Website flipping is, like flipping property, the practice of building or buying websites, enhancing their value and selling them for a profit.
There are a number of ways of engaging in flipping websites and this piece will look at one specific deal in the last few days which allowed me to make a nice profit with one of my websites.
You will see from the screenshot that the site sold for it’s buy it now price of $1,495 and that there were 17 people watching the auction before it finished. This site had about 40 articles on it and had made a nice bit of income over the previous 12 months averaging around $100 per month.
The financials
Here is a breakdown of how profitable this site and ultimate disposal was: firstly the content was outsourced to writers that I use at a cost of $5 per article so the total investment here was around $200.
I had virtually no hosting cost for the site as I had it hosted on a hosting account with approximately 70 other sites which costs around $9 per month in total.
The domain name PrefabGaragesReport.com cost $9.
The income over the 12 months turned out at around $1,200 and the ultimate selling price of $1,495 meant a very profitable return for a very small investment. (You will note that all of the figures are in US dollars as this tends to be the only currency that is used online in most global websites; perhaps it might be a good idea to become familiar with the US dollar with the turmoil in the Euro currency now anyway!)
Website flipping strategy
The way to really make nice money with deals like this one is to scale up your operations through outsourcing.
If you know what you are doing you can really scale this significantly by outsourcing the content creation to online content/article writers all around the world and carrying out the necessary research yourself.
Massive market
The market for websites like this on sites like Flippa.com is stunning and I have had interest and bidders from all around the world including Hawaii, the US, Canada, Serbia, India, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia and many other regions.
The reason for this is simple: the dream of making money online and autopilot income is an irresistible one and the amount of interest in sites that I have sold on Flippa.com has been really stunning. (The previous week I also sold a site for small money, $395, and it too had 17 people watching and bidding in the auction).
Website flipping does offer great opportunities to make money on the internet provided you know what you are doing, what type of website to build and how to build them. Scaling up the task is then pretty simple as there are a huge number of sites online which allow you to outsource all kinds of work such as content creation, header design and so on.
You could of course do a lot of this work yourself but your progress will be slower writing good, keyword focused content cannot be rushed so it makes sense to outsource.
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Filed under Website Flipping 
Building niche websites for profit is a viable business model and the video below will show you how I realized $12,100 over the first two weekends in August, 2011.
Firstly though, I will give you a brief outline of this business model.
Niche websites step by step guide
Here is a step by step guide showing how you can generate an income from the creation of small, niche websites.
1) Pick a niche or market;
2) Pick the best keyword or phrase as the domain name for your new niche website;
3) Carry out your keyword research with the Google Adwords keyword tool;
4) Pick at least 8-10 other keywords or phrases which will become the topics of new content on your site in the form of a page or post;
5) Build your website using the most appropriate plug ins and themes to optimize for best search engine ranking;
6) Publish your content;
7) Promote your site through off site/off page optimization such as backlinking, social bookmarking and other promotional techniques;
8) Sign up for the Google Adsense advertising programme;
9) Place your Adsense code on the site in the best locations to maximize click through rate from visitors;
10) Continue to promote your site;
11) Assess your site after a number of weeks and see how it is doing in relation to organic, search engine traffic and Adsense income;
12) Depending on your assessment at 11 above, either continue to beef up your site if it is showing potential or backlink and promote it to the maximum;
13) Hold it or sell it on Flippa.com;
14) Repeat the process above by scaling and outsourcing;
15) Reinvest profits and sales proceeds in scaling and outsourcing.
This business model has a number of significant attractions including
- You can do it part time or full time, depending on your circumstances;
- Your potential market for your finished product (your sites) is enormous (just check out Flippa.com and see for yourself);
- The number of markets and niche markets is also huge with a huge number of new computer and internet users worldwide every day;
- Very low start-up costs.
What you need to get started
To get started you need to acquire a few basic skills including
1) How to build a website (I recommend WordPress as it is incredibly easy to build sites quickly once you learn how to build one and the WordPress publishing platform is free);
2) How to carry out keyword research;
3) How to structure your site properly from the outset;
4) How to promote your site;
5) A little commercial nous or flair (always essential with any business whether online or offline)
Winners and losers
With this business model as with all models, success is not guaranteed with all sites.
You will have winners and losers. The key is to scale up the winners for the big money and to get the losers to a point where you can offload them or just cut your losses.
A global view
Building niche websites and utilizing the Adsense advertising model, if done correctly, has the following outcome:
You succeed when you sell your site; the purchaser wins as he is purchasing a steady income to give him/her a return on his/her investment; the advertiser on your site gets targeted traffic to his business offer; the visitor who clicks on the Adsense block will do so to find what he/she is looking for.
Everybody wins.
This is precisely what happens (or should happen) with newspapers/magazines who derive most of their income from advertising.
The two main differences between advertising on your site and in a newspaper/magazine is
1) There is no cover charge for visiting your site
2) Your advertising/publishing model is online, not offline.
Proof of income
See the video below..(the sound is not great so you may have to turn up your volume)
That’s cool.
But for anyone looking to start their own business and who are limited by lack of capital but are willing to invest their time and energy it is a real opportunity.
Check out an update to flipping websites as a source of income working from home.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Filed under Building Niche Websites
