Once A Flipper Always A Flipper - My Official Goodbye

Once A Flipper Always A Flipper – My Official Goodbye

Travis Van Slooten Well, my friends, it’s time to make the official announcement. I officially sold FlipWebsites.com a couple weeks ago on Flippa. It was a very tough decision to make because I really enjoyed maintaining this blog. The reason I decided to sell was because my other websites demanded my attention and I landed a fairly large offline gig.

I knew there was no way I could maintain the quality of this blog with all the other things that I needed to attend to. My choice was either post once or twice every couple weeks or let it die on the vine. I didn’t like either option so I felt it was best to pass the torch and let someone else take over the blog and take it to the next level. Enter Eppie Vojt…

Eppie is the new owner of FlipWebsites.com. He was a real professional during the deal and he made the transition incredibly smooth and seamless. I’ll bet very few of you even knew that this blog was sold. My “secrecy” about the sale of this blog was by design. I wanted as little interruption for you as possible during the sale. I think Eppie and I achieved that!

I know there is always a concern about a blog when someone new takes over but I assure you this blog is in good hands. Eppie is an experienced website flipper who has a lot of plans for FlipWebsites. I’ll let him share those with you but suffice it to say, you’ll see just as much quality content as I was publishing – if not more!

What I was most thrilled about when I sold this blog to Eppie was that he really seemed to know his stuff about this business and he assured me he would “take good care of the blog.” That was important to me because I put a lot of work and effort into this baby and I know this blog has a loyal following among flippers. I didn’t want the new owner to let them down – and I’m confident Eppie won’t.

I want to personally thank you all for the support I got while this blog was under my ownership. It was a blast and I hope I was able to help you along the way with your website flipping endeavors. Take care and I wish you all the best!

Travis Van Slooten

** Editor’s Note: I want to thank Travis for the great job he did in building up this site as an industry authority and assure our readers that many of the features you’ve come to know and love will continue to exist on the site. Market Snapshots aren’t going anywhere, and you’re still going to get tons of tips on how to get the most out of your flips.

I’ve got a few exciting things planned for the next 2 weeks, including a series called “Anatomy of a 5-figure flip,” which documents a recent $10,000 flip I made via Flippa. The first post in this series goes live today.

- Eppie

About Travis Van Slooten

Travis is an affiliate marketer and website flipper who ran FlipWebsites.com until the Fall of 2010.

View all posts by Travis | Visit Author's Website

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Erik

Travis – It was great to get to know you, and I wish you the best!
Pingback: FlipWebsites.com Gets a Facelift – Logo and Website Redesign | Flip Websites
http://www.homebrewerypro.com damo

Good luck on your new endeavours Travis, I have been following your blog for a while now and have found it extremely helpful and inspiring.

Congrats Eppie on becoming the new owner; as many others have already said it looks like the site is in good hands, due in no small part to the fact that you have genuine interest and experience in the field of flipping.

I wish you both every success
Damo
http://peterbeattie.com Peter Beattie

Welcome Eppie! I can tell (and I’m sure others can too) you know your stuff by the 2 emails you’ve already sent out. Glad to see that Travis was able to find someone like you.

Looking forward to what you bring to the site!

-Peter

http://www.flipwebsites.com eppie

@Peter – Thanks a million for the warm welcome (and the vote of confidence based on the messages I’ve sent out so far). It means a lot considering the source. I love what you’re doing in local flipping and offline marketing — very smart stuff. I love building (and flipping) sites that deliver customers to real local businesses. It’s both financially and personally rewarding.

http://www.howtowriteebooktips.com/ WriteEbooks

Haven’t “flipped” any websites yet, but always found your posts interesting. Good luck with the new venture and looking forward to learning from Eppie!
http://www.laptopwizard.net kevin

Travis you will be missed thanks for all the info you gave us

Kevin
http://www.mike-nagle.com Mike Nagle

Hello,

I was site flipping since the beginning of the year and it was going good and was also a lot of fun. I was selling start up sites and that died out for me around last may or june, I forget. I just went to flippa because I had discovered some users that I was following on flippa never stopped selling start ups at all and were doing pretty well actually. So I went to flippa and saw this site listed there. If I had the money at the time I may have bought it as the information is gold here.

I am glad it is going to continue. As a site flipper I found this site invaluable.

Thanks,
Mike Nagle

http://experienced-people.net/forums/entry.php/40-10-Questions-to-Ask-a-Website-Broker-Before-Signing-Up Clinton

>>If I had the money at the time I may have bought it as the information is gold here.
Mike, that seems a strange reason to buy a site. The “gold” information is available whether you buy the site or not.

Surely the reason for buying a site is because you can do something useful with it like improving it/increasing revenue? If, by your own admission, flipping is not working for you, maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t buy a site that needs to constantly churn out information on how to make flipping work.

http://www.g34media.com Missy

You will be missed Travis. Hopefully we can follow you somewhere else as well. I have you on my Twitter, so you’re not too far. lol.

Welcome Eppie.
http://www.freestuff4free.com/ david @ FreeStuff4Free

Very sad to see you go Travis. I did note that the site was for sale and was wondering when the transfer was going to be complete.

Congratulations and all the best for the future. Hope to see you from time to time on the site.
http://allcoverletters.com/ Robbie

Congrats on the sale! Good to see the site is transferred to another experienced flipper. can’t wait to read more articles
Travis

Thanks James and Clinton. It was a great ride while it lasted. I’m thrilled to death with the challenges ahead of me and it’s great to see that Eppie is following through on his promise to me that he’ll keep up the quality of this blog. His first post is already killer!

Thanks,

Travis
James

Happy trails Travis! You got the wheels turning on this blog, which is the hardest part. I look forward to seeing how this continues to develop.
http://experienced-people.net/ Clinton

Sorry to see you go, Travis, but you did the right thing.

And all the best to Eppie Vojt. If he does delivery on his promises I’ll continue to drop by and comment.

http://www.flipwebsites.com eppie

Clinton — thanks for the vote of confidence. Your contributions as a commenter to this site are very valuable. I’m glad to hear you’re willing to stick with me through the transition. I’ll try my best to not disappoint.

http://www.65e.net Eddie

Hello,

Congrats on the sale Eppie, my question is what is the best software (if there is such a thing) for building sites quickly to flip later? I mostly build with wordpress, not sure if there is or not, just wanted to get your opinion.

Thanks

http://www.flipwebsites.com eppie

Eddie — thanks for the congratulations. I’m very excited to take over this site.

As for your question, WordPress is a great (and my preferred) platform for quick flips for five main reasons:

1) It’s super fast to setup, so you can spend less time making the site work (which is a low-value activity) and more time creating content and generating traffic (activities from which you’re more likely to get a higher return).

2) It’s ubiquitous. WordPress is everywhere and most of your potential buyers already have comfort using it. You don’t have to sell them on the platform — just the site’s fundamentals (traffic, revenue, etc). If you build on an unknown (possibly difficult to use platform), you run the risk of scaring off buyers. When pitching your site, time spent to maintain the site is a contributing factor to the price people will pay. If there’s no learning curve, you eliminate a negative pricing factor.

3) There’s an abundance of cheap premium themes available. You can have a great, professional looking design at a fraction of the cost for a custom-built solution.

4) There are a ton of plugins available to extend site functionality. Again, this allows you to spend less time on low-value activity and more time improving your site’s fundamentals.

5) It’s free.

For a blog or small informational site, I think WordPress can’t be beat.

A quick aside — I see a lot of people use WordPress with other software (tied together with some duct tape and bubble gum) when building web applications. I personally think it’s a misuse of the software, but some people manage to get by with it. For any larger web apps, I highly recommend Zend Framework (or another MVC framework).