Buying websites that are not for sale

[kmander]

This is definitely my preferred vehicle for finding sites to buy.

A site listed on Flippa is sold be someone who understands the site has value and has already attempted to realize its value. A site owned by Joe Blogs, created out of passion without any monetary motive is bound to give you a far greater ROI.

I bought my main cash cow by doing a search, emailing the owner, negotiating a price and then closing the deal - all within a week and without any other competing parties.

Finding these sites isn't that hard, just Google search keywords and analyse the top 20 results. I'm looking into building a tool to help manage this task. Would love to hear about automated ways people are tackling this.

[DomainMagnate]

Finding these sites isn't that hard, just Google search keywords and analyse the top 20 results. I'm looking into building a tool to help manage this task. Would love to hear about automated ways people are tackling this.

I did something similar, but the results were quite poor. Everyone wanted much more than the market revenue multiple rates for their sites. I may try this again though.
The main problem is if someone put in their passion and a lot of time in the site, they are not about to sell it cheap. However I think there are people who would be willing to sell cheap, just gotta be more creative in finding them heh, hit me up on aim if you wanna discuss some options

[hooperman]

The main problem is if someone put in their passion and a lot of time in the site, they are not about to sell it cheap.

I think it depends who you find. Some people I've approached seemed positively insulted that I wanted to take their pride and joy, and others seemed happy to let their sites go for what I found to be a reasonable price. I'm hooked on using this method at the moment, probably because the last two turned out to be very good investments.

I don't tend to target the high ranking sites though, so maybe that makes a difference.

[Clinton]

Finding these sites isn't that hard, just Google search keywords and analyse the top 20 results.

Curious that you should say that. My own experience is that it's very hard. Maybe we're looking in different markets/different keywords. Would be great if you could give us an example post and run a case study.

just gotta be more creative in finding them

And, trust me, they don't get more creative than kmander when it comes to this. He and I have had email chats in the past about his methods - he's a smart cookie

[kmander]

Thanks Clinton - a compliment from you means a lot

I perhaps downplayed the difficulty in the task. But I've done it successfully before and do believe it can be rise and repeated.

First, I would pick a niche - let's go with "optical illusions" (I love very trivial topics - I stay clear from anything tied to ecommerce). Plug that keyword into any keyword tool (Overture, AdWords or Wordtracker do nicely) and get a group of say 20 keywords for that topic. Google each one and visit the top 10 results for each. I was thinking that a tool here could help in building these clusters of keywords, keeping record of which sites you've checked and automatically discounting Wikipedia/top sites. Also, you could build a script to crawl results and report on the domain age, inbound links, if they're using any advertising solutions (you can scrape the HTML and look for footprints of AdSense, for example). You must be able to outsource some of burden.

There are definitely some other creative ways to find sites, such as using Dmoz or searching for old copyright placeholders which has been talked about it here. Will have to consider sharing some thoughts here

[Clinton]

I've told you before that you're wasted in your day job. I'll say it again.

[benitez17]

kmander, I think you might just have a knack for finding the right niches and approaching the owner in the right way. I have tried this approach a number of times, but at least 90% of the time, when I contact the owner, they immediately think that they have hit the lottery with their site, and insist that they will only sell for some absurd asking price. The other times, the owner is reasonable, but I have never been able to close one of these types of deals for one reason or another.

[Clinton]

Will have to consider sharing some thoughts here

Thought about combining your methods with services that warn of domains on the verge of being dropped?

[kmander]

Haven't really exlplored this to be honest - I'm mainly put off by the fact that it's a little too simple. I'm sure there are a bunch of others out there who've created scripts to analyse domains that are about to be dropped.

[Clinton]

They have. And that's what I'm talking about - lead generation and management via a combination of their API and your CRM. AFAIK, there is nobody doing that. Companies like domainbroadcasting cater for the domainers and aren't filtering on the metrics you're likely interested in. They're looking at PR, age of site etc., rather than when the site was last updated, PPC costs of the main keyword...