A common mistake that sellers on Flippa make is that once they have their site listed and on auction, they just sit back and wait for the buyers to come to them.

While this is one way of doing things, and it does work (if it didn’t then Flippa wouldn’t be running!) there is nothing to stop you as a seller in finding potential buyers for your auction.

You see, while Flippa is one of the best online marketplaces and is full of people who are looking to buy sites; this doesn’t mean that everyone who would be interested in your site is going to see it on there.

Anyway, here is a great way that you can be pro-active and attract potential buyers to your auction. It’s really easy to do and won’t take you much time.

What you need to do is advertise your auction to other site owners in your niche and from similar niches.

So if you had a site that was specifically centred on dog grooming, first you would look for other dog grooming sites (your sites competitors). Then you would look into the wider niche of dogs (i.e. dog products, dog care, etc) and then even possibly sites regarding cats and pets.

The reason for contacting these site owners to inform them of your sites sale is because these are the people who would benefit the most from buying it. It’s a lot easier to expand a business through buying an already existing site with traffic and revenue, rather than building one from scratch.

Once you know who you are contacting (which is simply just a case of Googling your niches keywords to make a list of potential sites) all you need to do is contact them. Searching for the contact information should be easy as most owners include this under the “about us” tab, but if not, search around the Terms of Conditions, Privacy Policy and/or Disclosure pages.

If you have no luck here, you can perform a WHOIS search. If their domain is publicly registered, you’ll get everything you need to contact the owner. Even if you get the contact information from their website, still perform a WHOIS search. From this, you’ll get technical and administrative info that you need for the next step.

Then all you need to do is send an email to the owner to tell them your site is up for auction. Bear in mind, you shouldn’t just cut and paste an email. To make it more effective, it is important to spend some time getting to know each owner’s website, so you can reference specifics. It will not only appeal to the owner, but it will also show them that you are a genuine business person who has a valuable site for auction. You want them to know that it is a legit proposal, and not spam.

By using the above technique you can attract some buyers to your auction who would actually be interested in your site.

Of course you could always try this technique before you put your site up for auction on Flippa and try to make a deal privately, but unless you know what you are doing (as well as an idea of how much your site actually is worth) you may be best of trying it first through Flippa.