A couple of months ago I tried selling a website through Flippa.com. The sale never went through so here I am trying to sell it here. More about my auction experience below, but first, the site details.
Verdant Forums
http://verdantforums.com
Stats Etc.:
Vbulletin forums (license included in sale).
287 registered users – Threads: 423, Posts: 6,817
PageRank: 2
Indexed Pages: 2300+ (According to Yahoo site explorer)
Traffic: Server stats show a lot of traffic, but I now realize it’s spam bots trying to register. Real traffic – as measured by Google Analytics – is very low.
More about the forums:
VF is dormant, with posts coming in far and few between. It was gaining in popularity back in the day, when my partner Steve and myself tended to it. Other projects took us away from the forums and they have gradually dwindled into lack of activity.
Steve Snedeker is a professional landscaper and he was in charge content on the forums. You will find his writing there in the articles & tutorials section. Steve is a great guy to work with, and has already told me that he’ll be happy to work with a future buyer on creating more content and/or answering topics on the board.
Interested? Leave me a comment here.
The Auction Story:
Somehow, being new to Flippa I didn’t get some of their terminology. I managed to end the auction after 30 days without accepting any of the bids (which went up to $350). Embarrassing, really, as there were two interested buyers at that price, plus another one who contacted me later willing to raise.
Disclaimer: Before I go on, let me clarify that at no point did I ever do anything against Flippa’s TOS. When in doubt, I even contacted them and asked for clarifications. I strongly believe in abiding by a site’s TOS when you use their services.
Since it was a sheer technical error on my part that made me close the auction with no winner, I diligently went back to the highest bidder and explained what happened. To make a short story long, each one of the three bidders turned me down, for their own reasons, and the entire process took me several weeks (trying to give each one of them a fair chance of assessing their position, combined with my own lack of time and attention).
So, here’s your chance of grabbing a fully functional Vbulletin board! If you have any questions or are interested in buying, leave me a comment here.
I’m willing to consider any offer over $150. Under that and it simply isn’t worth my time dealing with the transfer. Feel free to re-post anywhere you like – Twitter, your blog, forums you frequent and thanks in advance!
{ 5 comments }
Selling the gardening forums through my blog post: http://bit.ly/6bi0X5 – pls RT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Twitter: websiteweekend
January 7, 2010 at 7:47 pm
This is really tempting, but my plate is hella full right now.
It’s a time thing, not a money thing.
Once you do sell, I might be willing to toss a couple of hours pro bono consulting to the new buyer to get it back up and running. 2100 pages of unique content is pretty darn good.
Dave Doolin´s last blog post ..No Blog Post Today. Busy. Don’t Feel Like Writing
Thank you – that is very kind of you to offer! I’ll do what I can to help too, but it’s always nice to have another mentor on a project.
I don’t have a green thumb and I don’t have any time either so I’m not a good candidate.
However, what may be helpful if you can also list how long the site has been indexed (usually within days of having content).
In addition, what you might want to do is find a way to bump the PR up a little and improve the Alexa ranking as well.
Good point on the site age. It was launched in July 2006, so about three and a half years.
That’s why I’m willing to sell it for such a low price, hoping a new owner can tend to it better.
I don’t have the time to put into increasing traffic, activity or PR. If I had, I’d be keeping the forums myself
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