Oh wow, I hope you didn't give them your id! Flippa used to be worthwhile but now they use a service that is shady to verify users. Flippa is not a financial money processor but they are demanding buyers and sellers upload selfie videos, selfie with govt id, and scan of selfie just buy or sell. The problem is is that the company they use sum and substance pretends to UK based but are a sneaky biz backed by some unsavory putin allies and really located in a money laundering place, cyprus. They won't explain that they do with the all the ids and videos. So only use flippa if you can avoid uploading all that private info. Flippa has no right to request this info , they're not paypal or escrow/dot/com which process the payments for domains and websites they list for sale.

I understand that tomorrow isn't promised to anyone, but investing today is hard for me now because I have no idea of how and where to invest in. I would be happy if you could advise me based on how you went about yours, as I am ready to go the passive income path.?

@@georgerobinson2021 I invest across the top markets but not by myself though. I follow the guidelines of *PRISCILLA DIANE AIVAZIAN* . you might have heard of her. I can correctly say she's worth her salt as an investment advisor as her diversification skills is top-notch, I say this because I see that in her results as my portfolio grows by averages of 20 to 3O% every month, unlike I can say for my IRA which has just been trudging along. my portfolio just mirrors what she places and not just on some particular industries of my choosing. she gave me that financial freedom I needed

@@raychristopher7797 That’s great, your investment advisor must be really good, I have seen testimonies of people using the help of investment advisors in making them more financially stable. Do you mind sharing more info on this person?

@@georgerobinson2021 look her up on the internet with her name. she's quite popular for her services as she was recently featured on CNN. She can work with anyone irrespective of where you're located

@@raychristopher7797 I just looked up this person out of curiosity; surprisingly, she seems proficient. I thought this was just some overrated BS, I appreciate this.

That sucks, this is why I made the video so hopefully some people would see it before they get ripped off. Agreed, you can verify all you want but at the end of the day it can all be faked and I wouldn't buy another site off flippa. Cannot be trusted

Damn

any advice for me? I'd like to buy a small website and grow it, and am willing to put in hard work. What questions or things should I do to mitigate the chance of any problems occurring other then what was mentioned in the gentleman's video? Thanks

Exactly 💯, great point

You're right, and that thought did cross my mind, but I was willing to take the chance and find out what would happen. We all make mistakes, and that is why I made the video, so others don't repeat them 👍

@@MichaelBordenaro I'm only saying it because I have made this mistake too.

@@majorlopez1992 That is the only way we learn sometimes, so all we can do is make sure we do learn

Yes you have to be careful with flippa. Unfortunately there are a lot of scams on the site. Glad you could learn from the video!

You're welcome! Learn from my mistakes, and that is a win in my book😉

@@MichaelBordenaro I have a store that I want to sell on flippa ..... it makes over 50K in a 50 day period and over 18K in profit .... I don't know how to use FLIPPA to sell it. Can you help me and i will pay you to do that.

@@omarmorshed7656 I don't really do that, but if you follow the instructions to input a listing, I'm sure you can get it up there and sold👌

I really appreciate you going back and watching my old content Eleanor it helps the channel a lot!

@@MichaelBordenaro your kindly welcome We enjoyed all of them . ✨💕💐💐💐💐💐💐

Thank you Eleanor!💖 Happy Holidays to you and your family!🎄🎉☺️

Probably not but at the same time you don't always know why someone is selling and everything seemed to have a check out for the most part so I went for it. But looking back, you're right that should have been a red flag

I'm super glad he made this video because it's super informative and gives people a heads up and what to watch out for, but one warning he forgot to mention was that if something seems too good to be true, it likely is. Buying $4800 worth of cash flow for $1200 is 0.25x when the standard is around 3x-4x. That's already a red flag. Why would somebody sell a steady stream of mostly passive income for that price?

Thanks for the sub!

Glad it was helpful! If it saved you $$, and a headache I am happy

You’re very welcome glad it helped you👍

You're welcome Wendi!

You're welcome! Hope it helps you in your website buying journey 👌

Absolutely! Hope it helps you 😊

You’re welcome Paula hope you learn from my mistakes 👌

You’re welcome!

No problem

Awesome! Glad it helped you

Im so glad you saw it in time!!

@@MichaelBordenaro i know right! i was about to do it today.

Thank you!

Well I didn't get into the transfer details, but it is the same for each transfer. Once the money has been placed in Flippa Escrow, then you can proceed to transfer the ownership of the domain to the buyer, and then give them a copy of the hosting files to transfer to their own host and then you're done!

@@MichaelBordenaro Thank you. 👍

@@MS-ic8lj You're welcome!

@@MichaelBordenaro 👍

You're welcome!

No I changed the theme on the not the domain. Only the appearance of the website changed

@@MichaelBordenaro Oh, I didn't catch that. Well, don't be too hard on yourself. I subscribed to your channel if that's any consolation!

Yep I got robbed. It was a tough lesson to learn, but hopefully it saved several others who saw this video from getting robbed.

You have to make sure the seller will give you access to Google analytics as well as somehow prove to you the website is making money. Otherwise most likely you will get burned just like I did in the video.

@@MichaelBordenaro ok sir thank you for a very understandable explaination much appreciated and also will you buy another website or apps again

CoVeR WkZ you’re welcome! Personally, I think I would probably only build one from scratch. The only way I would buy one again would be if I knew the owner of the site or the site has a good reputation.

It's all water under the bridge now for me. This video serves as a warning for anyone else looking to do this

yep. Some gay sayed never to buy sites younger than one year and look for a relatively straight line in terms of traffic to ensure consistency and no bot traffic or inflated stuff

Lesson learned

Whats Seo?

You're welcome!

My thought was, this SEO guy was probably doing some sort of shady black hat tactics to get traffic to the site, and I must have been right. Because since I did not hire him, the traffic slowed way down and if he was doing good organic SEO, the work would have had a lasting effect for a while.

No problem, hope the vid saved you $$$

@@MichaelBordenaro actually I was thinking to purchase an app , but wasn’t sure but yes I might do a deep research about it

@@S0METHING1986 Absolutely you should highly research it, good luck!

I don't think so because I the report says it was mostly organic traffic from google, unless that was being faked. Which looking back, it probably was being faked somehow, because after I bought the site, it was getting nowhere near the amount of traffic promised. Probably because I wasn't paying the "SEO" guy. He probably had some sort of scam going on.

@@MichaelBordenaro Did you buy any more websites that worked for you from any other source? I mean from humanproofdesigns and if so how is it going? i am sure there will be people like me interested to know about that. thanks!

@@atifrehmanfarooqui3862 Since this video, I have not bought any other websites. I advertise human proof designs because it is a 100% U.S. Based legitimate company (unlike Flippa) and they build all the websites them selves and have it down to a formula and all the websites are setup for success from the get go. After that, I built the next site myself, but I wanted to build one from scratch. But if I were to buy one again, it would be from them so I know I am not getting scammed.

@@MichaelBordenaro Thanks man that was a lot of useful input !

@@atifrehmanfarooqui3862 You're welcome! If I can prevent one more person from getting scam, mission accomplished✌️

shakthi shakthi Hello there. Down below on the description he has the answer for that. Good luck on your purchase 🙌🙏💪

Yes she is right! I have a link in the description for human proof designs. They are professional niche websites already built for you from a reputable company. You won't get scammed there. Let me know how it goes!

At the time, I thought I did enough homework to verify the purchase, but we all learn from mistakes, and that's why I made the video, so people don't repeat my mistakes.

@@MichaelBordenaro true that's how we learn and keep moving forward so have you made any thing out of it by now or still making mistakes bro ?

@@affanmajid6325 I don't buy websites anymore. I only make them from scratch now. But if I ever did buy another one, it would be from human proof designs. I have a link for them in the description. They are a reputable, American company that builds all their own sites and stands behind them.

I actually sold the site many months ago and recouped some of the money. Even though I lost $1200, I’m glad I don’t own the site anymore

Yep, compared to the almost 4000 per month it was supposed to have when I bought it.

@Die baltische Meeresgöttin Yes I was naive, and I probably even said something along those lines in the video. It's for everyone out there who has never bought a sight on Flippa. Hopefully they see this video before 👍

Dude.. if he doesnt work the traffic will go down for sure... competition is tough these days and u need to keep publishing new articles.

Seo guy and organic traffic? Dude plz dont buy any website ever again.. u dont understand how web works.

@@Gautamkumarofficial so tell us how please.it is important info.

Yeah it was a learning experience for sure and I did try to stop the bleeding as quickly as possible. But from many of the other comments, seemed like this vid save at least a few people from making the same mistake, so that definitely makes it worth it

You mean getting the money back?

Have you or do you still invest and make profits n Flippa or have you stopped ?

@@lovewilliams5167 Oh no, I am done with Flippa. I feel like almost every single website and there is a scam and also the lack of Flippa's help and customer service through such a large and expensive transaction has definitely burned me for good. I think the biggest issue with flippa is that people who use the platform are mostly beginners but in reality you need to be a pretty seasoned person in buying and selling websites in order to use it effectively

@@MichaelBordenaro gotcha what platform do you use now? Also since that transaction how many more have you made ?

@@MichaelBordenaro or none ?

I don’t understand how changing the theme could mess up the sites SEO. All the media-data remains the same and the post data etc. People change the theme of their websites all the time and it doesn’t hurt them

​@@MichaelBordenaro people change theme yes but it's not like they click on a new theme and call it a day. The metadata of posts remains the same, yes, because posts are a general wordpress concept, but post metadata isn't even very important for SEO any more. Changing the theme of an website with SEO without knowing a lot about SEO is basically like using heavy machinery to rip out the engine from a car (just rip it out, don't even unscrew anything), then plopping in a new engine, and expecting the car to run. Most themes nowadays have a bunch of information fields you can add that are unique to the theme. Are you sure all of that transferred? Are you sure your schema markup didn't get deleted? Are you sure your accessibility aria tags and image alt text stayed the same? Are you sure your page load speed and lighthouse scores didn't tank? Page load is hugely important for SEO. Are you sure the new theme had images optimized with source-sets for different sizes depending on device screen size? Are you sure that in changing the theme you didn't lose caching and gzip compression? Are you sure the new theme used semantic html under the hood to allow google to understand the content? Are you sure the same headings stayed and they had the same html elements (h1 vs h2)? Are you sure the new theme optimized the way javascript and CSS are loaded and run? Are you sure the new theme doesn't have a number of JS and CSS files that exceeds the maximum thread count the browser will allow a website to use? Are you sure fonts were being loaded properly in the new theme? Outside of code specifics... did you even have any SEO plugins installed that would tell you how effective the website was for a given search term before and after the update? Did you even look at what the top search terms you were ranking for were? Changing the theme for a website that's had a lot of grey hat SEO done to it is basically like a heart transplant dude, and you tried to do it the Mortal Kombat way.

@@jiggasnap Lots of good points, I'll give you that. Did I do all those things, of course not. But I still have my suspicions, that the site I bought, was getting traffic from an artificial source. There is no way to go back and prove that. However, the person who bought the site from me, has had it for 2 years, and hasn't been able to get it anywhere nnear the performance that was claimed when I purchased it, so that to me further confirms my suspicion, that I was duped.

@@MichaelBordenaro When you put it that way, I ask myself, is it more likely that the original seller just paid for fake clicks in a clickfarm, or is it more likely that they had highly effective SEO embedded in the theme choice, (which they somehow chose to sell for $2k while they could easily charge $5k a month to do that service for any company) and then a new SEO professional couldn't replicate the results? Occam's razor would hint that you're probably right, and the original seller was simply a scammer. Either way, you do a good service by telling your listeners that it was a mistake not to get added to the analytics account. If you had done that you could have easily spotted all the fake clickfarm traffic coming from somewhere in Asia. Another thing that's valuable (which you don't mention explicitly but anyone reading between the lines can see) is that it pays to start small. Lots of websites out there selling for 500k+ and some of them are pretty clearly borderline scams. It makes a lot of sense to start small with business acquisitions and learn lessons at the price of $2000 instead of paying the price of homelessness/bankruptcy.

@@jiggasnap Yep, at this point I'll never know but it seemed like the person I sold the site to, knew more than me about getting the site to do well and they couldn't so I'm leaning on the fact that it probably was a scam, otherwise they would have been charging more like you said. In any case, I hope the video helps at least a few other people from getting scammed since there are so many of them out there.

How it works is you are supposed to receive what you pay for. And if you don't, then it is a SCAM! Yes niche sites require work, but if a lot of the work is already done, then it should not be nearly as much work, and that is exactly what you are supposed to be paying for.

@@MichaelBordenaro I agree but how can you just add links and go to sleep? and wait for that $400 to come in... Am not saying the site was not scam but being one of the sellers on Flippa myself, you attitude of doing nothing and expecting everything and calling Flippa bad is wrong. Even though I used the word scam above, I don't think I guy or Flippa scammed you. You were the one who had no idea how to check and just clicked the buy button. If someone is making $400 per month, why would he sell that site for $2000? Its almost 20x of what u r making.. And the one thing that pissed me the most was when you said "All the traffic is from google, all the traffic is organic, so what would an SEO guy do?" Do you know what SEO is? If I don't do SEO on my site and it doesnt rank then how is Google going to send traffic to my site? Amazon affiliate is a very competitive niche,, there's always new sites popping up and if you don't keep ur content updated or make new links, you will lose rankings and that is what happened to your site. You basically lost ur search rankings because you left the site as it is and there was no one to do the SEO. Second thing, you said that you changed the theme as you bought the site, that is a big no no SEO wise, theme changes affect SEO, the traffic do return after some time but if there is no one to see to that how will it come back? And You tried to chargeback? Chargeback for what??? he didn't forcefully sold u the site. He even did Escrow method, u just got greedy by hoping to earn $400 per month by spending $2000 only and didn't check everything. So its you who is at fault here. My listing is live right now as well and the people interested ask 1000 questions before they even show interest. So basically, say that it was your first time doing Flippa and you fucked up. Don't call it a scam.

@@Gautamkumarofficial you might know more about website and SEO than me and that's fine. I never claimed to be an expert. But if someone claims the site is earning money and getting all this traffic and then the moment I take over none of that actually happening it is a scam. There are no two ways about it. I have checked flippa many times since then and 99% of the website and there are scamming garbage. Did I make some mistakes along the way yes. That's why I made the video so no one follows in my footsteps.And if you are a legitimate seller you should probably find a new platform to sell on to separate yourself from all the scam crap out there.

@@MichaelBordenaro You do have valid points and in a way it is a scam but the way he did it was not a scam.. And The organic and SEO guy part of yours was totally wrong.. Apart from that you did give some valid pointers and yeah Flippa is 90% people trying to offload their website to make quick bucks. I will try the site you recommend in your second Flippa related video. Thanks!

Gautam kumar looks like you were the same Scammer Seller who sold the website

If you watched the entire video, you would know thats what ended up happening. I lost the $$ Also, I did enough diligence to feel like I was buying a legit sight, and no amount of diligences gives someone the right to blatantly rip you off like this person clearly did and probably 99% of the other sellers do on flippa

This is one of my very first videos give me a break!! Would love to see what one of your very first KZfaq videos would look like and see how many people rip it apart 👌The video was meant to be informative so people do not make the same mistake I did. It's not a Hollywood production

@@MichaelBordenaro Some of these people are weirdos lol. Thanks for the info, I found it very informative.