At a Nick Gray, 2 Hour Cocktail Party author, networking event in Austin, TX, I met a handful of extremely accomplished and interesting people.

One was David Holmes of Red View Ventures, an entrepreneur who has bought, scaled and sold a handful of ecommerce businesses.

David Holmes has been in the Amazon space for more than 7 years and has successfully exited 2 Amazon-based businesses.

In 2020, he acquired an existing Amazon FBA business, grew it 500%, and ultimately sold it to a private buyer in 2022. His work has been featured on WebAcquisitions.com, ImportDojo, and other industry publications.

Now, he helps premium DTC brands take advantage of the full potential of Amazon through his unique launch and scale strategies.

Thinking it could be fun to buy, scale and flip an Amazon FBA site?

I met David Holmes, an entrepreneur who has flipped 6 Ecommerce sites, at a neighborhood networking event in Austin, TX last week.

I got to ask him a bunch of questions. Today we’ll dive into his specific tips to successfully scale and sell an Amazon FBA business.

He’s the best I’ve met at this, so you’re in for a treat if scaling or flipping an ecommerce business interests you.

Has anyone read entrepreneur Nick Gray’s book The 2 Hour Cocktail Party?

I haven’t read the book, yet.. but I want to! I went to a 32 person event the author hosted at Support Ninja founder Cody McClain’s house in my neighborhood in Austin, TX last week and it felt professionally hosted.

It was one of the best events I have been to, and chock full of accomplished, bright, entrepreneurs.

The event is where I met David, an entrepreneur who scales Amazon FBA sites full-time.

How has David sold 6 Ecommerce sites?

David was kind enough to give me some insight into FBA site flipping over coffee – Sharing his tips with you all below as I’ve never personally bought or scaled an Amazon site before.

Hoping to buy or scale your own ecomm business?

If you currently own an ecommerce site, or are interested to buy one, he can help you scale it. David runs an agency now and scales Ecommerce businesses with a profit-share model.

He knows what he’s doing. He helped one Amazon site go from $220,000/month to $2,400,000/month in under 6 months.

Let’s dive into David’s specific tips and experience below:

How did you first get into website investing and flipping?

I started my own content site in 2014 while I was in college. I quickly got it to $1,000/month which was a lot of money to me at the time. When I learned, I could sell it for $20,000+, I was astounded. Ever since then, I’ve been hooked.

What were you doing before you made the switch?

I used to be a mechanical engineer working in engineering consulting. I worked in accident reconstruction – where I would help reconstruct car crashes for civil litigation.

How many years have you been full-time buying and flipping websites?

I’ve been full time for 3 years now. In January 2020, I took the leap and I haven’t stopped since.

Is it more or less time-consuming than when you had a full-time job?

This isn’t what a lot of people want to hear but it’s definitely more time-consuming than a full-time job. You can’t just clock out at 5 pm. You’re responsible for every aspect of your business.

What do you prefer about having your own business vs working for someone else?

The freedom and the opportunity. I’ve been able to travel extensively while running my own business because I’m not tied down to a location.

Tell us about the first site (or last site etc you can choose one) you purchased. What niche was it? What type of site was it?

The last site I purchased was an Amazon FBA business in the skateboard niche.

Where did you buy it?

I purchased it off of Flippa in December 2019.

What stood out to you that made you want to buy it? Were there any red flags?

I had prior experience in the niche and I knew the seller from a previous skateboarding content site that I ran. There were multiple red flags – revenue was declining, product quality was iffy at best, and there was low net profit.

What did you do to optimize it/increase traffic/revenue/profit?

I did 3 things primarily:

1. The business was manufacturing in the USA. I outsourced manufacturing to China – saving 45% on cost of goods sold and improving the product quality
2. I optimized the Amazon Ad strategy. By doing so, I was able to grow revenue quickly.
3. I optimized the Amazon listing. This helped increase conversion rate quickly and helped grow revenue.

With this 2 sided approach (grow revenue and cut costs), I was able to drastically increase the valuation of the business.

How much did you increase its value by the time you sold it?

From the initial acquisition price to the exit price, I increased the value by 5x in under 2 years. Including cashflow while operating the business, it was a 10x return on investment.

What tips do you have for people who want to buy a site and flip it, what should they look for?

Always look at the negatives first. There are always reasons you can think of to buy a site. You need to think of all of the reasons this deal could go bad. Protect your investment first and then look to grow it.

What are your tips for how they can optimize it and grow revenue?

For content sites, you want to look for easy wins first – switch the ad network (Adsense to Ezoic/Mediavine/AdThrive), add comparison tables, add interlinking between the articles.

For bigger wins, add more content, improve backlinks, and start growing pageviews.

Where did you find the buyer?

I found the buyer through Flippa.

Any tips for people looking to sell a site? How can they present it in the best light? When is a good time to sell?

If you’re looking to sell a site, sell while it is growing! It is incredibly difficult to sell a declining site – I can’t overstate this enough. It’s possible but it’s difficult. You want to sell while your site is growing or stable.

You also want to leave some easy wins for the buyer. This gives them confidence they can quickly see a return on investment.

Do you tend to sell sites when they are on an upward trajectory?

I try to but it’s difficult. What I like to do is grow the site as quickly as possible, maintain revenue for 3-6 months, and then sell it – while leaving opportunities for growth for the new buyer.

How much more of a multiple do you find can you sell for if you sell for if you sell it on an upward trajectory vs a downward?

Multiples obviously vary wildly based on niche and the exact site but generally a growing site can go for 3-4x seller’s discretionary earnings. If it’s declining, you’re looking at a 2 – 2.5x earnings multiple.

What are red flags people should watch out for when buying an Amazon ecommerce site?

Product quality and moat against competitors. Amazon has become fiercely competitive in the last 3 years. You want to truly understand how you’ll differentiate from competition and maintain a premium price point.

What are some red flags you saw before purchasing your own sites that you wish you had paid more attention to or that made your growth and flip journey harder?

I wish I had paid more attention to the product quality. There were some quality issues that I fixed but there were other issues inherent in the product. That held back growth.

How many sites have you purchased, grown and sold? Have you sold all the sites you bought?

I’ve purchased 4 sites and built 2 other sites from scratch. I’ve sold all of them now.

Have all your site purchases been successful flips? If not, can you explain what happened and why and the lessons you learned?

Not all of them have been successful. I bought 2 sites built off expired domains in the spirituality niche. I ended up selling them a year later and recouped ~80% of my initial investment.

Biggest lesson learned was time.

At the time of running those sites, I was also running an Amazon agency and my own Amazon brand. I didn’t have enough bandwidth to focus on the sites so I eventually just sold them off.

Can you tell us more about what you are doing right now? What is your business?

I help e-commerce brands launch and scale on Amazon through my agency: https://www.redviewventures.com/

What is the specific service(s) you provide for companies? Does it involve just running their Amazon ads or do you offer other services / does it involve a more comprehensive growth plan or multiple services?

I perform full Amazon channel management – including listing creation, launch strategy, Amazon Ad strategy, scaling, and optimization. My goal is to take 90% of Amazon off of your hands.

Do you offer multiple packages or do you have a single service package offering? If multiple, what are the multiple offerings and who should choose each one?

What types of companies do you work with?

I work with e-commerce companies primarily doing $200k+ in annual revenue that want to expand to Amazon. If they’re not on Amazon, we’ll help them launch their products on Amazon. If they’re already on Amazon, we’ll help them scale to become category leaders.

Do you work with all niches as long as they are Amazon sites?

I only work with companies selling physical products.

How soon do you find companies experience revenue/profit growth after starting working with you?

Typically 3 months is the sweet spot to see good traction and revenue growth.

What is the most monthly revenue growth, and profit growth, a company has seen while working with you and how long did it take to get there?

I helped one e-commerce company go from doing $220,000/month to $2,400,000/month on Amazon in under 6 months. I wrote a case study about it here.

What made that company such a perfect fit to grow with your help?

They had the capital and cash conversion cycle to grow quickly. For other brands, we’ve been able to scale but have been limited on the inventory side.

Where can someone follow you on social media?

Connect with David on Twitter and Linkedin

Where can someone reach out to talk more if they have questions about your company or working with you?

david@redviewmanagement.com

If a Her.CEO reader is buying an Amazon site and wants to work with you, are you interested in running the ad portion for a percentage of revenue share? If yes I can let readers know.

Yes, I predominately work on a performance/revenue share basis.

Remember that website for sale last week?

Remember the matrixlab-examples.com website that a Her.CEO reader listed for sale last week?

Many of you were interested in purchasing the website, and a great buyer closed on the site this Wednesday.

The site had a solid monthly 18,193 last 30 days traffic, and 29 Ahrefs DA.

It was also severely under-monetized with only one revenue source, Adsense, which the valuation was based on, even though in the past the owner had made money off of teaching services and even selling a few guest posts, so it had a lot of potential.

The site ended up selling over-asking price, and both the buyer and seller were very happy with how the sale turned out.

Looking to sell your own website?

If any of you have a website you are looking to sell, you can send me an email at stacycaprio@gmail.com and I am happy to talk more to see if there is anything I can do to help.

How do you find a good website deal?

One of the Her.CEO site readers was interested if this specific site would sell because it was priced at a multiple a bit higher than an Adsense site would generally sell at.

At first I was surprised by this question simply because the site had tons of traffic, a very solid DA and age, and was severely under-monetized.

Then I realized that this was a way I could share with you guys to identify undervalued websites so you could find sites at a great deal. Ones that you can easily increase revenue on.

Which is better, profit or traffic?

Many people value profit on a site more than traffic. Sure, profit is nice, but you have to pay a multiple on profit, not traffic. Websites in today’s market are valued at a multiple of monthly profit, not traffic, and traffic is just as valuable as profit.

Traffic is arguably more valuable than profit, since you can always monetize traffic. You can monetize it in layers too, which is what makes it so valuable.

Monetize the site in layers

You can put ads on in layers. You can put products and services on top of that. You can sell sponsorships and email sponsorships and sponsored shout-outs. You can get even more creative and add layers on top of that.

Traffic is the baseline for profit. It’s a foundation for profit. So the fact that websites are valued based on profit and not traffic gives you guys a loophole. It gives anyone a loophole to get an undervalued site.

Find a site that has a ton of traffic and low profit. Then add layers of monetization to that site to quickly improve profit.

That is one way to find and buy an undervalued site and diamond in the rough, just like the site sold in my last email arguably was.

My favorite way to bump up a site’s revenue

The site sold in the last email is a great example of a site where you can add in more monetization methods to quickly increase revenue because it already has a ton of traffic. For example:

•  Adding in your own or outsourced Math tutoring or teaching services
• Adding in Math courses or ebooks, you could put your own or affiliate links
• Selling sponsored posts or links on the site, the old owner did this a bit in the past and found it successful but didn’t include this in his revenue or in the multiple since it was further in the past
• Selling banner ads to other Math teaching companies etc, since the site already has tens of thousands in traffic a month

How to quickly increase revenue on a site with traffic:

Buy an undervalued site by looking for one with lots of traffic but low profit

One of my favorite things to look for in any site I buy is, how can i increase the revenue here quickly, with the traffic we already have?

That’s why I love switching ad networks or adding in new ads to quickly increase revenue. Because it’s not a bet on if you can increase traffic with SEO or social media.

Less risk when you use the traffic you already have

It’s simply taking what you already have and squeezing more juice out of it. It’s less risky if you know the traffic you already have can be monetized in more ways or better ways than if you’re counting on scaling the traffic to the moon or making some bigger change.

You still need a long-term SEO plan

Of course, long-term, looking to scale traffic and actually grow the site is usually the best way to very significantly increase revenue over-time, but to take away the most risk, I’ve found it best to look for very high-traffic sites that are severely under-monetized.

Traffic & Attention are Valuable

The key thing to note here is if a website, or anything for that matter, has a lot of traffic and eyeballs on it, but little to no revenue, is that it is still valuable. Traffic and attention are very valuable and you can always monetize traffic.

Profit is Valuable, but so is Traffic

It is much easier to take a site with tons of traffic, and put more ads on it or different ads, or simply add in your own extra layers of monetization such as adding in your own products or services to sell on the site, and then see revenue increase significantly, than it is to take a site with little to no traffic, even if it has a high DA, and grow its traffic and revenue that way.

Find an under-valued site by looking for one with traffic and low revenue

The key point here is I’ve found from experience that a site with traffic is often just as valuable, or more valuable as a site with revenue.

The only difference is that a site with revenue will cost you more to purchase, since websites are valued at a multiple of monthly profit, not monthly traffic.

Leave a comment and let me know if you’ve ever bought a site with tons of traffic and then added more monetization methods, I’m interested to know if anyone else has and how they did it!

As a reader of the Her.CEO blog, you’re probably aware of the power of an affiliate business in starting off as an entrepreneur.

This post is an Empire Flippers case study from a seller who bought an Empire Flippers site and flipped it for a profit. The website buyer bought the site, optimized it, and then sold it for $136,773, getting to keep $116,257 in their pocket after transaction fees. In total, the seller made a total of $64,001 profit on the site from time of purchase to time of sale 18 months later. 

This case study walks you through exactly how the seller successfully bought, grew and flipped their website profitably, and includes some great insights that will help serve as a roadmap for anyone interested in learning more about how to successfully flip sites.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to monetize a website and create a hands-off source of income. Further down the road, you might even think about selling your site for a huge sum of money.

But what if the hidden value of an affiliate business lies in your skillset instead of the site itself?

Flipping sites can become a profitable career, even more so than building a business from scratch! Flipping online businesses for a living is becoming a growing industry. In the Empire Flippers marketplace, we see many sellers return as buyers, and they sell their acquisition for a profit in a year or so.

Once you’ve planned your exit strategy, you could use the capital windfall to buy a house without a mortgage, put the money toward your children’s college funds, or even buy a smaller affiliate business with the intention of improving it and selling it for a profit.

That’s exactly what one seller did in our marketplace: they bought an affiliate business and sold it for over $120,000 in profit after 1.5 years of improvement.

They achieved this success by following two simple steps:

• Creating a due diligence checklist and sticking to it.
• Figuring out a sustainable growth strategy that can be applied again and again.

We’ll break down how this seller achieved that in this case study, and hopefully you’ll have a better idea of what flipping online businesses looks like.

The Timeline

• Niche: Advertising, hobbies, lifestyle
• Site Created: May 2014
• Site Acquired: April 2017 for $52,256
• Monetization: Amazon Associates
• Total earnings (April 2017–October 2018): $60,000
• Completed Empire Flippers Application: October 6, 2018
• Listed on marketplace: October 14, 2018 for $136,773
• Agreed sale price: October 25, 2018 for $136,773
• Transaction completed: November 11, 2018. Net payout after broker’s commission: $116,257
• Total site profit: $124,750

Over the course of 18 months, this seller optimized the site and increased its overall earnings. After being listed for sale in the marketplace for only 11 days, it sold for its listing price in an all-cash offer.

Let’s break down the earnings. The site was bought for $52,256, and sold for $136,773. After the commission fee, the seller received $116,257. The seller made a profit of $64,001 from the initial purchase.

Keep in mind that the profit isn’t just the sales price. The seller received a monthly profit generated by the business from Amazon Affiliate commissions, which totaled around $60,000 during this time. In sum, the seller walked away with over $120,000.

Now that we know the details of the sale, let’s look at the seller’s strategy in buying the right asset to flip.

Fine-Tuning Due Diligence to Streamline Your Search

The seller’s main purchase criteria involved the following four points:

• An evergreen niche: The site should be as evergreen as possible, focusing on topics in the niche that will be relevant. 
• A great backlink profile: A spammy backlink profile could lead to a Google algorithm penalty. Some buyers also avoid PBNs and any blackhat SEO tactics. Look for high-quality backlinks from domains with high DR and in a relevant niche.
• A niche with a high potential ceiling: For this seller, potential was measured by how many keywords the site was already ranking for. In other words, they considered the search volume of the top keywords.
• Upward traffic trends: The seller focused on acquiring sites that had a positive traffic trend. Reading traffic was similar to reading stock charts.

These are some great starting points to consider when creating your own due diligence checklist. However, keep in mind that this seller has been flipping online businesses for a while, so their criteria will likely be very different from what you’d include. If you need help in deciding what criteria to use, download this free due diligence checklist to make your search easier.

Once you’ve decided on your checklist, this will help you eliminate unqualified businesses from your search, so you can spend more time focusing on the best available options.

In addition to the above criteria, you might consider the age of the business as a qualifying measure. While the site in the case study was created in May 2014, the seller acquired it nearly three years after it was started. This period of time is useful because it gives you enough time to grow a domain’s authority, which makes it easier to rank for keywords.

You might consider simplifying the criteria of positive trends to a minimum traffic measure, such as 10,000 monthly views. If you’re buying a site for the first time and you’re not confident about identifying trends, these types of stats can be easier to visualize to help you decide if a business might be a good acquisition.

Growth Strategy

The overall flow of the growth strategy in the case study was to identify the site’s strengths, improve them, and, once performance had improved, expand the business further.

The seller’s growth strategy can be broken down into three steps:

• Identify the top 5 to 10 highest earning pages.
• Optimize these top pages for on-page and off-page SEO.
• Create new content sections.

The first step included adding a unique affiliate link to each page so that they could monitor how much revenue each page brought in. From there, they could see the best-performing pages or articles and optimize the content. Another way you can check performance is by looking at your web analytics software. Google Analytics is a top choice for many bloggers, with Clicky being a popular alternative.

However, analytics aren’t as accurate as setting up unique affiliate IDs when measuring revenue performance. Check out this in-depth guide on how to create affiliate links if you want to follow the above strategy.

Once the seller identified the top-performing pages, they began optimizing them for on-page and off-page SEO to supercharge their potential.

On-page optimization ensures that you’re capturing all the relevant keywords from the parent keyword and placing them in appropriate places and with enough volume on each page. On the other hand, off-page SEO is more nuanced and requires a different approach, since this depends on a site’s backlink profile.

When considering manual outreach, many bloggers turn to guest posting for sites in shoulder niches or posting on forums while providing contextual links. These efforts require patience and steady output if you’re considering doing these on your own.

If you don’t have time for manual outreach, you could hire an agency to create guest posts for you so you can focus on securing opportunities and providing briefs.

The final step of the growth plan was to monitor the pages the seller improved. After seeing the site’s overall performance, new content sections were created in order to target new keywords. 

Finding new keywords to start ranking doesn’t mean you need to go after all the competitive ones with high search volumes. From a search engine’s perspective, targeting low-competition keywords with a small search volume can build the site’s overall domain ranking and authority, especially if those articles appear in the first few search results for a specific keyword.

The Exit

Once the site reached a certain level of performance, the seller decided that it was time to sell their investment. After 17 months of improvement and optimization, the seller listed the affiliate business in our marketplace.

It was listed at $136,773, and after 11 days, an all-cash offer was made. With low 6-figure deals, it’s more common to see offers with cash up-front, as buyers are able to raise the capital. Deal structuring can come into play to mitigate the buyer’s risk, but sellers can also use these earnouts in their favor to negotiate a higher overall sales price to compensate for receiving a delayed payout.

All deal structures are different, and although this case study didn’t involve one, it’s worth bearing in mind when you decide to exit your business.

Flipping – a Full Time Career?

We hope this step-by-step guide on how a seller managed to turn an initial $50,000 investment in an affiliate business into more than $120,000 profit has been useful to you. 

If you have capital and skills, flipping online businesses could be a great career opportunity. Instead of sticking with one or a few businesses, you could put the skills and experience you’ve gathered into improving failing or immature businesses and selling them for a profit.

The types of assets you flip depend on your strategy. However, it’s recommended that when you begin, you stick with a single type of monetization in the same type of niche.

Once you’ve created a system for choosing businesses that are the right fit for you and a way to optimize them, you’ve got processes to trust every time. All that’s left to do is decide where you want to buy and sell your online businesses when it’s time to flip the assets.

Where to Buy or Sell Businesses

If you’re selling or buying an affiliate business for the first time, we recommend that you use a broker’s service instead of going with a private sale.

A private sale has no protection for either party, and you’re depending on the honesty of the other party. If you’re buying, there’s no real way to tell if a business actually performs as advertised, or if the traffic and revenue figures have been doctored just to make the business look great.

If you’re selling through a private sale, you’ve got no way to protect yourself from tire kickers who will constantly present low-ball offers without any serious buying intent. Not to mention, there’s little protection in the final step when the funds are wired to your account.

When you use a broker, there are well-established processes in the service that will ensure that the deal goes as smoothly as possible. A reputable broker will ensure impartial service for everyone involved, since it’s the broker’s reputation on the line if they allow a bad actor into the system.

Which broker you should choose is harder to say. Stacy gives her own account of what worked and what didn’t, so make sure you check it out here.

In the meantime, if you own an online business, think about your exit strategy. You could gain a large amount of money in a short amount of time, and you can use that money to accelerate the growth of another project you’ve been working on. You could even start your own journey of flipping digital assets for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Start your own flipping journey by registering for free and start browsing today for the right deal that could be waiting for you.

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This post is a case study documented by Vinnie Wong. 

Vinnie Wong is a Content Specialist at Empire Flippers. Originally from the UK and now residing in Malaysia, he loves everything related to online businesses. When he’s not neck deep with work, he’s running after his toddler or trying to relive the glory days by injuring himself while playing soccer.

How to Sell a Website – Tips How & Where to Sell Your Website + How I sold mine. You can learn how to sell your site watching the video below or reading the rest of this article.

First things first, I am here to be a resource for you and if you are looking to sell a website send me an email, stacy@her.ceo.

I’m always looking to buy high traffic and/ors revenue generating websites, and I have a website investing email list who are also hungry and ready to buy websites. So if you have a site that gets traffic, or any type of revenue send me an email, stacy@her.ceo.

You can also sign up for my email list if you want to buy a website, as I send website buying tips and deals.

Starter Sites vs Established Sites

There are two types of sites you can sell, one is a starter site, which is one that you either custom make or that you’ve already made that has all the pieces in place. It has content and structure or is a custom site for someone, but it has no traffic and no revenue.

Depending on how you position it you can still sell it for a lot of money, especially if it’s a custom site for someone.

Th second type of site is one that has traffic and is making money already so it’s actually worth something on its own.

Personally, I only like to purchase the second type of site which is a site that already has traffic and already has revenue.

If you have a starter site you can always try to get it traffic and optimize it for SEO and other traffic sources and then if you start getting traffic or revenue you actually might be able to sell it for more than what you’ll be able to sell it.

Basically if you make a website and want to sell it, anything you can do to get more traffic to it or monetize it more fully will allow you to get a buyer more quickly and to sell it for a much higher price.

How to Sell a Starter Website

Sell on Motion Invest for Quick Cash:

If you choose to ignore my advice then you can still sell a site not getting any traffic. Motioninvest.com is one site that sells both websites that are earning a small amount of revenue and brand new starter sites that aren’t earning revenue. You can try contacting motion invest and selling your starter site, although I believe they prefer sites that do have some sort of monthly revenue.

Sell on a Facebook Group:

Another way to sell your starter site is to join website investing and passive income and retirement income facebook groups and once you establish a relationship with people in the group by helping answer questions and have value-add posts, you can post about your starter site that is ready to go and see if anyone is interested in purchasing it.

You’ll want to ask the group admins first if this is allowed or figure out a creative way to phrase it where it doesn’t seem like you’re selling anything but you’re still gauging interest if anyone wants it.

For example you could post, “I have this beautiful, 10,000 word, finance website, but I don’t know what to do with it. What do you guys think? Should I renew the domain or let it go or try to sell it somewhere? “ the beauty with this type of post is you’re not actively selling but if someone is super interested in your site they will reach out to you via DM and you can start a sales conversation there.

If you have a site that does have some sort of traffic or revenue then you have a lot more options to sell it.

You can email me, stacy@her.ceo and I can either make an offer on it or send it to my website investing waitlist to see if anyone there has any interest in buying it.

How to Sell an Established Website

How to sell a website that already has traffic and revenue:

Email Stacy@Her.CEO

The first thing you want to do is email me stacy@her.ceo, and we can start a conversation and see if there’s some way that I can either buy your site or help you sell it. As a first step, always I have a huge email list that always wants to even if it’s something I’m interested in.

List Your Site on a Website Selling Platform:

You can also choose to sell it on a website investing platform.

You can list your site to sell on Flippa which has a starter site listing fee of $15 or an established site listing fee of $49 PLUS a 10% sale success fee that goes down in a tiered structure for sites that sell for over 50K, you can also apply to sell your sit on Empireflippers.com they don’t accept all sites like Flippa does so you have to send in stat and revenue verification data and they have to choose your site to list on their platform.

When I went through the process of listing my website for sale on Empire Flippers they made me pay a $250 deposit that they ended up refunding when they didn’t choose to list my site for sale on their platform.

I’m not sure but I think they might refund the deposit after you sell your site but you’d need to check with them to verify how that works or even if they still collect that type of deposit because I checked their website and they don’t publicly post about requiring sellers to send in a deposit even though it was something I had to do. they also take a 15% success fee for any website that sells for under $1 million dollars which is quite hefty, and that also goes down in a tiered structure for more expensive sites.

I don’t have personal experience selling a site through any other platforms but you can also apply to sell your site at FEinternational.com, investors.club and quietlightbrokerage.com.

I ended up selling my site using a broker at Latonas.com.

It’s important to do your research for each platform to figure out the fees you’ll have to pay for listing and sale success fees as it differs by platform.

If you choose to sell on Flippa.com for example, they have $49 listing fee and then they take a 10% success fee of each sale, and that goes down as your site price goes up, like, the percentage that they take goes down so the number they take still goes up but the percentage will go down.

You can also sell your site on Empire flippers.com Flippa accepts every site that lists on it, Empire Flippers is more choosy and they’re going about your site and going to make sure it’s exactly what they want to sell to their audience. You might not even get accepted with Empire Flippers since they don’t accept all sites to sell.

Getting accepted by them is also not a a guarantee of a sale, although you’re going to get more visibility from listing on Empire Flippers, Flippa or any of the other site listing platforms because both of these platforms have a huge audience so there’s a really high chance that someone will want your site.

I was looking at EmpireFlippers.com and it says that out of all the sites they’ve approved, they’ve actually sold 89% of the ones that they’ve listed, so still your site could be in the 11% that doesn’t get sold.

Empire Flippers also makes you pay a $250 deposit when you list it which I think they say they refund after the sale or return of the site. I only know about the $250 fee because I went through the process of listing the site with them although I didn’t end up listing it on their platform, but I still had to pay them the $250 and then they refunded it when they didn’t approve my site for their platform. They actually don’t post about this fee publicly but I only know about it because I had to pay it when I tried to list with them.

They also take a 15% success fee which is pretty hefty it goes down if your site is over a million dollars in price, they take a pretty big success fee so that’s something you want to take into account if you can try selling it with a broker first that takes a lower success fee, you’re going to get to keep more of your total selling price.

It’s something I’d recommend listing all your options and then seeing the potential amount you could get for the site on the different platforms and start with the ones that have the highest potential and then apply for the ones that have lower potential.

Where to sell your website

There are many platforms and places you can sell your site. Here are a few you can research and try:

• Her.CEO
• Facebook Groups
• Private Deals
• Flippa
• Empire Flippers
• Latonas
• FE International
• Motion Invest
• Quiet Light Brokerage
• Investors.Club

My Experience Selling a Website

Latonas.com is where I actually ended up selling my site.

I had a very good experience in the sense they worked hard to sell my site and were very communicative and responsive. They also have a pretty big audience so I had a buyer within a few weeks, an interested buyer, so we got on a call and everything was great. After the call he made an offer and wanted to buy it.

We went through the process. The buyer put the money in Escrow and I transferred everything to him. We signed multiple airtight contracts. After I transferred everything to him he had everything he had the domain he had the host he had the database. He sends an email and says, “You know what, I just I can’t, I don’t want to do this anymore and I want to take my money out.” He got cold feet, and he said it was because the site didn’t comply with GDPR.

He said, “You need like a controller, someone to manage the data GDPR”. GDPR is very complex, however if you don’t think a website complies with GDPR, you probably aren’t going to be able to buy any website, because even Google has had the GDPR lawsuits and they’ve had to pay huge fines.

If Google has its huge team of lawyers and they weren’t even incredibly able to correctly, prepare for GDPR, any small website or any website on any listing platform is likely not even close to prepared for literally any GDPR lawsuit. At the end of the day, this person just got cold feet and wanted to pull out and they were trying to pin the blame on something so they chose GDPR. The takeaway here is that even if it didn’t have anything to blame it on they still could have pulled out of the deal.

The buyer was able to take their money out of escrow, and then I transferred everything back even though we had airtight contracts. It’s not worth it to get into a lawsuit over something like this – I’m not going to go after them with a lawyer to try to make them follow through with the transaction.

I guess it’s good to know that contracts, at the end of the day airtight contracts don’t have that much value. I mean if you take something to court I would guess that contracts have more value. It took a few more months to find another interested buyer.

This person did end up buying it for less than the already very low price I had originally put on it, and this buyer had tons of red flags. I shouldn’t have sold to that person and there ended up being issues later on which I won’t go into here.

At the end of the day I don’t regret selling the site however I do wish I had waited for a different buyer and went for a higher multiple.

Website Selling Takeaways

Takeaway 1: Choose a high-multiple broker with low fees

When selling my site I do wish I’d chosen a higher-end broker so I could have sold at a higher multiple.

Takeaway 2: Be Patient, there will be a buyer

I do wish I’d been more patient waiting for someone, or does that so I could have gotten a better purchaser who would have done more work on the site and not cause issues that we ran into later on, as well as a purchaser who was willing to pay a higher multiple take all those things into consideration when you’re selling your site.

In conclusion, if I could go back in time and give my old self advice before selling the site I would say, “Be patient, choose a higher end broker and work out the math on the different brokerages and platforms to see what makes sense for you to list your site, and just know that contracts aren’t really airtight until the money has been not just put in escrow but literally released from escrow.”

Comment below if you have ever bought or sold a site and your experience with your listing platform.

If you’re here and looking to sell your website, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to buy or invest in a website, you can read my website investing story here.

Email me at stacycaprio@gmail.com with your name and site traffic if you’d like to sell your site and I’ll personally respond.

I have an enthusiastic community of investors, entrepreneurs, side hustlers, and a large list looking purchase high-quality websites.

So if you have a website you are looking to sell, you’re in the right place.

I can’t guarantee your site will be a good fit to sell to my audience, but if it is built using white-hat SEO principles, has traffic, revenue, and profit, it likely will be.

Selling my First Site – The Rough Journey

First of all, if you’re wondering why this article’s title says I almost sold my site for 187.5% more than its original cost, this is because that was exactly what almost happened.

$12,000 was the first offer I received for my site, which I had purchased a few years ago for $6,400.

However the buyer with the first offer ended up backing out, making this first offer an “almost” offer.

Here’s how the title math works: $12,000 / $6,400 = 187.5%

I use the almost offer percentage in the title because I’m not supposed to put any specific details from the actual deal that did go through.

So, you’ll have to use your imagination on the exact percentage the site actually sold for when it was purchased by buyer #2, who did not back out.

Second of all, here is the mini-story of me trying to sell my website:

Me Trying to Sell My Site – Funny Story

Funniness Disclaimer: I think this story is funny looking back [in the moment it was the opposite of funny to me] which is why I wrote it out. I’m not sure you will think the same. But maybe you will because it’s a pretty funny story any way you look at it [as long as you’re not living it in the present moment LOL].

No one:

Not a single person:

Me: “Who wants to buy my website that makes passive income each month?”

Nothing. No Response. Because no one asked.

Me: *Looks for a website broker*

*Finds website broker*

Website Broker:

“Pls give us months and years of data in a detailed Excel sheet”
“Pls give us monthly revenue screenshots in a very specific format”
“Pls sign our 6 month exclusivity agreement”

“Yo sorry, we actually don’t want to help you sell your site.”

Website Broker 2:

“Yes, let’s do this, we can help you sell your site!”

Potential Buyer: “Yes, I will buy your website”

Me: “Ok Great”

Potential Buyer: *signs airtight contract* *puts $12K in Escrow*

“Here is $12K in Escrow”

Me: “Great” “Here is the domain name, Here is the website.”

Me: *puts domain name and website in buyer’s account*

Buyer: “Hey, NVM, I don’t want it anymore”

Me: “What?” “You already have it”

Buyer: “I’m scared of GDPR”

Me: “But you signed a contract. You already paid for the site. You literally have the site.”

Buyer: “Bye Felicia, Peace, and I’m taking my money back”

Buyer:

*Peaces out*
*Takes his money back out of Escrow*

Me:

*Cries Silently*
*Cries Loudly*

*Thinks he was the only person in the world who would ever want my website, it’s all downhill from here*

Buyer 2: “I’ll give you money for your site”

Me: “It’s a miracle” “Ok deal”

*Throws hands in air, dances around kitchen*

Selling my first site was difficult.

I went through a lot which I explain in more detail below.

I knew I wanted to sell the website for months and all I was getting were nibbles with low-quality intent that turned away after I gave them more detail.

I also had difficulty finding a broker that would accept my site because it was forum-based, or too small, among other excuses.

The first broker had me fill out a ton of forms including a 6 month exclusivity agreement.

They also had me send them very detailed information about my site including monthly revenue and cost breakdowns as well as proof of revenue screenshots by month in a very specific format.

After filling out all their detailed forms and exclusivity agreement, the broker then told me they actually wouldn’t be able to help me sell the site.

So then I had to start from scratch to find a new website broker to work with.

Even worse, when I finally landed on a broker that agreed to help me sell the site, I had a very serious buyer indicate he wanted the site.

The buyer signed an airtight contract with multiple online witnesses and facilitators.

The buyer even wired $12K into Escrow and it cleared.

I also literally transferred the domain and all the data into his host, finishing the entire transfer.

Then, the buyer, or technically the not-buyer, I guess, got ice cold feet and emailed everyone on the buy thread saying he would like to cancel the transaction and get his money back.

He got scared because GDPR was newer around this time, and I think he saw a GDPR section in one of the ad network agreements you have to sign during on-boarding.

This must have scared him a lot, because he started copy-pasting GDPR tidbits into the thread saying my site did not comply.

The things he was picking at included not having a GDPR data protection officer that I would be selling along with the site, something really only required (if even) by very large public companies that process tons of data.

Anyway, *apparently* you can back out of an airtight contract after an asset transfer is complete, which is exactly what he did.

At that point I wasn’t going to fight or sue him because it would have cost a lot of money and time to do so, and it seemed better to simply find a different buyer.

I was definitely hurt and surprised at first, especially because I thought the deal was already locked in.

However it ended up being best to simply move on and find another buyer, which we were able to do relatively quickly.

My rough experience selling my own site is one of the reasons I help others sell their sites without (hopefully at least, ha), the headache I experienced.

The other reason I help people sell sites is my enthusiastic community that emails me almost every day asking for me to help them purchase a site, and I enjoy connecting them to people like you selling high-quality sites.

You can email me, stacycaprio@gmail.com, if you have a site you’re looking to sell.

You can message me using the form above, or email stacycaprio@gmail.com to start a conversation if you have a profitable site you are looking to sell.

The Details on How I Finally Sold my Website

Below I’ll go into detail on how I found the seller for my own site and some more detail regarding all the ups and downs of selling it.

A few years ago, I bought a site, that was actually a package duo of two sites, for $6,400 off an expired Flippa listing.

To buy the site, I messaged the owner on Flippa and started a conversation saying I was interested in the site. I also asked if he could add me to the Google Analytics as a viewer so I could verify the current traffic.

The transaction went through much more seamlessly for him than when I tried to sell the site myself a few years in the future.

Although to be fair, he had waited years for someone to make a viable offer on the site.

Interestingly enough, in a little under 20 months I ended up giving one of the sites back to the original owner at no cost, and I ended up selling the other site to a separate person about exactly 20 months later.

I ended up not selling one of those sites to the non-buyer described in the story above who backed out of the $12K contract, and instead sold the site to actual buyer #2 for an undisclosed amount.

I can’t give any detail about the site, the niche, or even the amount the actual buyer paid, since I did sign an agreement that says “the terms of the sale are confidential” not to disclose specific term information from the actual sale.

This means the only information I am disclosing in this post is what I originally paid for the anonymous site, and the offer that a non-buyer made which fell through on the anonymous site, and nothing specific about the terms of the actual sale that went through.

Selling my site was a roller coaster of emotions, but I’m hoping I can help you avoid the same headache.

Or, you can email me at stacycaprio@gmail.com and we can go from there.

If you’ve also sold a site before, feel free to leave your own experience in the comments as I’d love to hear how it went for you.

Not looking to sell a site, but want to buy a website instead?

If you’re reading this and interested in buying, not selling, a website, you can put your email in the form below and I’ll add you to the website investing waitlist where I occasionally send out vetted website deals:

Sign up For the Her.CEO Website Investing Waitlist here: