short Game
To go back to the real estate analogy from above, I recommend “buy and hold” websites. I recommend you build websites, and then once they generate income on a regular basis, keep them as though they were rental properties.
However it’s worth mentioning a different strategy. Let’s take Kyle’s example from above, because he’s handily provided some figures for us.
He said that the site design took 5 hours. Writing the articles for it took less than 25 hours, but we’ll keep that figure because it’s easy.
That’s 30 hours of work for a site valuation of $2,000.
The website generates – again, according to Kyle – around $100 a month, though he thinks it’ll make $150 and upwards in the future.
Let’s take the $100 figure.
You could “rent” your website income to yourself and you’ll make $1200 a year.
Or, you could sell the website for $2k and then build another one in the same fashion.
If you built one website a fortnight (which is 15 hours a week) you could make an extra $4k a month – or $48k a year – by working on this part time basis.
That’s not bad for a part-time, 15 hours a week job. You could also play around with those figures for your situation.
Or, you could build some, sell some and keep some. Again – think of it as real estate for the online world.
Final Thoughts
The above are just some ideas that you can use for looking at website auction sites. Hopefully, some of them are a little more out-of-the-box thinking ideas than just “buy and sell some websites bro!”
I’m new to website auctions, so it’ll be interesting to see if I can put the ideas above into practice in any sort of profitable fashion.
If you have more experience than me (it’s hard not to) let me know what you think about the ideas above and website auction sites in general.