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Selling Websites on Flippa: How I Made A Mind-Blowing Sale 🤯 (🐀 Website Is Sold)

In October, I sold my 🐀 Website from Human Proof Design for $2,700 🤑 Meanwhile, the website makes only $10 a month gross revenue and -$5 a month (yes negative) net revenue 😝

I anadonded this website a while ago. However, this successful sale showed that it was well-built and has passed the test of time 👍

🐀 Website revealed 🎭

I know you are dying to know what my 🐀 Website was about 😉

It’s about fans 🌬🎉

Can you figure out the URL on your own? 😉

WhatFans blog homepage

How I Sold 🐀 Website: My Buy It Now Price Got Exceeded Twice 🤯

I decided to sell it through a Flippa auction. Here’s the listing.

In case you do not know what Flippa is: It’s an eBay for selling online properties such as sites, domains, and other digital assets. Exactly as on the real eBay, it’s just a platform to facilitate deals as they do not vet anything being sold.

Going with an auction makes sense for small websites when the expected price is below $5,000

For me, it is always super hard to come up with a good price for a site is since there is such a huge demand for small well-established sites 🤯 

Even the Flippa Price Calculator did not show the actual price the website was sold for:

Flippa calculator price

This proved that my decision about an auction was correct! 👍

Buy It Now Price 💲

When I was preparing the listing, I decided to calculate the Buy It Now (BIN) price in advance. Last time, when I sold 🐝 Site, everybody was asking about the BIN price and I had no clue.

This time, I got prepared and had my number: $600 (I know, I know, the Flippa Price Calculator showed $1000 but I used it much later 🤦‍♀️ Don’t make my mistakes!)

The auction started slowly. 

People were bidding here and there. Some did ask me about my Buy It Now Price and when I told them it’s $600, they stopped replying 🤷‍♀️

“I must be asking a lot…” I thought 😣

However, eventually, the auction price exceeded the BIN price… 😏 And I had to come up with a new one because people kept asking 🥴

Without much thinking, I kinda doubled it and got $1,100.

This number also got quickly exceeded 🤷‍♀️ 

After that, I just gave up and started telling everybody that “Nope I do not have a BIN price, let’s just see how the auction rolls out!” 😏

The end of the auction 🔚

The last hours of the auction were intense.

Every time when someone bids during the final hour, Flippa extends the auction by an extra hour. It’s done to avoid “hacking” or “sneaking in” when someone bids in the last second and wins.

Finally, only two bidders were left. Each was bidding extra $50 every 20-30 min. 

The price was slowly growing from $1,650 to $1,800.. to $2,000…

Eventually, one of the bidders gave up 🥵

The action ended with the price of $2,700 😊🎉💃

And the thing is that it might’ve happened that the winner would not be the winner at all.

How I banned the winner 😬

When the winner placed his very first bid, I went to check his profile.

I do it with every new bidder to see if they have had any disputes or bad reviews.

And indeed 💥 this guy got into a dispute in September 2020 😒

“Nope, I do not want any problems! Let’s not accept any bids from him” I told myself and pressed Reject Bidder.

This meant that all the future bids from this person would be rejected.

Then I thought: well maybe I should at least ask him what happened? After all, he’d already completed one successful Flippa transaction right before the dispute.

So I reached out to the guy.

Turned out that the dispute was raised because of some confusion that happened between him and some other seller. Our guy simply misunderstood how Flippa works 🤷‍♀️

After clarifying the matter, he very politely asked me to start accepting his bids 🙏

I saw that the person was adequate and his explanation seemed to make sense… So I contacted Flippa customer support and asked to re-enable his bidding 🙈

And as you saw above, that was a good move 👍 Thanks to that, I got a handsome sum for my site 🤗

The multiple I sold the site for 🔢

First of all, what is a multiple?

Let’s say your website makes $20,000 a year and you sell it for $40,000. In this case, the multiple is 2

It means that the buyer will start making a profit after 2 years since the moment they bought the site given that the site revenue stays the same.

So, a multiple is the number of years that will pass before the site “pays back” its price.

Normally the multiples for websites are in the range of 2 to 5:

Multiples of sales price for websites
Image credit: flippa.com

When I bought 🦄 Website in April, the multiple I paid was 4.5. It was on the high end of the range because the website was considered to be authoritative and with stable revenue.

Meanwhile, 🐀 Website got sold for a multiple of 22.5 🤯

It means that if the new owner does not do anything with the site, he will get back his money in 22.5 years! And only after that, he will start to make a profit 🤯

Meanwhile, the gross revenue of the site is only $10 / month and net revenue (gross revenue minus expenses) is simply -$5 / month (yep it’s negative 😬).

It was actually costing me money to run this site 😬

Rat website financials from Flippa

My auction shows very well that there is a huge demand for small profitable websites that are aged and show stable rankings.

When I was watching how the auction price was growing, I had many doubts about whether it was a good decision to sell it 😂

So why did I do it?

Why I Sold The Site 😜

It is actually a great website with zero black-hat links and a good chunk of traffic coming from Pinterest.

The aged domain, no black-hat links, awesome solid Pinterest traffic… It is super ready to be brought to the next level.

It also looks awesome! Many of the bidders complemented its design:

Comment about how nice the website looks
Comment about how nice the website looks
Comment about how nice the website looks

So…

Why the heck did I sell it? 🤔🤣

The answer is very simple: I am not a big fan of fans 🤷‍♀️

I do not like fans 😂

But I tried oh man how hard I tried! 😅

I took photos of every fan I saw to create custom images, I did a lot of research about different types of fans…

But…

It. Was. All. So. Boring! 🥱

I was just not into it 🤷‍♀️

And eventually, the site got abandoned… 🤷‍♀️

After selling two other sites on Flippa, I was playing with the idea of selling this one, too.

But life was always getting into the way 😒

And then, summer 2020 arrived and passed and while doing the site maintenance, I took a look at its Google Analytics stats….

…and oh my god!

It turned out that during the summer, the site traffic exploded 💥

Ironically, during the time when I was not touching it, the website also got the best traffic ever 🤣🤣🤣🤣

August 2020 traffic grew by 10 times compared to August 2019!

For some reason, the Pinterest traffic exploded despite the fact I did not post anything on Pinterest. 

And it brought in some good Adsense earnings 🤑

The organic search also grew by 30% despite the fact I did not build any links in 2020.

Rat Wesbite 2020 vs. 2019

And that’s when I realized that if I do want to sell it, it was the best time!

You know the rest 😏

🐀 Website History

If you have been long enough with me, you probably remember that this is the website I got from Human Proof Designs.

This was one of my first niche sites.

The site was Ready Made for me and it taught me a lot: the proper structure, how to write selling articles, what products to sell, and more.

Then, while growing it further, I used the knowledge I obtained from the Authority Hacker Pro course. It helped me to propel the site to the awesome level where it is now.

Let’s read about these services in detail.

What is Human Proof Designs 👩‍🏫

Human Proof Designs is a website building and selling company that also offers other services that you need to grow your website: content writing, SEO, etc. 

In the beginning, they specialized in selling so-called “Ready Made” websites. You’d choose one of the topics they suggest and they would build the site.

Since that, the company has evolved a lot.

Now, you can buy a wide variety of sites: from Ready Made websites that are similar to what I bought to aged sites that are already indexed by Google and starting ranking to revenue-generating ones that are already bringing in a profit.

Ready Made websites are perfect if you want to start a niche website business but are cash-strapped or want to learn everything yourself. In this case, you’d need to put in some work before you start getting revenue.

Aged and revenue-generating websites usually cost more (or much more) because they are already ranking in Google and maybe already earning money. At the same time, once you buy it, you either start getting revenue right away or you are positioned to grow your site fast 🚀

When I started, they only offered Ready Made sites. I was happy with this offer since I wanted to grow the site myself.

Apart from that, HumanProofDesigns offers other services such as:

But I never tried them except Training

Training service comes for free with the site that you bought. I got it when I completed the purchase and it was very useful and helpful 👍

On top of that, they have a members-only Facebook group where you can ask questions and talk to others. I am a member of the group and I can say that it’s a good group for beginners 👍

You can check what sites they have by clicking on the button below:

Check out their December Specials on websites 🎉

What is Authority Hacker Pro❓

Authority Hacker Pro is one of the best courses about building and growing niche websites

It has everything you need to bring your website from $0 revenue to 5-6 figure income per month.

I bought it in 2017 (after I bought a site from Human Proof Designs) and since that, I have used the techniques taught in the course on all my sites.

For 🐀 Website, I intensively used the Shotgun Skyscraper Outreach blueprint that helped me to obtain great white-hat links as well as to get impressive Pinterest traffic. I also used Content Blueprint and other modules.

The course teaches you everything you need to know from building a new site to optimizing an existing one to social media techniques to email marketing to even selling your site 😅

It is a complete training that gets updated on a regular basis. For example, in only 2020, 15 new lessons were added to the course.

However, the course has one problem 😒

It is not always available for purchase 😕 It only gets one for enrollment once a year or so 😞


Sorry, AuthorityHacker Pro is closed now!

Sign-up to my newsletter to get notified when it opens again:




Why Choosing Flippa To Sell A Website🤔

This is the third time I sold a website and like the other times, I went with Flippa.

Why selling websites on Flippa? Here are my reasons:

  • I was not sure how much my site cost so I wanted to run an auction
  • I want some sort of protection when executing the transaction, and Flippa uses Escrow to release payments
  • I wanted to reach out to many potential buyers to get the maximum price and Flippa is a popular platform for buying websites
  • My site was too small to go to the other brokers

However, Flippa has its own downsides:

  • They charge a posting fee so your sale has to cover at least that plus the closing fee
  • You’ll pay the closing fee (though their fee is smaller than the fees of other brokers)
  • You need to promote your listing yourself; however, as I said above, Flippa is popular enough to already have a lot of buyers

I think it’s a good place to sell small sites.

Webmasters who have big websites (with annual earnings above $10,000) tend to go with brokers or find private buyers on forums.

As you can see, if I were to go with a private deal, I would simply get my first BIN price, which was $600. Or maybe $1,000 😕

Meanwhile, with the auction, I got 4.15 times more than that 😏

$600 vs $2,700 😉

How To Maximize Price When Selling Your Site 🔝

Pre-sale activities🎨

I bet you can guess that a nice-looking site can be sold for more 😀

This is very true – just look at these comments I got for 🐀 Website:

Positive comments about the site
Positive comments about website's design
Positive comments about reviews and writeups

I am sure that the nice look positively affected the final price.

If you want to get a higher price, you should invest some time in doing website “staging”:

  • Replace crappy looking images with nice ones
  • Make sure all the images show properly
  • Check if the menus and other UI elements look nice

Don’t make drastic changes such as changing the site theme since it may affect its rankings in Google. 

Do just some little touch-ups here and there so that the site would look a bit more polished and thus a bit more premium.

Selling process 🐾

Your approach should depend on the size of the website you are selling.

If your website does not make much money yet, my advice is to go with Public Auction.

This will help you to maximize the amount of money from the sale. However, if you need to close the sale fast, this might not be the best option since auctions last 30 days. 

There are a few rules you need to follow when you want to auction your website:

  • Use Flippa Price Calculator or any other calculator to get an idea of how much your website may be worth (don’t make my mistake 🤦‍♀️)
  • Set a very low reserved price; the reserved price is met, it creates an impression that your listing is very popular (my reserve price was $100)
  • Be present to answer questions about the listing
  • Once in a while, post public comments on your listing; this increases the activity around it and bumps it up in the Flippa search (your goal is to attract as many bidders as possible)
  • Check the profile of every new bidder to understand whether the person is reliable and whether you’d like to have business with them

I did not go with Public Auction when I sold the first site on Flippa and I really regret it now. How knows how much I would have gotten 😩

A Good Website Is A Good Investment 👍

Websites are a hot commodity now. 

The prices are growing like crazy 🤯

I bought my 🦄 Website in April in the middle of the pandemic and the multiple I paid was 4.5

It means that if I keep the same amount of profit the seller was getting, the site will bring profit only after 4.5 years. That’s a high multiple 😒

However, I went for it because it was pretty much the only website I was able to afford 😒 (given some other parameters)

All others that were from the niche I was interested in were way too expensive.

That’s said that creating and growing a niche website business is becoming more and more lucrative 🤑 

If you want to jump-start your niche website journey, take a look at the sites Human Proof Designs offers

In order to grow your website efficiently, take a look at the Authority Hacker Pro course (hurry up while it’s still open 😬).

And if you want to sell a website, Flippa might be a good place to consider 😀👍

What do you think guys? Let me know in the comments!

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