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I have had a niche site that was building right before the pandemic started and into a couple months ago slowly adding content but personally I had reached the end of my time availability to manage and grow it properly how it deserved.
So I set to looking for how I could sell the site, I wanted to use a service that would help me not be inundated with requests for assistance as I have plenty of sites that need my time and attention in addition to my family and my day job.
I looked into services like Flippa (seemed questionable and full of many low quality sites), Empire Flippers (need to be much bigger), then decided to look into Motion Invest as I have been following Spencer and his NP4 site for a while and figured it could be a viable option.
Who Are Motion Invest
The founders of Motion Invest have created a marketplace or auction house that offers customers the opportunity to buy along with sell low, minimum entry websites making anywhere between $50 – $2000 per month.
Overall this will give you a unique opportunity to purchase true valuated sites from as low as $1000 on the Motion Invest platform versus other sites.
This is a huge diversion from the way sites like Flippa, this is due to the due diligence of all websites listed for sale on Motion Invest are actually verified by them so you won’t see any shady websites for sale with questionable traffic and earnings.
What Made Me Choose Motion Invest
For someone who has never sold a website before finding someone who could help me sell a site without making me feel like my questions were silly or stupid was my primary need. After this more of my wants were to be more hands off in a transition and to not deal with what I saw in Facebook Groups with just spammy requests for domains.
Ease of Income Evaluation
The team at Motion Invest are very helpful in telling you exactly what they need for your income proof to help them in building the valuation for the listing, wanting videos of you actively interacting with the affiliate programs proving that you have legitimate income and not using faked screenshots.
Simplicity In Listing
There is only a couple of options to list your site: Dutch auction (which is what I went with) and the option to sell directly to them.
Quick Sales Not Spam Requests
When looking around there are plenty of ways you can look to sell your website, from Flippa to Facebook Groups and onto big time players in the space like Empire Flippers.
What I wanted was to cut down on the time spend which Facebook Groups looked to be due to continual requests for information based on listings, Flippa is just a place with many lower quality sites that could bring down the impression of your own.
Motion Invests platform is to list and email out to all their members and this hits on a very unique set of potential buyers with income that will allow them to purchase fast and easy.
Little Time Necessary in Support of Migration
They manage the turnover for you on your behalf and only reach out when there are specific questions or needs that they are unable to facilitate, if you are on a stock theme like GeneratePress and running Affiliate with Amazon and Ads this should amount to nearly no interaction on your part!
My Personal Experience Selling My Site With Motion Invest
There is always people reviewing services that they have not personally used, it has nearly become the “norm” in online niche websites to sell anything, anytime, regardless of experience. Instead it is a focus on purely “getting that commission” which drives me silly.
That’s not to say I won’t add affiliate offers where they make sense and with products I actually use on my websites, Motion Invest is the same, I wouldn’t put anything on my site that speaks to them without actually going through the process myself, dishonesty sucks.
This site that I was looking to sell off presented a perfect opportunity for me to really go through the process from valuation to sale and really present a boots on the ground view of the process and why it is very nice for techie and a non-techie alike.
Submitting My Site For Valuation
This is the initial process to provide your website information to them along with the sources of income, traffic, and details to let them begin to provide a high level valuation of your website.
For me this process was pretty simple and took me less than 15 minutes to complete and it included Amazon, Ezoic, and some smaller affiliate programs that provided my site revenue.
Selling to Motion Invest or 3rd Party
There is two options presented when you look to list on their site, selling directly to them with no commission but also at a much lower sales price or to list your domain in their Dutch auction.
A dutch auction means it will list at a specific price and then decline by a set amount each day afterwards until it bottoms out at another value, speaking from my side this wasn’t even a thing as it sold within hours of listing.
While I was anxious, what first time seller wouldn’t be right, it was all handled exceedingly well by the staff over at Motion Invest as I was able to speak with Eric Dance on the process to understand it better and put me more at ease!
Selling Agreement and Listing
This is pretty straight forward, it is just an agreement in place to ensure you don’t try to bounce out of the listing afterwards and has some limitations to when and where you could attempt to sell your site at a later time.
To ensure a nice set up for a buyer from their marketplace, I had to sign an agreement and additionally answer a few questions about my site to help answer those most common questions a potential buyer would ask which included things like:
- What to Do to Grow The Site
- Time Spent Working On it Currently
- Any Additional Tools (I gave a FB group along with my list of article ideas)
- Basically helpful stuff to get the new owner off on the right footing.
Incredibly simple online form to fill out and took very little to get in place and the listing went out on their next email to the subscribers!
Accepting an Offer and Transfer Process
This again was facilitated easily with online forms, then once the completed agreement at this point you get in touch to begin setting up the domain transfer after creating and transferring the site backup that allows them to install on the new owners hosting.
Migrating the Site
All I had to do was to zip up the site and deliver it to the support team, then unlock the domain and prepare it for the transfer to the new owner, most of this time was in waiting for the domain to transfer and hosting to be configured.
They then help the purchaser install WordPress and apply the backup and once this is done I was able to remove the site from my hosting.
They also worked with the new site owner to migrate the domain from my Ezoic account to their account which removed it from my active site list, so if you want to collect data on performance before make sure to do this prior to this cut over.
Discussions With Migration Team About Site
They have people who will assist the new owner in a transition from your hosting to theirs which will remove you from being necessary in almost all issues, for myself I had to help out a bit as my website used the Oxygen Builder and when transferred you have some specific processes to sign shortcodes.
Outside of this blip I had a few email conversations about the affiliate accounts and transitioning where possible to the new owner, and in some cases they just got a new account with the affiliate as it was easier.
As a note, for these conversations with their team I had to install Skype as a chat relay back and forth so be aware that you can set that up beforehand in case communications are needed.
Payment Timeframe
I chose to be wired the funds which due to a holiday had a little lag time, this wasn’t on Motion Invest themselves but the banking hours side of the world that caused a minor delay.
In the end once we were all finalized on my bank information the wire itself was incredibly painless and in my account super fast!
New Ability To Order From a Due Diligence Service (Updated: Oct 2021)
Recently Motion Invest has posted about getting someone to help perform much deeper due diligence for you on a site you are looking at, for a small fee this can help you to see in much better detail as they provide a video deep diving into sections of the site.
The due diligence looks at multiple factors to give you as complete a picture as possible of the site you’re considering buying which include diving into things like:
- Brandability and domain
- Niche longevity
- Website history
- Website traffic trends
- Backlink profile (PBNs, toxic links, etc)
- Monetization potential
- Valuation
The service is able to return an ordered due diligence consultation video within 7 days. They do provide an option for a premium to jump the line and get your video in 24 hours, to note this could be done on sites like Flippa, EF, or others in addition.
They showcase some video reviews to help you see and understand your purchase prior, so watch and think about if this would help you make a purchase:
- Content site in the parenting/saving money/mom niche: video
- Content site in the golf niche: video
- Site in the spiritual niche: video
Final Thoughts on My Motion Invest Review
For most people who are looking to sell their website with a minimum of headache using Motion Invest is an amazingly simple process that gets results in an amazingly short period of time for the people I have spoken with who have listed sites.
While there is a load of different places you could choose to sell a website the benefits for me in Motion Invest is the high quality of service and the ability to be 99% hands off allowing me to continue working my other websites and not spend an entire month or more hand holding a transition.
Most services could look to how Motion Invest runs their process and business to see how truly painless you can make for a website owner, especially those who have never gone through the process previously. I would highly recommend it as a place to let go of sites you can’t focus on or as a solid place to find a good deal on a site to add to your collection!
