In the eCommerce era, business websites have gained a lot of significance. It takes a lot of time to develop a great looking website and also do the marketing required to generate lots of incoming traffic to the site. Time many people, and businesses, dont have. Introducing website auctions, making it possible to find established websites for sale.
There are numerous marketplaces online that sell thousands of websites every day. All you need to do is browse the marketplace, choose your favorite website and buy it.
How to Buy a Website at Auction?
The auction sites are like a marketplace and different websites will be listed for auction. You should not buy a website right away just because it looks good. For the website to be useful for your business the domain name should be in your niche and the website should already have organic traffic unless you are buying ‘start-up’. With most established websites , the owner/developers spend several months, and years in many cases, to develop a high traffic website and hence, websites at the website auction sites will be priced accordingly.
In order to buy a website, you should register yourself as a buyer and then bid on websites of your choice. The seller of the website is at sole discretion to determine the bidder to whom website will be awarded. Before bidding, you should ensure that the website receives only organic traffic because several website developers buy inorganic traffic to boost the traffic number just for selling the websites.
You should perform thorough background research on the websites you intend to buy, because if you end up buying a website that has fake traffic, you may have a lot of work to do getting the organic traffic you want, or even worse, trying to remove your site from a search engines blacklist if ‘blackhat’ marketing means were used by the previous owner.
Some of the popular auction sites for buying and selling websites are:
- flippa.com
- websitebroker.com
- buysellwebsite.com
- ebay.com
- webmastersmarketplace.com
- ebizbrokers.com
- bizbuysell.com
Stay Away From Scams At Website Auction Sites
Auctions for selling websites are developed almost every day and it is hard to keep spammers away. The auction sites do little about checking the authenticity of the sellers because thousands of websites are submitted for selling every hour. So, it becomes your responsibility to ensure that you are not in the hands of spammers. In the website marketplace, all website owners are required to put a traffic number and revenue number which are crucial factors to determine how well the websites perform.
If the seller is interested in your bid, you should ask for past revenues and check the traffic for at least six months. Even fake reports will resemble authentic reports, but if you look closely, you will be able to find at least one small flaw. On a general note, you should avoid websites that claim to generate unrealistic revenues and websites that have erratic fluctuation in terms of traffic.
Also, be clear about what you are buying, for example does it include hosting? Will the existing owner help with the setup of the site on your server? What programming knowledge is required for the maintenance of the site? If there are any special scripts involved in what you are buying, do the include support/upgrades? Do you have to pay for that support, or if the support is free, how many hours? Always remember, the time to ask questions is BEFORE the hammer falls.
People should also use tools such as the seo slashtag at blekko.com, yahoo site explorer or opensiteexplorer.org to check the quality of the backlinks to the website. This always provides an insight to how well the site has been marketed, and/or what methods have been used. Thats my first step when reviewing websites at auction.