General Tips On How To Properly Buy Or Sell A Website

That's called wasting people's time and it will often get your sale thread ignored. Serious buyers like myself and others don't have time to value your site for you. Not posting your BIN says you don't know what your site is worth. This is not a free site valuation service.

If you think about it what you just said is ridiculous. The whole purpose of BIN is to prompt a quick sale. Not posting your BIN pretty much kills any chance you have of a quick sale.

People who don't post BINs often find their sale thread scrolls off the front page in under an hour then they wonder why....

 

I totally agree with GeorgeB.

Not using a BIN is like driving with your eyes shut....its just a BAD IDEA. I have sold multiple sites literally within minutes of a post with the BIN feature. It really entices your buyers to purchase the site upfront if they are truly interested and the price is just right.

I have viewed many sites up for sale that did not have a BIN and I just moved on. This just tells me that the seller doesn't really care about his site and is 99% of the time, junk.

Believe me....when I post a site...I know exactly how much I want for it and I am not afraid to post it. Not having a BIN and only allowing incremental bids from buyers will only result in Dirt Cheap website purchases because the majority will only bid in $10 increments. Check out the majority of posts on DP without BIN.....their pretty sad!

 

One really big tip about buying proxy websites -

NEVER trust statistics such as webalizer or awstats. They are extremely innacurate, as they count hits as pageviews and any hotlinked image as unique visitors. I once had a site going at 40,000 uniques a day, it turned out the actual number of uniques was 300, and the rest were driven up by someone having hotlinked a file through my proxy on a popular chinese porn forum.

ALWAYS ask for Google Analytics, extremetracker, or some other popular 3rd party hit counter stats. Ask these stats even for regular websites, the difference between real visitors and whatever it is that webalizer counts is upto 50% on normal websites.

NEVER buy a proxy site based on potential unless its earning potential is absolutely clear. Like if the current owner has to use a crappy ad network because he can't get into adsense and is earning X, if you have an adsense account, you have potential to earn 2X by placing adsense on the home page. However, traffic all by itself isn't potential. I once bought a proxy site getting 2k uniques (real uniques, not fake). It wasn't monetized and the owner was selling it based on "potential". Actually he had probably tried to monetize it, and made $0, so he pulled off all ads and sold it based on "potential" (very common technique when you have lots of traffic but its paying crap). After I bought it and put up Google Analytics, it turned out all the traffic was from Iran. Here's a screenshot (this is across 6 days, 12k uniques).

 

Pros and Cons of Buying websites

 

How much is my site worth?

Selling websites on forums

Guide to buying blogs

9 part site buying guide

i hope that helps.

 

ok so i get your point...

if i have a price in mind then a BIN should be set right away.. if it'll get sold it gets sold... if not better luck next time.

thanks for the tip.

 

Thanks for all the links

FFMG

 

Here is a good discussion about how to make a good offer ...

What about eveluating an offer itself?
Is there a system to evaluate a website? Only the profit it makes?

 

This is a good warning to all DP members. Beware of buying forums

 

Also be courteous to a sellers thread and don't post useless opinions about a site unless asked for of course.

 

thanks - found that useful

 

thanks a lot
very very helpful
i appreciated it
regards

 

Great thread. DigitalPoint is a nice place to sell your websites but it still doesn't beat SitePoint (although i really wish it did). Why? I have noticed one problem when selling sites on DigitalPoint:

When listing your website for sale, because of the huge activity in this forum, your thread quickly goes on to the next pages in about 4-6 hours. This means less people (buyers) get the chance to see your thread. And people rarely check beyond 'Page 1'.

Sitepoint allows people to 'promote' their site's listing by Featuring it on the category page, featuring it on the front page and highlighting the auction in a different color.

I think DP should do the same. Even if it means we have to pay. Bear in mind, I still believe listing your site for sale should still be free; but promoting it should not (but it still shouldn't be too expensive). If DP introduces this new feature it will at least mean those sellers who want more people to see their thread (especially if they have 'big' websites for sale) will get the chance too. It will also mean less people will bump their own threads in order to get it to the front page once again.

I'm only trying to help so please let me know what you think and if their may be any flaws in the idea.

Thanks.

Ash

 

Very nice points

thankyou

 

Thanks Dekker for the great tips! I will bear those in mind.

That's impressive deano!

I will check your resources out, cheers.

 

I'm new to this so please forgive my ignorance. What does BIN actually stand for and what does it mean?

 

Buy It Now
It's the price point at which you win/obtain what is for sale.

 

Thanks marcel

 

Thanks Tellmen.

 

I agree with ash, this would also make sure that people don't double and triple post their own threads to bump it to the front page.