My Second Sale on Flippa
I believe I tried a couple times after my first sale on Flippa to sell a site but with no luck. I was getting frustrated.
So I decided to try something different. I built an ugly site. To me, it didn’t look ugly. It just looked plain and simple. There was no premium theme to it. I carefully picked the plugins for it. I wrote 6 unique articles and spun them each 5 times. I submitted 2 articles to directories. I submitted the site to search engines. I social bookmarked it. I built 4 free webpages including Squidoo and Blogger for the site. I even started and grew a twitter account to over 450 followers.
I tweaked the auction to include the above info. I put it up for 5 days and started it at $1 with a $297 BIN. On the 4th day I was getting nervous because no one had bid. There were 2 watchers. I was starting to think that I wasn’t going to the sell the site.
Then I got my first bid at $29. I was stoked. I had the reserve set at $59 and was tempted to lower it but hubby changed my mind. I ended up having 5 different bidders. I got to actually experience what it was like for my auction to get 3 hours added to its time several times. I lowered the BIN to $197. I was definitely excited.
In the end, the auction ended at $80. Granted it wasn’t the BIN. But it was more than my reserve and I made more than my first sale. So I was definitely happy about it. I made some money to buy a few gifts for my 4 year old’s birthday. Happy mom over here :) Baby steps right?
So I eagerly sent the winner a message in regards to the sale of the site. I was anxious to get paid and transfer the site.
The following day, the winner messaged me that he paid via Paypal and btw here is the info. He also said that I just needed to give him the wordpress files and database because he knows how to set up the site. Whoohoo! Easy peasy!
I was actually nervous because it seemed to easy compared to the previous sale. We did have an issue with mailing the files. But in the end he received it.
I received a message the following day from the winner saying that it was an absolute pleasure to work with someone who knows what she’s doing. My ego shot up a bit, I won’t lie. He told me that another seller sold him a site and gave him a zip file with the entire home directory in 100+ megs! Holy sh*t!
So I felt good about myself. On to site #3!
My 1st Completed Sale on Flippa
I’m happy to report that I finally sold my dating site on Flippa.
For those of you who have been following, you know that I’ve had a hell of a time selling it. Tried selling it on Digital Point (no fees). Didn’t work. I put it up for auction on Flippa 3 times ($19 first time, and $9 each subsequent time) before I finally got a buyer at $59. Unfortunately, that didn’t pan out and I had to go through the 3 day waiting period before I could dispute, and another 3 days waiting for the buyer to respond. In the end, he never did. Flippa automatically removed my 2.5% success fee invoice and relisted my site for free. They also knocked the buyer’s trust rating down to -9 and suspended his account. I then sent him negative feedback.
I was discouraged at that point. But hubby kept telling me to keep trying. So I made some minor changes to the auction based on my previous experience, and relisted it. I also listed a stretch marks niche site.
Unfortunately, the stretch marks auction didn’t get a buyer. But I did get one bid on the dating site. When the auction was over, I was nervous. The buyer didn’t have very high trust rating, nor did he have any feedback. He had also just registered this past September. I was afraid I was going to get burned again.
Still, I went through the motions. I sent him a thank you message requesting info from him. Then I waited. I noticed that he was from the UK so there was a big time difference.
The next morning, I received a message from the buyer. He pointed out that several categories were unreadable (What?!) and that he would like the color scheme to be more romance friendly such as pastel. He had a few other questions but in the end, he told me that payment was sent.
I should have been relieved that I finally got a payment for a site that I spent a couple months slaving away over. Granted it was a huge learning curve from start to finish. And as I write this, I’m still not completely done with the site I sold.
He wanted a color scheme change which meant I had to spend the entire day pouring over CSS code. Mind you, I’m still a bit of a novice. If someone told me to create a brand new site entirely out off CSS, I’d just about shit myself. But the past couple of days, I’ve learned and understood enough to make the necessary changes to the color scheme, albeit painfully slowly and with mistakes that I had to clean up. Definitely a learning experience. I also took the time to fire up Photoshop and update the logo to match the new pink pastel color scheme. Afterall, I AM a professional. I will not give a client a half ass built site.
As for the unreadable categories, I was shocked. I spent a couple of months staring at the damn site. I thought I had seen and checked everything. But apparently, the free autoblogging plugin Multipress Lite was creating extra symbols that would break the div code in the Wordpress theme. Not good. I found this all out after hours of stressing out, checking pages, coding and recoding, wanting to throw my monitor out the window, deactiving all plugins and reactivating each one, etc. I came to the conclusion that I need premium plugins in my arsenal.
Along the way, I’ve been taking notes, reorganizing and finetuning the step by step plan of action that I am going to be using for subsequent flip projects, making and refining a shopping list of tools and plugins that I need (I have acquired a few already but very slowly since I’m on a very tight almost nonexistent budget, and generally keeping myself as organized as possible. I do not like running around like a chicken without a head.
I’ve also created and refined my Flippa sales template, email templates, and have created text files of important info in regards to each domain (database info, user/pass for the site, email address, affiliate codes etc).
As I type this, I keep looking over at the website that I sold. It has not fully propagated. It could take up to 3 days but I hope not. The buyer has Godaddy and Hostgator accounts like me so it really shouldn’t take so long. I want this done so I can finalize the process, take a deep breath, and move on to the next site.
It has definitely been an eye-opening, frustrating, but huge learning experience. No amount of videos or ebooks can fully prepare me for site flipping. I came prepared with some knowledge, only to realize that most of my actual learning would happen when I created and flipped the site. Experience is a valuable learning tool.