Introduction
Website flipping is one of the most profitable, enjoyable and simple methods of generating a full time income online. Even if you have little to no prior experience in virtual real estate, you can still build a profitable business in a very short amount of time.
Depending on your experience, ability to outsource as well as your overall goals, you may explore multiple website flipping avenues, including:
Short Term Website Flips
(purchasing or creating websites and cross selling)
Long Term Website Flips
(purchasing/creating websites, establishing and selling)
Mid Term Website Flips
(purchasing undervalued websites, renovating – flipping)
You can also make money flipping blogs and domain names, as well as established websites.
Regardless what your overall goals are, starting off with low cost, short-term website flips is often the best way to minimize risks as well as being able to learn the ropes so that you can develop a strong business foundation for future development and sales.
It’s important to take a hands-on approach to website flipping even if you intend to outsource a majority of the work so that you are able to gain personal experience in the industry, and be able to identify market shifts, changes as well as current demand.
What is hot today can quickly become saturated or outdated tomorrow and in the website flipping arena, you need to be quick on your feet and able to adapt to abrupt changes in order to consistently sell your websites.
Once you have gained experienced, and have a better understanding of the website flipping market, you will be able to focus on long term website flips, as well as cross-market selling.
Let’s begin!
Getting Started
When it comes to building or developing websites to sell, you need to place a monetary value on your time. This is incredibly important for those who plan to develop their own websites, rather than outsourcing the content or development.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in spending weeks or even months creating a website with the intention of selling it on the marketplace, only to discover that the incredible amount of time you spent on development wasn’t even factored into the actual cost of the site.
One of the biggest mistakes that new flippers make is in failing to take into account the REAL costs of developing each website. Instead of focusing just on the visible costs, such as hosting, domain names, or outsourcing content, you also have to put a value on your time, because after all, you need to make sure that you are paid for the work you’ve done.
It’s great to be passionate about the sites that you create to flip as long as you are aware that you need to cater to the market, and work within the prices they are willing to pay.
Sometimes, the extra hours you invested into building the site will go unrewarded, so always look for ways that you can cut down on the workload associated with each site, and get more out of each flip with less time spent on development.
Focus On Long Term Growth
It’s important to structure your website flipping business for long term growth right from the start. You don’t want to lose out on potential leads, or minimize exposure simply because you overlooked the most important components.
One of the easiest ways to build a loyal customer base, and to maximize your exposure is to set up a ‘Buyer Notification List’.
Here’s how to get started:
Hosting Account
If you have one, great, if not, you’ll need one, both for creating your squeeze page as well as for housing the zip files of the websites that you create. This hosting account can be a simple set up, no need for anything fancy, a cheap www.HostGator.com account will do just fine!
Domain Name
Pay attention to the domain that you choose, for branding purposes. You will want to avoid anything with numbers, hyphens or complicated spelling. Keep it simple, so that people can easily remember it and return to your site!
Create A Squeeze Page To Capture Leads
This is critical if you want to grow a customer base that you can easily market your websites and auctions to. I’d suggest registering a domain name that either includes your name or something catchy, that you’d like to be known for.
Each time I sold a website or even listed one, I included a link to my squeeze page, so that potential buyers could be notified of future releases. In a matter of a few weeks, I was able to build a list of thousands!
Remember, these are targeted prospects, people who are clearly interested in the types of websites that you are selling. Not only will you be able to maximize your income by notifying people each time you develop a new website, but you will also be able to offer custom website offers, special deals and even ‘customer loyalty’ points based on repeat business!
You will want to sign up for a free autoresponder account so that you can better manage and grow your lists. I recommend, http://www.aweber.com or http://www.getresponse.com
Make sure to communicate with your subscriber base from the very first member. You want to send out notifications of new listings and releases and well as survey your subscriber base to get a better idea as to what they are interested in and willing to buy.
This will help you create higher value websites based on current demand.
Create a Polished Marketplace Account
Depending on where you plan to sell your websites, you will want to spend time creating your profile and boosting confidence with those that will be interested in your offers.
With marketplaces like Flippa, you are able to build “reputation points’ by verifying a phone number, linking your Facebook and LinkedIn account, and generating positive feedback from buyers.
Don’t overlook the importance of an established profile!
Buyers will take this into consideration, when considering purchasing from you, as the more complete your profile is, and the higher your feedback score is, the more reassured they will be that you are a reputable and honest seller.
You can begin to generate positive feedback each time you successfully sell a website by simply emailing your buyer after you have delivered the material, and requesting that they take a few minutes to leave feedback. In return, you should always leave positive feedback for them as well.
It doesn’t take long to build up your reputation points with sites like Flippa, however you will need to sell 4-5 websites before your rating increases.
Flippa is also a great way to evaluate potential topics or themes for your websites. Spend a few minutes browsing through the Flippa marketplace using their customizable search filters, paying attention to ‘Recently Sold’ websites.
You’ll come up with tons of ideas for your own websites, very quickly.
Flipping Blogs For Quick Profit
A very easy way to gain entry into the website-flipping arena is by developing quality blogs.
With blogs, you don’t need to hire a designer or learn HTML, you can just download a copy of http://www.Wordpress.org, set up a domain and hosting account and quickly create a quality site in a matter of a few hours.
When it comes to content, you can either choose to write it yourself, or outsource it to professional freelance writers. You can easily find pre-written article packages from forums like http://www.WarriorForum.com or http://forums.digitalpoint.com on nearly any niche topic imaginable.
Just make sure that you do your best to enhance the value of every blog you flip by either customizing the theme as well as implement powerful monetization channels into the blog including Amazon aStore widgets, affiliate links from marketplaces like ClickBank, or even CPA offers from networks like
http://www.CPALead.com or http://www.MaxBounty.com
Potential buyers want to see the value in the blogs you are selling and they’ll place a higher value on blogs that clearly demonstrate its ability to generate revenue. Even if your blog is a start-up listing with little to no traffic, you can still yield a decent return if you take the time to showcase the blogs ‘potential’.
Consider using a mixture of unique content with high quality private label articles to create blogs faster, and easier, and always choose memorable top-level extensions for the domains you register.
Tip: When it comes to outsourcing your content and design, there are a variety of affordable ways to do this. Check out the major freelance sites like www.Guru.com and www.Scriptlance.com for quality developers and writers.
Also, be sure to pass all articles through www.CopyScape.com prior to posting them on your blog, so that you can verify that all content is unique and not found elsewhere.
For blogs, you only need a small amount of original content. I tend to stick with only 10-15 articles, adding in thumbnail images and sprucing up the theme a bit before selling it on Flippa.
The more you customize the theme, the more valuable the blog becomes, and with WordPress powering the website, it’s very easy to learn basic customization even if you are not a skilled designer.
Add more value to your blog flips by integrating Amazon widgets:
With astore, you can also offer a shopping cart for multiple item purchases, where checkout is completed directly on Amazon’s secure servers and commissions paid out to you promptly.
Flipping Higher Value Websites
When it comes to flipping higher value websites, potential buyers will expect a lot more from you in terms of analytics, to providing details on traffic and overall revenue.
You should always integrate data collection tools into your websites before you begin to develop them, so that you are able to provide a detailed history of stats to potential buyers later on.
One of the easiest ways to collect important information relating to your website is by installing Google Analytics into your websites.
You can sign up for a free account at:
You will also want to establish traffic flow to websites that you intend to sell at a higher price range.
When it comes to overall value, buyers will guage the potential of your websites on both traffic and revenue, so it’s important that you do your part in establishing the website before featuring it on the open market.
You can jump-start traffic to your websites with article marketing, social bookmarking, pay per click marketing, or by creating linkwheels that pull in traffic and boost search engine ranking by exploiting the popularity of feeder sites.
In addition, you will always be able to sell a website at a higher price if it is generating even a bit of revenue. It doesn’t have to boast thousands of dollars a month, but if you can show potential buyers that it has the potential to earn money, you will be able to assign a higher price point to your listing.
If your website is monetized with Adsense, you will need to generate consistent traffic in order to generate any signifigant profit. If you are able to integrate a digital product, affiliate products, or even CPA offers, you will find it a lot easier to maximize the value of every website you sell.
You could also browse through popular marketplaces like www.ClickBank.com and selectively choose high converting affiliate products that you could feature on the website. Just make sure that they are relevant to your websites overall topic!
I personally prefer marketplaces like www.CJ.com but because they require an application and approval process, and not everyone may end up being approved for membership there, the last thing you want to do is disrupt a revenue stream if the new buyer is unable to be accepted by CJ.com.
Sticking with marketplaces that require no approval and are relatively easy to sign up for, such as Clickbank are often easier.
Another way of monetizing the website is by transforming it from a regular static site into an interactive membership website.
This way, you can begin earning money on a recurring basis which is very appealing to buyers. Just make sure that you have enough content (or ability to purchase content) to fill the membership center and continue to update it as it is needed.
You will also want to conduct on-site maintenance prior to listing your website to ensure that all links are functional and that there aren’t any cross browser problems.
