I must admit it's becoming increasingly difficult to find quality websites to buy at places like Flippa. However, finding a good site takes time and patience. Prior to my moving online, I bought offline businesses and it was normal to spend days/weeks/months before finding a "potential" buy.
It's important to be prepared. On occasion I lost a good deal because I just wasn't fast enough on my feet. Here's the process:
1. Get your finances ready and maintain proof of your finances
2. Register with various business brokers and be honest with them about the extent to which you will self-finance and the extent to which you'll need seller financing
3. Register on places like businessesforsale and other listing sites
4. Be prepared for a lot of junk, a lot of sifting and a lot of due diligence that leads to abandoning the purchase - wasted time.
Online is exactly the same. But you can be even more proactive. Do things that other buyers aren't doing.
1. Post a Want To Buy ad in the main site selling forums.
2. Think companies rather than the small change hobby sites typical in Flippa. Where would a registered company look to list? They'd contact their accountant, their lawyer, their financial advisor, their local government business advisor - or a broker. They may not know about online auction sites. Exploit that.
3. Sign up to bankruptcy notices. The London Gazette is one example. Find the official (or unofficial) insolvency listings in your area/country. Remember that you don't have to be restricted to a country. If a business in Mongolia is going bust and one of their assets is a PR8 website with a 10K daily visitor count put in an offer to the Official Receiver. He may be willing to let it go for a few hundred dollars!
4. Use your ingenuity. If you're spending hundreds of hours in looking for the right business, would it be worth offering brokers a $xxx reward to do the filtering and find you the right website?
5. If you're spending hundreds of hours looking for the right business would it be worth throwing $xxx at a good PPC campaign and setting up a form that filters the quality leads from the useless ones?
Think out of the box.
For example, I've got deals with various valuation sites (in addition to the one I own). I also have lots of deals with brokers. A lot of good leads come out of those.
The main ways buyers find websites and the locations where you can find quality sites to buy are listed here.
Check out related sites that you don't normally go to. My friend, Richard Parker, maintains a blog at one of the biggest business for sale sites in the US. It's a good one to start with. They'll generate ideas, get you thinking differently, put a different perspective on things.
Here's one tip I've spoken about elsewhere. What are YOUR suggestions for finding good sites? Start a new thread. I'll pick out your best suggestions and update this post/sticky.
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