Website Flipping

When buying websites, you’ll chance upon properties that you absolutely must get.  On the flipside, you’ll also come across ones that would be best passed over.  How do you know when an available website is best treated with a brush-off?

Search Engine Problems: If the website is banned by at least one search engine, it’s likely to get in the bad favor of others too.  No matter how good it looks, flipping the site will be an uphill battle – one you’re not likely to win.

Zero Promotion: New sites deserve bargain basement prices.  Even though the owner put in a ton of work on the technical aspects, it’s still a shaky buy, at best.  Unless the domain name is a keyword-goldmine, it’s usually better to pass.

Heavy Competition: If the site being sold is a small fish in a large pond filled with plenty of established players, there’s far too much work needed to bring it up to speed.  Unless you can successfully turn the site’s fate around, future buyers will be wary.

Short-Life Span: Sites about particular products or niches that are bound to be gone in a year or two (e.g. a particular movie or a game) are a losing gamble.  After the buzz passes, anyone who gets it will be left with residual traffic that may not even be good enough to pay for its own rent.

Easy To Duplicate: When you check the bargain basement sections of site flipping, you’ll notice the exact same types of properties for sale – wallpaper sites, proxy sites, arcade games, PLR blogs, etc.  With the right content and tools, those sites can be turned out in mass.  There’s no point buying them – just make ten of the same thing yourself.

Make sure to think twice about any website you do buy, many times if it seems to good to be true it usually is.  Make a checklist and go through it every time you are in the market for a new site.

When it comes to flipping a blog, everybody’s trying to come up with something extra that can prop up its value.  Most every relatively new blog that goes up on the selling block will need something extra if it wants to sell for more than the nominal price.

The Basics

If you’re putting up a blog for a quick flip, it’s almost requisite to have the following things on board:

* a descriptive logo
* a custom template
* several starter articles

Value-Added

While the above additions may seem like a good amount of work to put in already, they’re usually not enough to make your flip extremely profitable.  If you do what everybody else does, after all, you’ll just end up making the same profits as they do (which is not much).

Getting creative and pitching in additional value can really raise a blog’s worth.  Instead of taking the road well-traveled, how about getting creative and adding something in that can really draw attention.  Try one of these two things, for instance:

An informational product for sale.  Since commissioning an original ebook or similar product might actually prove too expensive for a quick flip, try to find a product that comes with resale rights.  Design a custom sales page, add it to the site and launch it.  If you can get even one sale before flipping a blog, you can use that as proof-of-concept to sell the site for even more.

A mailing list.  Contrary to what many beginners think, building a small mailing list from your blog isn’t too difficult a task.  For instance, you can buy some PLR content, split it into several parts and offer it as an email course to your visitors.  Similarly, you can package it as a free report that they can receive via email.  If you can get even 10 readers to sign up before putting the blog on sale, the potential of generating a large mailing list out of it can make more than a few potential buyers look your way.

If you put in some thought behind it, you can come up with different ideas that should give your flip an added allure, setting it apart from the deluge of new blogs available for the taking.

Everybody knows that a critical aspect of SEO is inbound links. Perhaps the first group of people to realize this were the bloggers. They quickly developed lists of where you could submit your blog on the Internet and grow your backlink count.

Website flippers can leverage all of the work that the bloggers have done collecting these blog submission sites. See, a site that takes links for blogs is really just a glorified directory. They will likely categorize the blogs into various groups. When you are flipping a website you want the very same thing as those bloggers searching for that great submit your blog list. You want links from high power sites.

So a website flipper should simply grab as many submit your blog list as they find and start submitting. A few notes. First, search for the highest authority blog aggregation sites you can find. Second, don’t do them all in one day. Not because of any penalty issue – but because a slow growth rate in back links is much more natural. If you do this you will see that your website flipping business starts to pick up because your properties have more attractive link profiles.

Turnkey Internet business platforms are software products that allow you to launch a website with little effort. In the old days you had to do all the website design and build yourself. This was time consuming. Today there are turnkey Internet business support sites that will give you tools to bring a website on the market quickly.

Using turnkey websites is really important if you are in the business of website flipping. When flipping a website you need to fill it up with content as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Yet, you need good content and a professional look. Website flipping is much like flipping a house. You want it look good to potential buyers. They need to experienced the flipped website, or house, as upgraded and worth top dollar. But your trick is to flip the website as inexpensively as possible.

To me it seems that turnkey Internet business tools help you accomplish exactly what you need for website flipping. They speed the process, lower the costs, but give you an end result that is professional and search engine friendly.

If you want to turn your site flipping into a sustainable business, building a team of people that can help you accomplish your goals is not an optional step.  There’s plain too much work that goes into flipping websites, that you’ll end up spreading yourself too thin, without a team to help you out in various steps.

While you may not be able to afford full-time employees, finding reliable (and affordable) freelancers that you can tap when needed will be one of your most important undertakings.  Having them attend to the nitty-gritty of the site itself, you can put your energies where it’s needed most – finding new sites and selling them.

1. Designer: Having a designer on board allows you plenty of flexibility with your sites’ appearance.  If the suite uses a bad template, you can commission the designer to build you a more intuitive one.  From a new logo to better icons to more appealing color schemes, having a reliable designer (who’s familiar with your tastes) on tap can do wonders.

2. Programmer: Even when you’re using a commercial CMS, you’ll always need custom tweaks performed on your site occasionally. Unless coding is your specialty, even a small change can eat up hours upon hours of your time.  Always keep a programmer on your roster of contacts – you’ll need them for sure.

3. Copywriter: Content is king – that’s what they all say, isn’t it.  That’s because it’s true.  The value of a site with good, timeless content can never be discounted.  As such, having a good copywriter on board can bring a lot of value to your flipping ventures that you otherwise wouldn’t get.

So get to it and start building your website flipping team!