Would you buy this website? Looking for buying advice
Hey everyone,
I am thinking about buying this website on Flippa.com:
https://flippa.com/10566178-yearly-profits-25-500-passive-income-autopilot-blog
The current price is $30k and it has over 190 investors actively watching. There are 7 days left to make an offer.
Would you buy it? If not, why?
A few things I like:
- interesting niche (crafting)
- a good amount of backlinks and ranking money keywords
- nice technical & UX room for improvements (e.g. page speed)
A few things I dislike:
- Revenue going down (hit from Amazon changes in regards to lower affiliate commissions I assume)
- weird, salesy wording
- the changing explanations of why the owner sells the website
- that the site suffered from Google's algorithm update
- the high bounce rate
Looking forward to your feedback.
As usual, I will share my experience in my website investing newsletter here: https://dealsflow.substack.com/.
Most blogs that are pumped up and then dumped at a sale use copied content. For the original creator that might be fine due to weaker copyright laws wherever he / she is living, but probably not in your jurisdiction.
Plus, anything resembling a blog is usually only profitable if you neglect to count the insane amounts of time that the founder and / or their unpaid friends and contributors put in. But as soon as the new content stops, Google will drop you to page 20 and your traffic is gone.
Hm, yeah totally see your point. How would you check for 'originality' of content though? Do you have any tools to do this?
Thanks for your thoughts on this! 👌🏼
Copyscape is a common tool used to check for originality.
Thanks, Alexis! I will have a look at it..
When I bought a website, I asked the seller to sign an indemnification agreement that says they'll take on the costs and work of protecting me from liability, should their content be found infringing. But I'm not sure if you can ask for that at the usual flippa prices.
Ah, but still interesting to keep in mind. Will add it to my legal things to keep in mind list ;)
Selling at 1x of yearly revenue is a red flag for me, especially when they claim there is no work required to generate that revenue.
What would be your plan for it? Being that this is a blog, do you plan on posting more content? Without fresh content it seems like the revenue is just going to keep going down.
On Google, the top entry for sewcare seems to be down, so this could be the reason for the declining revenue as well.
Thanks for your thoughts, Jerome. Luckily the site was only temporarily down and is back up again - but still. There are quite a few warning signs in the listing and I currently have the tendency to not proceed. If so, though, I would continue to build this as a content site and aim at earning money with affiliate links (e.g. to Amazon and other partners). This alone could be worthwhile enough as a small side business I guess. Do you have any tips for me where to find promising, alternative websites? Did you every buy one yourself?
Made $25K last 4 years, but site age is 2 years old. That discrepancy would certainly make me hesitate.
Haha, so true. I currently still wait for GA read access, but Ahrefs shows as well that traffic only started October '17. Good find!