Buying failed template sites - a good opportunity?

[Clinton]

This follows from something benetiz17 said in a blog comment here:

If anything, the turnkey sellers benefit me, because I have bought dozens of failed sites for about $10 each that have backlinks, PR, aged domains, and traffic because the person I bought them from was sold a bill of goods by a template site buyer, they were unable to monetize them, and then gave up on the site.

I've never thought to do that!

I can, however, see it working. Is it worth maintaining a spreadsheet of people who've bought template sites in Flippa (extracted from the Flippa feedback etc) and contacting them in six months to a year? By that time most of them should have discovered that the site's not going to make money.

Sorry for giving your tip a wider audience, benetiz17

[benitez17]

This follows from something benetiz17 said in a blog comment here:

I've never thought to do that!

I can, however, see it working. Is it worth maintaining a spreadsheet of people who've bought template sites in Flippa (extracted from the Flippa feedback etc) and contacting them in six months to a year? By that time most of them should have discovered that the site's not going to make money.

Sorry for giving your tip a wider audience, benetiz17

Shhh!

Actually, I had already mentioned this to 3Six in an earlier thread, so I put it out there myself. There are so many sites out there that have been abandoned that a little competition isn't going to kill the market. I don't even actively track URLs of template sites sold or anything like that, since there are so many dead blogs and the like for sale on DP at any given time.

[meathead1234]

This is a solid technique and works well. As mentioned, DP is probably the easiest place to pick sites like this up. You can also get the odd one from random webmaster forums - but generally need to look through about 20 to find something decent.

Only issue if they have been previously sold on Flippa, is that if and when (assuming you are flipping) come to relist on Flippa it will show the previous auction - generally putting potential bidders off. If you want to keep and monetize the site, that's fine but generally speaking you'd be better off building something decent rather than a crummy template site.

[benitez17]

I don't flip them. I just dump some text links and/or banner ads on them and collect the revenue. Most of the time they pay for themselves in a few months.

[meathead1234]

Yeah - it's good as you get 2 options. I prefer to flip them right away to release cash to invest elsewhere. Keeping them also works (assuming you know what you're doing).