How To Flip Website

Did you know that a study has proved that people with brain damage make better investment decisions because of their impaired ability to experience emotions? That’s right. It’s also true in website flipping, and in selling a website in particular.

We always have that fond feeling about our websites that we built from scratch, websites that we tended and cared for like our baby, we usually become so attached to them we usually find it hard to let them go. Or sometimes we may probably be so sick and tired of some of our websites that we just can’t wait until we get them off our hands. In both situations emotions usually get involved when we’re selling these websites, and too much emotions can drive us to making hasty and rushed decisions in the selling process. Believe it or not the best deal happens when conducted with less emotions.

Let’s say you have set your mind to selling this one website of yours, you know it must go, you don’t want it on your server anymore, the faster it is sold the better, bottom line is you just want it SOLD. You set your price, as well as your reserve price (reserve price is the lowest price which you are willing to sell your website for), you have the statistics, screenshots, and whatnot all ready, and you’re all good to go.

Let’s say you are selling the website on an auction and you open the auction for 5 days, with reasonable starting bid. And then on the first day of the auction you get a couple of bids, you start to feel confident about the auction and probably at this point you regret a little bit about the price you’ve set (maybe you’re thinking you should set the price ‘higher’). But then on the second day the bids just stop. No bids are coming in anymore. And then it goes on like that until the fourth day of the auction. You start to get uneasy. And then on to the final day with no new bids. Now you start to panic. You start thinking the site is going to end up unsold for sure. You’ve set your mind to get this website sold, remember? Supposedly there should be no more room for this website in your mind anymore post-auction.

This is the time where you are the most vulnerable, as this is the time where you might allow emotions to take control of the selling process. You start to let emotions decide your next move. And usually this is where sellers resort to lowering their reserve price down to the price that they’re actually not willing to sell the website for and end up feeling bitter about the sale if the website is sold. Read more »

I always see from time to time new website sellers over evaluating their websites and setting ridiculous price when selling their websites on Flippa. Actually not only on Flippa, it also happens on places like Internet Marketing forums marketplace. A brief look at their profile usually shows that these sellers are usually new in selling websites, hence the ridiculous price you see on their listing. I’ve seen some auctions on this term on Flippa, and I will show you some examples later at the end of this article.

For now, let’s deal with the question: how to price your website for sale? There are many factors we should consider to price a website. Some people go straight for the revenue, some others see other values as more important than revenue. But in this post we mention several critical factors to be considered in pricing your website for sale.

Critical factors to be considered to price your website for sale

Factor #1: Revenue

Some people prefer to only look at this factor alone. How much revenue your website is generating in a month? And for how long? (The longer the site has been making that kind of revenue, the better). Some people sell their website 6x or 12x the monthly revenue, that’s the easiest formula. However, it is advisable to look at other factors too (look below), as these other factors could further add up to your website worth.

Factor #2: Traffics (visitors, sources)

This is the second most (sometimes the most) important factor to be considered when pricing your website. You need to have statistics and logs of visitors coming to your website. Most servers have standard statistics/log analyzer like AWStat, but it would help a great lot if you have Google Analytics installed for your website, because this is the traffics analyzer that people seem to trust the most these days.

Basically, the more visitors you have, the higher the price for your site will be. But that’s not all there is to it, take note ‘who’ your visitors are, from which countries, how they reach your website, whether they’re coming from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc), from other websites, paid traffics, or direct traffics (meaning people type in the url of your website directly). For most sites and most niches, the more traffics you have coming from search engines (it’s called “organic traffics”), the higher the price for your website will be. All of this data can be found from your statistics, so be sure you have all the statistics ready before trying to sell your website. Read more »