FlipSquare Blog - Your guide to buying and selling websites & domains

Some people make a living telling others how easy it is to start, market, and run a web site profitably. For the most part, that's just not true. Finding an unsaturated market to profit in is hard enough and even if you succeed at that, you have months if not years of hard work ahead of you in the way of marketing, SEO, and site development before you have anything to write home to mom about. If you're up to the challenge of starting from scratch, more power to you. But if you're looking for a way to quickly get involved with online business, you have an option:

So I’ve come up on my 1 year anniversary of domain name investing. I’m by no means a pro, full time domainer nor extremely successful. After 1 year I’m probably $900 in the hole but I’ve learned a lot and see that there’s money to be made if you’re smart. So hopefully this short article will help you avoid some basic mistakes that I’ve made. To give you some ideas of where I’m at as a domainer here some rounded portfolio stats.

My Portfolio Stats:

Domains: 375
Earned from sales or parking: $1,100
Earned from developing: $400
Spent: $2,500

Total: -$900

So here is my list of I-wish-knew-this-before mistakes …

When buying an e-commerce site many times the site's owner will list all of the profit whilst holding back information about the number of refunds that have been issued. This is especially apparent with informational products like eBooks.

Always request full revenue screen shots from the seller. It's fine if they cross out the identifiable customer information, but if you see entire lines missing from their screen shots, more often than not that's a refund entry.

Now, that being said, a refund here and there is normal, in fact it's probably better to see them sporadically than not at all. But before you invest in a site you need to dial in an accurate rate of refund. Without it you're bottom line is up in the air.