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.

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!

When you buy or build sites with the intention of flipping them within the very short-term, it pays to keep your costs as low as possible.  Since the price of new, barely-indexed blogs and informational websites usually go for very low (think $75 to $200), your profit margin will depend greatly on how well you can keep your costs to the bare minimum.

Here’s the rub: if you skimp too much on your new site, it will show.  A stock free template, makeshift logos and PLR content just won’t cut it anymore – you’ll be lucky to sell those properties at cost.  The trick, then, is to give your site as professional treatment as you can, while keeping a tight lid on your spending.

Let’s look at the things you’ll likely need to spend cash on when building new sites:

Logo.  For the purposes of a quick flip, your logos must cost well below industry standard in order to keep you profitable.  Your best chance is to hire an offshore designer or local kid who can give you bulk, original graphics for $10 a piece.  You’ll actually find many takers for this – as long as your order is in bulk.

Scripts/Widgets.  The more experience you get, the more familiar you will be with useful functions and features that add tremendous value to new sites for flipping.  While you can buy scripts at nominal licensing costs, it will pay off more in the long run if you commission custom-scripts that you can use over and over across all sites you create.  Pay once (even if it’s a little expensive), use many times over – can’t beat that.

Templates. Instead of buying a premium template for every site you create, it’s better to just acquire a couple of flexible designs and have a low-rate designer tweak it for every site you make.  There are many designs out there where simple changes, such as a new logo, new icons and different color schemes, can make a huge difference, almost making it look unique.  After the initial investment on a flexible template, you can just hire someone to put in an hour’s amount of work to change the CSS and such for cheap.

Content.  When you’re building a new site, content can make a huge difference.  Personally, I like to use a bunch of second-rate rewritten PLRs (that you can get for ultra-cheap), propped up by 2 or 3 well-written and original content (that you actually pay decent money for).  If you design your navigation right, you will be driving attention to the good content and making the site look packed by inclusion of the second-rate stuff.

You can get everything needed for a quick flip with Justin Brooke’s new Website Flipping Starter Kit; 25 blog themes, 4 pre-made sites, 5 PLR products, 500 free graphics, traffic software, & video training.  So get to it.

Brett

Sometimes, all you need to look for in a website to make a profitable site flip is a good domain name.  This is especially useful when you’re starting a site from scratch with an intention to put it in the market after a small amount of development.  Even if you’re looking to buy a built site, though, the domain name will play a heavy factor as far as its future marketability is concerned.

These are the things you generally want to look for when choosing a domain name.

1. The shorter, the better

A shorter domain name will be easier to remember, faster to type and easier to brand.  As much as possible, stick to within three keywords or less.   If you can get away with it, do limit the character count to 19 or fewer as well.

2. Stick to the major TLDs

For purposes of flipping, keep the domain name to within the three major TLDs, namely .com, .org and .net.  If you’re considering purchase of a site with a different extension, see if you can buy a major TLD of the same before going through with the transaction.  Otherwise, you may just want to pass.  The majority of people default to .coms when they hear about a website, so as much as possible I grab a .com domain.

3. Cram your keywords into the domain

Having the main keyword in the domain automatically brings SEO value to the site, as well as slapping those vital words right on the brand.  This brings major points once you throw the site back on the market as keywords are among the first things buyers look at when looking for online properties to invest on.

4. Avoid trademark violations

Always check whether a domain violates any trademarks.  The last thing you want is to invest all that time and energy developing a site for flipping, only to have buyers refuse to even come near it for fear of infringing on other companies’ legal properties.

Stick to these few guidelines and you’ll be off to a good start in the website flipping proccess.