Site Flipping
No doubt you’ve heard of house flipping, where people buy houses, renovate them, and then resell them at a profit. Website flipping is similar to house flipping – you can purchase an existing site and spruce it up to increase its value. However, a big difference is that with website flipping, you can actually create websites from scratch and flip those too.
People usually buy websites because they’re either profitable already or they have the potential to become profitable. The point of buying such a website is to skip all the tedious work of having to put together a site, populate it with content, and to drive traffic to it.
Sites usually make money from revenue streams such as Google AdSense, Amazon, ClickBank, and other similar networks. To make good money, you’ll obviously need to be in a profitable market. Creating a site on underwater basket weaving will get you very few visitors and zero relevant products to promote.
Let’s say you want to create a site from scratch. The easiest way to do this is to install a blog using WordPress. Upload a clean looking theme and some good plugins to increase the functionality of your blog. Aside from consistent traffic and revenue stats, there are two major things which can increase the value of a website: unique content and a unique design.
The unique content should consist of around ten well written articles. Feel free to upload more content to your site, but if you put too much time into a website, it kind of defeats the purpose of website flipping. The point of flipping websites is to sell a site quickly and use the profits to invest in buying or creating more websites. Don’t hold on to sites for too long, or else you’ll lose out on opportunities to flip more sites.
After you’ve populated the site with content and monetized the site with ads, you’ll need to drive traffic to the site. The content helps with boosting the site’s search engine rankings, but you’ll probably need to do some search engine optimization to further boost its rankings. Hopefully you chosen some keywords for which it will be realistic to dominate the first page of the search engines. With some link building, you’ll get those coveted top spots and the autopilot daily flow of traffic that comes with it.
Basic SEO techniques include article submission, blog commenting, forum posting, and social bookmarking. Simply put, the more backlinks you get to your site, the higher it’ll rank.
Let’s say you consistently average a dollar a day in AdSense revenue for one of your sites. That’s $30 per month from that site. It is perfectly reasonable to ask for at least six times its monthly revenue as the sale price. In fact, sites regularly sell for twelve, eighteen, and even twenty four times their monthly revenue. How much your site sells for depends on it’s current revenue and how much effort has already been put into the creation and maintenance of the site. That little “buck a day” site could easily sell for $200-$300 on a website marketplace.