Oh wow, I hope you didn't give them your id! Flippa used to be worthwhile but now they use a service that is shady to verify users. Flippa is not a financial money processor but they are demanding buyers and sellers upload selfie videos, selfie with govt id, and scan of selfie just buy or sell. The problem is is that the company they use sum and substance pretends to UK based but are a sneaky biz backed by some unsavory putin allies and really located in a money laundering place, cyprus. They won't explain that they do with the all the ids and videos. So only use flippa if you can avoid uploading all that private info. Flippa has no right to request this info , they're not paypal or escrow/dot/com which process the payments for domains and websites they list for sale.
I wasn't financial free until my 40’s and I’m still in my 40’s, bought my third house already, earn on a monthly through passive income, and got 4 out of 5 goals, just hope it encourages someone that it doesn’t matter if you don’t have any of them right now, you can start TODAY regardless your age INVEST and change your future! Investing in the financial market is a grand choice I made. Great video! Thanks for sharing! Very inspiring! I love this.
I understand that tomorrow isn't promised to anyone, but investing today is hard for me now because I have no idea of how and where to invest in. I would be happy if you could advise me based on how you went about yours, as I am ready to go the passive income path.?
@@georgerobinson2021 I invest across the top markets but not by myself though. I follow the guidelines of *PRISCILLA DIANE AIVAZIAN* . you might have heard of her. I can correctly say she's worth her salt as an investment advisor as her diversification skills is top-notch, I say this because I see that in her results as my portfolio grows by averages of 20 to 3O% every month, unlike I can say for my IRA which has just been trudging along. my portfolio just mirrors what she places and not just on some particular industries of my choosing. she gave me that financial freedom I needed
@@raychristopher7797 That’s great, your investment advisor must be really good, I have seen testimonies of people using the help of investment advisors in making them more financially stable. Do you mind sharing more info on this person?
@@georgerobinson2021 look her up on the internet with her name. she's quite popular for her services as she was recently featured on CNN. She can work with anyone irrespective of where you're located
@@raychristopher7797 I just looked up this person out of curiosity; surprisingly, she seems proficient. I thought this was just some overrated BS, I appreciate this.
i think the 1st mistake was . You have to ask yourself, who sells a web site generating that much money for that cheap a price. That is a red flag to me.
You're right, and that thought did cross my mind, but I was willing to take the chance and find out what would happen. We all make mistakes, and that is why I made the video, so others don't repeat them 👍
I also got ripped off. We bought a site for about 900 dollars. Before we bought the site the owner even showed us the sales. Which looked legit but don't think it was true. Same like you the traffic disappears when they turnover the site. Even if you tried to verify, they have a way of faking it but making it looked legit. Like what you said... lessoned learned!
That sucks, this is why I made the video so hopefully some people would see it before they get ripped off. Agreed, you can verify all you want but at the end of the day it can all be faked and I wouldn't buy another site off flippa. Cannot be trusted
any advice for me? I'd like to buy a small website and grow it, and am willing to put in hard work. What questions or things should I do to mitigate the chance of any problems occurring other then what was mentioned in the gentleman's video? Thanks
Tbh, I'm not sire if this was a scam like you say it was. You mentioned changing the theme immediately after getting the site and that's 100% going to affect your SEO and consequently your search rankings and traffic. It's not correct to asume that a theme changes the appearance and nothing more. It also could change the sites loading speed, content formatting, the user experience, functionality and meta data of the site. Plus having too many custom features that dont mesh with the native funtionality of wordpress (or whatever platform the site is using) could affect your SEO. The previous theme may have looked bad but could theoretically have been better if judges those metrics and that could have made a difference to your rankings. Not knowing enough about the technical aspects of a website can hurt you in the long run and that's not the sellers fault. Nonetheless i dont know anything about the seller or the previous work they did on the site so it could have been a scam and perhaps they faked the rankings and income info.
Or what's more likely, the previous owner bought stuff with their own affiliate links and as soon as it was sold, stopped. There's NO way impressions and visits would fall off a cliff right after a change of ownership
That's a sound theory, unless you made sure all previous SEO in the website moved to the new theme you perhaps deleted it by accident then google would not pick up on key words and hence much less traffic arrived.
Probably not but at the same time you don't always know why someone is selling and everything seemed to have a check out for the most part so I went for it. But looking back, you're right that should have been a red flag
I'm super glad he made this video because it's super informative and gives people a heads up and what to watch out for, but one warning he forgot to mention was that if something seems too good to be true, it likely is. Buying $4800 worth of cash flow for $1200 is 0.25x when the standard is around 3x-4x. That's already a red flag. Why would somebody sell a steady stream of mostly passive income for that price?
Thanks, Michael, for sharing your experience. It will help a lot of us not to make the same mistakes. You lost some money, but we all learned a lesson. If you had not learned anything, that would be a real loss. Robert Kiyosaki said, "If it cost you money, it was cheap". My best wishes for your future endeavors.
@@MichaelBordenaro I have a store that I want to sell on flippa ..... it makes over 50K in a 50 day period and over 18K in profit .... I don't know how to use FLIPPA to sell it. Can you help me and i will pay you to do that.
yep. Some gay sayed never to buy sites younger than one year and look for a relatively straight line in terms of traffic to ensure consistency and no bot traffic or inflated stuff
Well I didn't get into the transfer details, but it is the same for each transfer. Once the money has been placed in Flippa Escrow, then you can proceed to transfer the ownership of the domain to the buyer, and then give them a copy of the hosting files to transfer to their own host and then you're done!
I don't think so because I the report says it was mostly organic traffic from google, unless that was being faked. Which looking back, it probably was being faked somehow, because after I bought the site, it was getting nowhere near the amount of traffic promised. Probably because I wasn't paying the "SEO" guy. He probably had some sort of scam going on.
@@MichaelBordenaro Did you buy any more websites that worked for you from any other source? I mean from humanproofdesigns and if so how is it going? i am sure there will be people like me interested to know about that. thanks!
@@atifrehmanfarooqui3862 Since this video, I have not bought any other websites. I advertise human proof designs because it is a 100% U.S. Based legitimate company (unlike Flippa) and they build all the websites them selves and have it down to a formula and all the websites are setup for success from the get go. After that, I built the next site myself, but I wanted to build one from scratch. But if I were to buy one again, it would be from them so I know I am not getting scammed.
You have to make sure the seller will give you access to Google analytics as well as somehow prove to you the website is making money. Otherwise most likely you will get burned just like I did in the video.
CoVeR WkZ you’re welcome! Personally, I think I would probably only build one from scratch. The only way I would buy one again would be if I knew the owner of the site or the site has a good reputation.
dude the thing is that you didnt even do proper research before investing in the website so i am sorry for your loss but it clearly shows from your video that you didnt do any kind of research about buying the website and that is number 1# reason why u lost the money
At the time, I thought I did enough homework to verify the purchase, but we all learn from mistakes, and that's why I made the video, so people don't repeat my mistakes.
@@affanmajid6325 I don't buy websites anymore. I only make them from scratch now. But if I ever did buy another one, it would be from human proof designs. I have a link for them in the description. They are a reputable, American company that builds all their own sites and stands behind them.
Why didn't you hire the SEO guy, if you could see that the traffic really was there when he worked on it. I don't understand why it has to be worked on constantly myself. Isn't it supposed to be set it and forget it, passive income, all that? But maybe you didn't want to throw good money after bad?
My thought was, this SEO guy was probably doing some sort of shady black hat tactics to get traffic to the site, and I must have been right. Because since I did not hire him, the traffic slowed way down and if he was doing good organic SEO, the work would have had a lasting effect for a while.
Yes she is right! I have a link in the description for human proof designs. They are professional niche websites already built for you from a reputable company. You won't get scammed there. Let me know how it goes!
@Die baltische Meeresgöttin Yes I was naive, and I probably even said something along those lines in the video. It's for everyone out there who has never bought a sight on Flippa. Hopefully they see this video before 👍
@@lovewilliams5167 Oh no, I am done with Flippa. I feel like almost every single website and there is a scam and also the lack of Flippa's help and customer service through such a large and expensive transaction has definitely burned me for good. I think the biggest issue with flippa is that people who use the platform are mostly beginners but in reality you need to be a pretty seasoned person in buying and selling websites in order to use it effectively
I don’t understand how changing the theme could mess up the sites SEO. All the media-data remains the same and the post data etc. People change the theme of their websites all the time and it doesn’t hurt them
@@MichaelBordenaro people change theme yes but it's not like they click on a new theme and call it a day. The metadata of posts remains the same, yes, because posts are a general wordpress concept, but post metadata isn't even very important for SEO any more. Changing the theme of an website with SEO without knowing a lot about SEO is basically like using heavy machinery to rip out the engine from a car (just rip it out, don't even unscrew anything), then plopping in a new engine, and expecting the car to run. Most themes nowadays have a bunch of information fields you can add that are unique to the theme. Are you sure all of that transferred? Are you sure your schema markup didn't get deleted? Are you sure your accessibility aria tags and image alt text stayed the same? Are you sure your page load speed and lighthouse scores didn't tank? Page load is hugely important for SEO. Are you sure the new theme had images optimized with source-sets for different sizes depending on device screen size? Are you sure that in changing the theme you didn't lose caching and gzip compression? Are you sure the new theme used semantic html under the hood to allow google to understand the content? Are you sure the same headings stayed and they had the same html elements (h1 vs h2)? Are you sure the new theme optimized the way javascript and CSS are loaded and run? Are you sure the new theme doesn't have a number of JS and CSS files that exceeds the maximum thread count the browser will allow a website to use? Are you sure fonts were being loaded properly in the new theme? Outside of code specifics... did you even have any SEO plugins installed that would tell you how effective the website was for a given search term before and after the update? Did you even look at what the top search terms you were ranking for were? Changing the theme for a website that's had a lot of grey hat SEO done to it is basically like a heart transplant dude, and you tried to do it the Mortal Kombat way.
@@jiggasnap Lots of good points, I'll give you that. Did I do all those things, of course not. But I still have my suspicions, that the site I bought, was getting traffic from an artificial source. There is no way to go back and prove that. However, the person who bought the site from me, has had it for 2 years, and hasn't been able to get it anywhere nnear the performance that was claimed when I purchased it, so that to me further confirms my suspicion, that I was duped.
@@MichaelBordenaro When you put it that way, I ask myself, is it more likely that the original seller just paid for fake clicks in a clickfarm, or is it more likely that they had highly effective SEO embedded in the theme choice, (which they somehow chose to sell for $2k while they could easily charge $5k a month to do that service for any company) and then a new SEO professional couldn't replicate the results? Occam's razor would hint that you're probably right, and the original seller was simply a scammer. Either way, you do a good service by telling your listeners that it was a mistake not to get added to the analytics account. If you had done that you could have easily spotted all the fake clickfarm traffic coming from somewhere in Asia. Another thing that's valuable (which you don't mention explicitly but anyone reading between the lines can see) is that it pays to start small. Lots of websites out there selling for 500k+ and some of them are pretty clearly borderline scams. It makes a lot of sense to start small with business acquisitions and learn lessons at the price of $2000 instead of paying the price of homelessness/bankruptcy.
@@jiggasnap Yep, at this point I'll never know but it seemed like the person I sold the site to, knew more than me about getting the site to do well and they couldn't so I'm leaning on the fact that it probably was a scam, otherwise they would have been charging more like you said. In any case, I hope the video helps at least a few other people from getting scammed since there are so many of them out there.
Aww sorry for that...but I'm sure you can find ways to make money. Maybe collaborate with cat vloggers/bloggers and split comissions while you write their articles? Send free cat food to subscribers? Put exclusive cat stuff to bring traffic. Idk have to hussle and look for ways to get $. If you put the work in you can do it💪💪
This is not how it works.. you sleep and wait for 400 dollars per month... this is not fairy tale.. you need to work on it so that traffic remains stable or increases. How can u sleep and just wait for money?
How it works is you are supposed to receive what you pay for. And if you don't, then it is a SCAM! Yes niche sites require work, but if a lot of the work is already done, then it should not be nearly as much work, and that is exactly what you are supposed to be paying for.
@@MichaelBordenaro I agree but how can you just add links and go to sleep? and wait for that $400 to come in... Am not saying the site was not scam but being one of the sellers on Flippa myself, you attitude of doing nothing and expecting everything and calling Flippa bad is wrong. Even though I used the word scam above, I don't think I guy or Flippa scammed you. You were the one who had no idea how to check and just clicked the buy button. If someone is making $400 per month, why would he sell that site for $2000? Its almost 20x of what u r making.. And the one thing that pissed me the most was when you said "All the traffic is from google, all the traffic is organic, so what would an SEO guy do?" Do you know what SEO is? If I don't do SEO on my site and it doesnt rank then how is Google going to send traffic to my site? Amazon affiliate is a very competitive niche,, there's always new sites popping up and if you don't keep ur content updated or make new links, you will lose rankings and that is what happened to your site. You basically lost ur search rankings because you left the site as it is and there was no one to do the SEO. Second thing, you said that you changed the theme as you bought the site, that is a big no no SEO wise, theme changes affect SEO, the traffic do return after some time but if there is no one to see to that how will it come back? And You tried to chargeback? Chargeback for what??? he didn't forcefully sold u the site. He even did Escrow method, u just got greedy by hoping to earn $400 per month by spending $2000 only and didn't check everything. So its you who is at fault here. My listing is live right now as well and the people interested ask 1000 questions before they even show interest. So basically, say that it was your first time doing Flippa and you fucked up. Don't call it a scam.
@@Gautamkumarofficial you might know more about website and SEO than me and that's fine. I never claimed to be an expert. But if someone claims the site is earning money and getting all this traffic and then the moment I take over none of that actually happening it is a scam. There are no two ways about it. I have checked flippa many times since then and 99% of the website and there are scamming garbage. Did I make some mistakes along the way yes. That's why I made the video so no one follows in my footsteps.And if you are a legitimate seller you should probably find a new platform to sell on to separate yourself from all the scam crap out there.
@@MichaelBordenaro You do have valid points and in a way it is a scam but the way he did it was not a scam.. And The organic and SEO guy part of yours was totally wrong.. Apart from that you did give some valid pointers and yeah Flippa is 90% people trying to offload their website to make quick bucks. I will try the site you recommend in your second Flippa related video. Thanks!
This is a good mistake. We need to make mistakes and a lot of it otherwiese we will not improve. Important this there is he took immediate action. Others will calculate and calculate,,,do some more research and research and the bus have already left.
Yeah it was a learning experience for sure and I did try to stop the bleeding as quickly as possible. But from many of the other comments, seemed like this vid save at least a few people from making the same mistake, so that definitely makes it worth it
If you watched the entire video, you would know thats what ended up happening. I lost the $$ Also, I did enough diligence to feel like I was buying a legit sight, and no amount of diligences gives someone the right to blatantly rip you off like this person clearly did and probably 99% of the other sellers do on flippa
This is one of my very first videos give me a break!! Would love to see what one of your very first TH-cam videos would look like and see how many people rip it apart 👌The video was meant to be informative so people do not make the same mistake I did. It's not a Hollywood production
Would I buy another flippa site? Find out here: th-cam.com/video/IYa3oy7wyqs/w-d-xo.html
Oh wow, I hope you didn't give them your id! Flippa used to be worthwhile but now they use a service that is shady to verify users. Flippa is not a financial money processor but they are demanding buyers and sellers upload selfie videos, selfie with govt id, and scan of selfie just buy or sell. The problem is is that the company they use sum and substance pretends to UK based but are a sneaky biz backed by some unsavory putin allies and really located in a money laundering place, cyprus. They won't explain that they do with the all the ids and videos.
So only use flippa if you can avoid uploading all that private info.
Flippa has no right to request this info , they're not paypal or escrow/dot/com which process the payments for domains and websites they list for sale.
I wasn't financial free until my 40’s and I’m still in my 40’s, bought my third house already, earn on a monthly through passive income, and got 4 out of 5 goals, just hope it encourages someone that it doesn’t matter if you don’t have any of them right now, you can start TODAY regardless your age INVEST and change your future! Investing in the financial market is a grand choice I made. Great video! Thanks for sharing!
Very inspiring! I love this.
I understand that tomorrow isn't promised to anyone, but investing today is hard for me now because I have no idea of how and where to invest in. I would be happy if you could advise me based on how you went about yours, as I am ready to go the passive income path.?
@@georgerobinson2021 I invest across the top markets but not by myself though. I follow the guidelines of *PRISCILLA DIANE AIVAZIAN* . you might have heard of her. I can correctly say she's worth her salt as an investment advisor as her diversification skills is top-notch, I say this because I see that in her results as my portfolio grows by averages of 20 to 3O% every month, unlike I can say for my IRA which has just been trudging along. my portfolio just mirrors what she places and not just on some particular industries of my choosing. she gave me that financial freedom I needed
@@raychristopher7797 That’s great, your investment advisor must be really good, I have seen testimonies of people using the help of investment advisors in making them more financially stable. Do you mind sharing more info on this person?
@@georgerobinson2021 look her up on the internet with her name. she's quite popular for her services as she was recently featured on
CNN. She can work with anyone irrespective of where you're located
@@raychristopher7797 I just looked up this person out of curiosity; surprisingly, she seems proficient. I thought this was just some overrated BS, I appreciate this.
i think the 1st mistake was . You have to ask yourself, who sells a web site generating that much money for that cheap a price. That is a red flag to me.
You're right, and that thought did cross my mind, but I was willing to take the chance and find out what would happen. We all make mistakes, and that is why I made the video, so others don't repeat them 👍
@@MichaelBordenaro I'm only saying it because I have made this mistake too.
@@majorlopez1992 That is the only way we learn sometimes, so all we can do is make sure we do learn
I also got ripped off. We bought a site for about 900 dollars. Before we bought the site the owner even showed us the sales. Which looked legit but don't think it was true. Same like you the traffic disappears when they turnover the site. Even if you tried to verify, they have a way of faking it but making it looked legit. Like what you said... lessoned learned!
That sucks, this is why I made the video so hopefully some people would see it before they get ripped off. Agreed, you can verify all you want but at the end of the day it can all be faked and I wouldn't buy another site off flippa. Cannot be trusted
Damn
any advice for me? I'd like to buy a small website and grow it, and am willing to put in hard work.
What questions or things should I do to mitigate the chance of any problems occurring other then what was mentioned in the gentleman's video? Thanks
Tbh, I'm not sire if this was a scam like you say it was.
You mentioned changing the theme immediately after getting the site and that's 100% going to affect your SEO and consequently your search rankings and traffic.
It's not correct to asume that a theme changes the appearance and nothing more.
It also could change the sites loading speed, content formatting, the user experience, functionality and meta data of the site.
Plus having too many custom features that dont mesh with the native funtionality of wordpress (or whatever platform the site is using) could affect your SEO.
The previous theme may have looked bad but could theoretically have been better if judges those metrics and that could have made a difference to your rankings.
Not knowing enough about the technical aspects of a website can hurt you in the long run and that's not the sellers fault.
Nonetheless i dont know anything about the seller or the previous work they did on the site so it could have been a scam and perhaps they faked the rankings and income info.
Exactly 💯, great point
Or what's more likely, the previous owner bought stuff with their own affiliate links and as soon as it was sold, stopped.
There's NO way impressions and visits would fall off a cliff right after a change of ownership
That's a sound theory, unless you made sure all previous SEO in the website moved to the new theme you perhaps deleted it by accident then google would not pick up on key words and hence much less traffic arrived.
Is it common for a site to sell for less then 5x it's claimed monthly income? That seems like a red flag to me.
Probably not but at the same time you don't always know why someone is selling and everything seemed to have a check out for the most part so I went for it. But looking back, you're right that should have been a red flag
I'm super glad he made this video because it's super informative and gives people a heads up and what to watch out for, but one warning he forgot to mention was that if something seems too good to be true, it likely is.
Buying $4800 worth of cash flow for $1200 is 0.25x when the standard is around 3x-4x. That's already a red flag. Why would somebody sell a steady stream of mostly passive income for that price?
hey, thanks for the great tips on flippa.I myself thought about doing business on flippa once. now I have an idea how it words thanks to your video.
Yes you have to be careful with flippa. Unfortunately there are a lot of scams on the site. Glad you could learn from the video!
Thanks, Michael, for sharing your experience. It will help a lot of us not to make the same mistakes. You lost some money, but we all learned a lesson. If you had not learned anything, that would be a real loss. Robert Kiyosaki said, "If it cost you money, it was cheap". My best wishes for your future endeavors.
Did the owner promise you future earning or just showed his past earnings?
Thanks for sharing ! I am a completely newbie so that kind of expericences on Flippa is so amazing and I'm sorry for your loss. Thanks so much :D
You're welcome! Learn from my mistakes, and that is a win in my book😉
@@MichaelBordenaro I have a store that I want to sell on flippa ..... it makes over 50K in a 50 day period and over 18K in profit .... I don't know how to use FLIPPA to sell it. Can you help me and i will pay you to do that.
@@omarmorshed7656 I don't really do that, but if you follow the instructions to input a listing, I'm sure you can get it up there and sold👌
Appreciate you sharing this.
Subbed!
Thanks for the sub!
Thanks for making this video. This is very helpful.
You’re very welcome glad it helped you👍
I am enjoying binge watching and liking the videos I missed ,. Thank you and thank Lizzie for all your hard work . 💐💐💐💐💐
I really appreciate you going back and watching my old content Eleanor it helps the channel a lot!
@@MichaelBordenaro your kindly welcome
We enjoyed all of them . ✨💕💐💐💐💐💐💐
Thank you Eleanor!💖 Happy Holidays to you and your family!🎄🎉☺️
Thank you so much for this life lesson! Really appreciate this.
Glad it was helpful! If it saved you $$, and a headache I am happy
Thank you for your insights!!
You're welcome Wendi!
One thing I noticed is that the traffic went up to 4,000 or so in the course of two months. That's very suspicious for a new site.
It's all water under the bridge now for me. This video serves as a warning for anyone else looking to do this
yep. Some gay sayed never to buy sites younger than one year and look for a relatively straight line in terms of traffic to ensure consistency and no bot traffic or inflated stuff
Sorry about that, so please how did you deliver/transfer the website to the buyer after selling it? Thank!
Well I didn't get into the transfer details, but it is the same for each transfer. Once the money has been placed in Flippa Escrow, then you can proceed to transfer the ownership of the domain to the buyer, and then give them a copy of the hosting files to transfer to their own host and then you're done!
@@MichaelBordenaro Thank you. 👍
@@MS-ic8lj You're welcome!
@@MichaelBordenaro 👍
Do you think all that traffic that it was getting was bots ?
I don't think so because I the report says it was mostly organic traffic from google, unless that was being faked. Which looking back, it probably was being faked somehow, because after I bought the site, it was getting nowhere near the amount of traffic promised. Probably because I wasn't paying the "SEO" guy. He probably had some sort of scam going on.
@@MichaelBordenaro Did you buy any more websites that worked for you from any other source? I mean from humanproofdesigns and if so how is it going? i am sure there will be people like me interested to know about that. thanks!
@@atifrehmanfarooqui3862 Since this video, I have not bought any other websites. I advertise human proof designs because it is a 100% U.S. Based legitimate company (unlike Flippa) and they build all the websites them selves and have it down to a formula and all the websites are setup for success from the get go. After that, I built the next site myself, but I wanted to build one from scratch. But if I were to buy one again, it would be from them so I know I am not getting scammed.
@@MichaelBordenaro Thanks man that was a lot of useful input !
@@atifrehmanfarooqui3862 You're welcome! If I can prevent one more person from getting scam, mission accomplished✌️
Thank you so much for sharing your experience and learnings. This video has been super helpful!
Did you say you changed the domain name of the website? Because that would affect your traffic.
No I changed the theme on the not the domain. Only the appearance of the website changed
@@MichaelBordenaro Oh, I didn't catch that. Well, don't be too hard on yourself. I subscribed to your channel if that's any consolation!
Thanks for the honest sharing of your experience.
You're welcome! Hope it helps you in your website buying journey 👌
Thanks for sharing your honest experience.
Absolutely! Hope it helps you 😊
Nice video.
Love from India 🇮🇳
Thank you!
Thank you for this! Very helpful
Thank you for sharing those!
You’re welcome Paula hope you learn from my mistakes 👌
Good video I learned a lot thanks for the good information
Just a quick question sir how to know if the app or website is good for many profits
You have to make sure the seller will give you access to Google analytics as well as somehow prove to you the website is making money. Otherwise most likely you will get burned just like I did in the video.
@@MichaelBordenaro ok sir thank you for a very understandable explaination much appreciated and also will you buy another website or apps again
CoVeR WkZ you’re welcome! Personally, I think I would probably only build one from scratch. The only way I would buy one again would be if I knew the owner of the site or the site has a good reputation.
dude the thing is that you didnt even do proper research before investing in the website so i am sorry for your loss but it clearly shows from your video that you didnt do any kind of research about buying the website and that is number 1# reason why u lost the money
At the time, I thought I did enough homework to verify the purchase, but we all learn from mistakes, and that's why I made the video, so people don't repeat my mistakes.
@@MichaelBordenaro true that's how we learn and keep moving forward so have you made any thing out of it by now or still making mistakes bro ?
@@affanmajid6325 I don't buy websites anymore. I only make them from scratch now. But if I ever did buy another one, it would be from human proof designs. I have a link for them in the description. They are a reputable, American company that builds all their own sites and stands behind them.
Thanks for sharing!
No problem
Also, the seller is making 400 bucks a month but is desperate for a quick 1200?
Yeah huge red flag
Flippa flipped him off.
thanks you for making this video because i was about to make the same mistake
Im so glad you saw it in time!!
@@MichaelBordenaro i know right! i was about to do it today.
Thank you very much for this super video I really appreciate it :)
You’re welcome!
You've got to understand SEO if you're going to get into buying sites.
Lesson learned
Whats Seo?
Why didn't you hire the SEO guy, if you could see that the traffic really was there when he worked on it. I don't understand why it has to be worked on constantly myself. Isn't it supposed to be set it and forget it, passive income, all that? But maybe you didn't want to throw good money after bad?
My thought was, this SEO guy was probably doing some sort of shady black hat tactics to get traffic to the site, and I must have been right. Because since I did not hire him, the traffic slowed way down and if he was doing good organic SEO, the work would have had a lasting effect for a while.
Could tell me the best place to buy website?
shakthi shakthi Hello there. Down below on the description he has the answer for that. Good luck on your purchase 🙌🙏💪
Yes she is right! I have a link in the description for human proof designs. They are professional niche websites already built for you from a reputable company. You won't get scammed there. Let me know how it goes!
Thats projected finances not actual finances, what do you mean ?
Very useful video. thanks
Awesome! Glad it helped you
1.5 speed FTW
Thank you for sharing
That website has a traffic of 29 searches per month now !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yep, compared to the almost 4000 per month it was supposed to have when I bought it.
@Die baltische Meeresgöttin Yes I was naive, and I probably even said something along those lines in the video. It's for everyone out there who has never bought a sight on Flippa. Hopefully they see this video before 👍
Dude.. if he doesnt work the traffic will go down for sure... competition is tough these days and u need to keep publishing new articles.
Seo guy and organic traffic? Dude plz dont buy any website ever again.. u dont understand how web works.
@@Gautamkumarofficial so tell us how please.it is important info.
Thank you sharing your honest experience….
Thanks for the info. Question. Did you ever try buying anything else from Flippa? Do you have any successful stories using that site ?
Any success up to this day ?
You mean getting the money back?
Have you or do you still invest and make profits n Flippa or have you stopped ?
@@lovewilliams5167 Oh no, I am done with Flippa. I feel like almost every single website and there is a scam and also the lack of Flippa's help and customer service through such a large and expensive transaction has definitely burned me for good. I think the biggest issue with flippa is that people who use the platform are mostly beginners but in reality you need to be a pretty seasoned person in buying and selling websites in order to use it effectively
@@MichaelBordenaro gotcha what platform do you use now? Also since that transaction how many more have you made ?
@@MichaelBordenaro or none ?
Never heard of flippa, and the rent is too damn high!
everyone buying from flippa blames themselves a lot
Wow. This didn't even happen to me and I'm pissed! I mean they Robed you legally. And I was actually researching flippa all morning.
Yep I got robbed. It was a tough lesson to learn, but hopefully it saved several others who saw this video from getting robbed.
In changing the theme you probably fucked up the entirety of the SEO work that had previously been done, fyi
I don’t understand how changing the theme could mess up the sites SEO. All the media-data remains the same and the post data etc. People change the theme of their websites all the time and it doesn’t hurt them
@@MichaelBordenaro people change theme yes but it's not like they click on a new theme and call it a day. The metadata of posts remains the same, yes, because posts are a general wordpress concept, but post metadata isn't even very important for SEO any more. Changing the theme of an website with SEO without knowing a lot about SEO is basically like using heavy machinery to rip out the engine from a car (just rip it out, don't even unscrew anything), then plopping in a new engine, and expecting the car to run.
Most themes nowadays have a bunch of information fields you can add that are unique to the theme. Are you sure all of that transferred? Are you sure your schema markup didn't get deleted? Are you sure your accessibility aria tags and image alt text stayed the same? Are you sure your page load speed and lighthouse scores didn't tank? Page load is hugely important for SEO. Are you sure the new theme had images optimized with source-sets for different sizes depending on device screen size? Are you sure that in changing the theme you didn't lose caching and gzip compression? Are you sure the new theme used semantic html under the hood to allow google to understand the content? Are you sure the same headings stayed and they had the same html elements (h1 vs h2)? Are you sure the new theme optimized the way javascript and CSS are loaded and run? Are you sure the new theme doesn't have a number of JS and CSS files that exceeds the maximum thread count the browser will allow a website to use? Are you sure fonts were being loaded properly in the new theme?
Outside of code specifics... did you even have any SEO plugins installed that would tell you how effective the website was for a given search term before and after the update? Did you even look at what the top search terms you were ranking for were?
Changing the theme for a website that's had a lot of grey hat SEO done to it is basically like a heart transplant dude, and you tried to do it the Mortal Kombat way.
@@jiggasnap Lots of good points, I'll give you that. Did I do all those things, of course not. But I still have my suspicions, that the site I bought, was getting traffic from an artificial source. There is no way to go back and prove that. However, the person who bought the site from me, has had it for 2 years, and hasn't been able to get it anywhere nnear the performance that was claimed when I purchased it, so that to me further confirms my suspicion, that I was duped.
@@MichaelBordenaro When you put it that way, I ask myself, is it more likely that the original seller just paid for fake clicks in a clickfarm, or is it more likely that they had highly effective SEO embedded in the theme choice, (which they somehow chose to sell for $2k while they could easily charge $5k a month to do that service for any company) and then a new SEO professional couldn't replicate the results? Occam's razor would hint that you're probably right, and the original seller was simply a scammer.
Either way, you do a good service by telling your listeners that it was a mistake not to get added to the analytics account. If you had done that you could have easily spotted all the fake clickfarm traffic coming from somewhere in Asia. Another thing that's valuable (which you don't mention explicitly but anyone reading between the lines can see) is that it pays to start small. Lots of websites out there selling for 500k+ and some of them are pretty clearly borderline scams.
It makes a lot of sense to start small with business acquisitions and learn lessons at the price of $2000 instead of paying the price of homelessness/bankruptcy.
@@jiggasnap Yep, at this point I'll never know but it seemed like the person I sold the site to, knew more than me about getting the site to do well and they couldn't so I'm leaning on the fact that it probably was a scam, otherwise they would have been charging more like you said.
In any case, I hope the video helps at least a few other people from getting scammed since there are so many of them out there.
Thank you.
You're welcome!
Aww sorry for that...but I'm sure you can find ways to make money. Maybe collaborate with cat vloggers/bloggers and split comissions while you write their articles? Send free cat food to subscribers? Put exclusive cat stuff to bring traffic. Idk have to hussle and look for ways to get $. If you put the work in you can do it💪💪
I actually sold the site many months ago and recouped some of the money. Even though I lost $1200, I’m glad I don’t own the site anymore
use a broker if you want to buy an existent business
You save us thanks.
You're welcome!
Ok
Thx a lot
No problem, hope the vid saved you $$$
@@MichaelBordenaro actually I was thinking to purchase an app , but wasn’t sure but yes I might do a deep research about it
@@S0METHING1986 Absolutely you should highly research it, good luck!
Hahahaha.......$400= $4......🤣🤣🤣😃
This is not how it works.. you sleep and wait for 400 dollars per month... this is not fairy tale.. you need to work on it so that traffic remains stable or increases. How can u sleep and just wait for money?
How it works is you are supposed to receive what you pay for. And if you don't, then it is a SCAM! Yes niche sites require work, but if a lot of the work is already done, then it should not be nearly as much work, and that is exactly what you are supposed to be paying for.
@@MichaelBordenaro I agree but how can you just add links and go to sleep? and wait for that $400 to come in...
Am not saying the site was not scam but being one of the sellers on Flippa myself, you attitude of doing nothing and expecting everything and calling Flippa bad is wrong.
Even though I used the word scam above, I don't think I guy or Flippa scammed you. You were the one who had no idea how to check and just clicked the buy button.
If someone is making $400 per month, why would he sell that site for $2000? Its almost 20x of what u r making..
And the one thing that pissed me the most was when you said "All the traffic is from google, all the traffic is organic, so what would an SEO guy do?"
Do you know what SEO is? If I don't do SEO on my site and it doesnt rank then how is Google going to send traffic to my site?
Amazon affiliate is a very competitive niche,, there's always new sites popping up and if you don't keep ur content updated or make new links, you will lose rankings and that is what happened to your site.
You basically lost ur search rankings because you left the site as it is and there was no one to do the SEO.
Second thing, you said that you changed the theme as you bought the site, that is a big no no SEO wise, theme changes affect SEO, the traffic do return after some time but if there is no one to see to that how will it come back?
And You tried to chargeback? Chargeback for what??? he didn't forcefully sold u the site. He even did Escrow method, u just got greedy by hoping to earn $400 per month by spending $2000 only and didn't check everything.
So its you who is at fault here. My listing is live right now as well and the people interested ask 1000 questions before they even show interest.
So basically, say that it was your first time doing Flippa and you fucked up. Don't call it a scam.
@@Gautamkumarofficial you might know more about website and SEO than me and that's fine. I never claimed to be an expert.
But if someone claims the site is earning money and getting all this traffic and then the moment I take over none of that actually happening it is a scam. There are no two ways about it. I have checked flippa many times since then and 99% of the website and there are scamming garbage.
Did I make some mistakes along the way yes. That's why I made the video so no one follows in my footsteps.And if you are a legitimate seller you should probably find a new platform to sell on to separate yourself from all the scam crap out there.
@@MichaelBordenaro You do have valid points and in a way it is a scam but the way he did it was not a scam.. And The organic and SEO guy part of yours was totally wrong.. Apart from that you did give some valid pointers and yeah Flippa is 90% people trying to offload their website to make quick bucks. I will try the site you recommend in your second Flippa related video. Thanks!
Gautam kumar looks like you were the same Scammer Seller who sold the website
This is a good mistake. We need to make mistakes and a lot of it otherwiese we will not improve. Important this there is he took immediate action. Others will calculate and calculate,,,do some more research and research and the bus have already left.
Yeah it was a learning experience for sure and I did try to stop the bleeding as quickly as possible. But from many of the other comments, seemed like this vid save at least a few people from making the same mistake, so that definitely makes it worth it
Can’t stand people who always do credit card disputes, you never did your due diligence. Take it on the chin and learn from it.
If you watched the entire video, you would know thats what ended up happening. I lost the $$ Also, I did enough diligence to feel like I was buying a legit sight, and no amount of diligences gives someone the right to blatantly rip you off like this person clearly did and probably 99% of the other sellers do on flippa
just talking is so boring sir. could you show something?
This is one of my very first videos give me a break!! Would love to see what one of your very first TH-cam videos would look like and see how many people rip it apart 👌The video was meant to be informative so people do not make the same mistake I did. It's not a Hollywood production
@@MichaelBordenaro Some of these people are weirdos lol. Thanks for the info, I found it very informative.