Did you ever buy a website? How did it go?

I bought a few sites in the past, but only because they had good communities that were being neglected and I wanted to rebuild them.

I really did not care about the software each site was using only that it would continue working as is until I could develop or replace it with a newer modern solution.

I have also consulted for people who have sold and acquired sites and for the most case, the process has gone smoothly by simply being thorough.

I have found the best way to avoid bad site acquisitions is to simply ask several questions over a period of time rather than all at once.

What you look for are patterns in the seller's willingness to answer or avoid answering your questions over a period of time.

If you simply provide a one-time list of questions, the seller can mask potential issues by giving very detailed answers on some questions and giving vague or non-answers to the questions they want to avoid.

By asking them one at a time over a period of time, it makes it much harder for the seller to avoid the questions and also makes it easier to ask follow-up questions based on their responses.

If someone selling a site refuses to answer questions or consistently deflects or redirects, then you are better off moving on to another potential acquisition target.

When selling a site, the best thing you can do is answer their questions as quickly as possible and also provide as much information, documentation, notes, etc. when you hand over the site.

Your goal when selling a site is to wash your hands of it as quickly as possible so you can move on to other things, and providing that additional information can help reduce the post-sale questions you get from the buyer.

Lastly, ALWAYS use an escrow service to handle the financial transaction no matter which side you are on!

Over the years I've bought and sold two types of sites: blogs and WordPress plugins. I come at all of these as fun little side projects to my main business which is custom software development and consulting.

My best content site purchase was a WordPress blog I bought on the old Digital Point forum (showing my age here) for $60. I made a lot of mistakes with this site that eventually caused it to lose most of its SEO value but in the process it still earned thousands of dollars using basic Google AdSense.

I've also started a few blogs on my own that I've gone on to sell. Most recently, pre-COVID, I sold one that I had been working on for about a year and a half. Up until the point of the sale it had generated no revenue and very little traffic. I decided I didn't want to maintain it any longer so I made a post in a Facebook Group I was a member of that was related to the site's topic. I had multiple interested buyers within a day and picked the one I thought was best for the site.

As for WordPress plugins, I've purchased two from their original owners on Flippa. The first was a small plugin being sold for less than $800 if memory serves. It had a thousand or so active installations and a "Pro" version with a few hundred dollars in sales. I just saw a lot of opporunity to improve upon the revenue model so I bought it right away. The transfer was quite a hassle, as the owner was not the developer and their were some issues there, but in the end the deal closed after a lot of back and forth. The second plugin I purchased with the idea of letting it kind of sit as is until I have time to work on it more.

Most of my experiences are with Flippa which is kind of a pit of despair in terms of quality. You have to be very patient and know how to separate the good from the bad from the awful to find opportunity. Sometimes I think most people would be better off cold emailing site/application owners and seeing if they are interested in selling as opposed to trolling the common marketplaces.

I bought IntroCave through FE International -- talked quite a bit about in the (text) interview I did with IH awhile back.

Would buying expiring domains and building something out of that count as website investing?

If so, @searchbound on twitter does that extremely well. For example, he bought VidaliaOnions.com shipping onions, yes onions, but it's doing super well.

He buys domains that speak to his curiosity and is fun to plan/make something out of it.

In terms of insights, he simply uses google trends to highlight demand. He also prefers .com addresses only with two words max. The reason for that is he believes this helps with SEO.

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Thanks Alex for starting this thread. I'm curious too.

I receive a weekly email from Empire Flippers, but haven't found the right deal. Interested in hearing from others.

What has your experience been like?