Website Flipping - The 7 Essentials To Investing In A Profitable Website

Website flipping is fast becoming the must own business of 2008-2009. There is so much potential with investing short term in websites...by sprucing them up quickly so that they are more valuable to put back on the market.

The other appeal is that there is a never ending demand for websites that can be created from a neglected site or even a brand new domain, all of which can result in huge returns in your investment, with many people experiencing returns of 4x the price they bought the site for.

So the question is, would you spend $1 to get $4 back? Let's find out how to get started...

It might sounds daunting at first, but in reality anyone can do this. It all begins with research however, so make sure you follow these steps and then seek further advice as you move along the process:

1. Establish a budget that you can afford.

Look for sites in Sitepoint.com and Ebay.com and try to find a site that is within (or below) your budget. From here, you can begin to do proper research on the site for sale. If you're interested in the website, you must also check that there is a demand for its contents; otherwise you'll never get much traffic or sales. You can check demand by using Google's free keyword selection tool. Simply take some related keywords from the site and put them into Google's free keyword tool and see what sorts of search numbers come up. If you've got a large amount of people searching on these keywords every month, then you've got potential traffic for this site.

2. Check where the traffic is coming from

You can also check out where the seller is getting his/her traffic from already. It is generally better to invest in a site that has steady and reliable traffic from solid search engine listings instead of them relying on writing dozens of articles and paying for traffic to keep the numbers up, but there are exceptions to this rule.

3. How is the site performing or underperforming?

Apart from traffic, you'll also want to see how the site is making money and retaining it's' visitors:

-Does the website have a newsletter? -Does the website run adverts, if so how and with whom? -Does that site sell a product? -What is the site's revenue for the month?

Essentially, you are looking for a site that is in the early stages of making a lot of money but one that the owner has dried up on or ran out of time with (or who simply cannot see the potential themselves!).

For example, they might run a newsletter but not be promoting products. They might be running adverts that only pay pennies when they could be paying dollars per click (or even per impression!).

4. Check screenshots and the site's entire history

Most sellers with provide upfront stats of the site's traffic along with screenshots of proof of earnings. Although these can be fake, it's a starting point. What you are looking for is any drop off in traffic or revenue. This could be a reason why a seller is actually selling in the first place, which leads us on to...

5. Why are they selling?

The next step is to get in touch with the seller and ask why they are selling the site. Many sellers will have an immediate answer or may even put the reason in their auction listing. This helps to understand why they would give up a perfectly good, high potential website. The trick is to avoid telling them that they have a money pot on their hands or they might change their minds about selling it!

6. Any support?

If you're not comfortable with the technicalities of transferring a site, check if the owner is willing to provide support. This might also come in useful even if you are technically able. It's always nice to know that you're not going to run into any problems after you've handed over a sum of money, no matter how big or small.

7. Is the seller legit?

Another thing that is really important to check is whether the seller is actually genuine and not a fly by night scammer. The best way to do this is to use a reputable marketplace such as eBay or Sitepoint.com who both run buyer/seller feedback scoring systems along with identity verification to boost buyer confidence and avoid fraud. The other option (which is highly recommended) is to use Sitepoint.com's free website sales contract to further cover yourself.

Conclusion

As you can see, if you use a little common sense and flow a system then it's not hard to find hidden gold that is selling for peanuts online. Hidden gold that just requires a little shining and restoring on your side, before you resell the site at a huge profit.

It is not uncommon to resell sites at 4x or more the value you bought them, even in very short time periods such as 3 months (or less). Sometimes it will only require one small tweak here and there are the site can be making twice as much revenue as the day before...and that's not hype.

There are of course a few other aspects to look out for when flipping a site, which you can learn more about below, plus you will need to know the best way to fix up the site and resell it for maximum profits in order to make this business really rock for you.

Website Flipping The Project Archimedes Way

Website Flipping - 3 Crucial Pillars To A Bigger Asking Price

Flipping websites is definitely a lucrative business model and is possibly one of the safest ways to invest your money because it is so controllable and flexible. Unlike the stock market that can jump around from minute to minute and the housing market than is either too expensive or completely bottomed out (like it is today in 2008), website investing is a marketplace that is much more stable and full of rabid buyers.

But whilst many talk about finding a website for sale and actually buying it, what many don't mention is the work that is required in actually adding value to the site. After all, if you can't add value, there is little chance you'll turn a profit.

So let's look at some of the first key areas you need to focus your time (or a freelancer's time) on.

1. Improve Existing Revenue

If you've bought a site that is already making money, you're in a better position from the start. Take a look at what is actually generating the revenue and replace that with higher paying ads or even your own direct affiliate links or your own products for higher profit margins. If your site is not making any money at the time of purchase, it's time to test a few ad placements and affiliate links for related products or services.

2. Enhance customer retention

Does the existing site capture email addresses? Does it have an RSS feed or newsletter service? Does it have social bookmarking buttons so that people can share your content easily across the web? If it has none of these, then add them right away! If it does have these features, try to look at how your visitors are interacting with these features and try to improve on it.

For example, is the newsletter being ignored and nobody is signing up? Are people bookmarking your site? Heck, are people even sticking around for very long at all? If not, you need to consider getting better content up ASAP and provide more value and entertainment for each visitor.

3. Boost the traffic

If you bought a site that is already getting some sort of regular and reliable traffic, all you need to do is go and get more of it. The beauty is, you should already know where the traffic is coming from, so you know exactly where to go and get more of it from! If your site is not bringing in any traffic, you'll either need to start paying for it or better still, go out and start marketing your site. There are a million and one ways to bring traffic to your site, many of which are included in a guide that I recommend later on in this article.

Conclusion

All of the information you need to tackle these three points above comes from tracking your visitor's activity. You can do this for free using Google Analytics. You will need a Google account, but it takes less than 10 mins to set up and get running with their excellent free service. The analytics code they give you will tell you everything you need to know about where people are coming from to find your site, what they are doing when they reach your site and a whole host of other data that can give you the info you need to conquer these 3 crucial tasks of flipping a site for maximum profit.

If you're confused about getting traffic, boosting the revenue or keeping more people from leaving or never coming back to your site, then you might want to learn more about this guide to successful site flipping. Here's a great review on it:

Website Flipping Program "Project Archimedes"

Website Flipping - 2 Steps To Selling Big And Selling Safe

So you want to become rich buying and selling websites huh? Well, it has to be said that one of the most accessible ways to do so is by the recent craze and phenomenon known as "website flipping".

Website flipping is a buzz term for short term investing in websites. The real beauty is that unlike physical real estate, you can pick up established and profitable websites for less than a pair of trainers and turn them into residual money makers in no time at all. Then, if you get bored of babysitting that site, you can hand the keys on to a new owner and walk away with a huge lump sum of cash in the process. Welcome to site flipping, now let's look at one of the most important parts of the entire process...

Let's assume you have a website that you've found which is making a little money. You bought the site, built up the daily visitor count and even added some high priced products or high paying ads to it (all of which is explained later on in this article).

However, you're only half way there and if you screw up with the actual selling of the site, you could stand to lose not only time but a lot of money too.

Step 1. Make sure you're selling in the hotspot

There are numerous places to sell your website online, some more reputable and safer than others. When you're selling a site, the things that should be most important to you are the ability to see how trusted and respected the buyer is plus an effective system to communicate freely.

Not only that, but you need a marketplace where there are a ton of rabid buyers who will likely claw and hussle for your site, through sheer competition. One such place which has all of this is Sitepoint.com.

You can list your website in super targeted categories depending on its status. For example, if you run the next best thing to MySpace, you'd list your site in the premium websites for sale. However if you have a brand new blog about cat grooming, you would list your site for sale in the startup websites for sale. If your site is ticking along nicely, you'd go for the established sites for sale.

There are many other options and plenty of user friendly features at Sitepoint.com which makes it a great place to sell your site for maximum profits.

It does cost money to list your site for sale, but I can assure you that providing you take the right steps to listing your site for sale and have properly "flipped it" for maximum profits, then you won't need to worry about the small fee.

Step 2. Avoid being scammed AFTER the sale

Many people worry about buying from a seller who is unlawful and a possible scam artist, but whilst this is a legitimate concern, it is also likely that the seller is worried about the buyer being less than savory. Why? Because a seller can still claim their money back, particularly if they have paid by credit card, via a chargeback.

This could happen if the buyer is either unhappy with the transfer of the site progress, or simply if the buyer is trying to rip you off. The truth is, if you're not covered with some kind of basic contract or agreement, you might end up losing your money...which is a real nightmare if you've already transferred the site across to the buyer! You would have just lost your site and now facing a chargeback for the sale...ouch.

Conclusion

There are lots of aspects of becoming successful at site flipping but having said that, it is considered one of the easiest and straight forward businesses to run online in recent years. The marketplace is thriving, you can control your budget and investments and you can essentially dictate how much you would like to earn each month as a result. Want to earn $2000 per month? Fine, just buy a site and flip it up to that level, then take the profits and reinvest. It soon becomes a snowball effect as your profits pile on top of each other.

Not sure how to tell what a site is worth selling for? Simple! Just take the revenue that it is currently earning per month and multiply it by 4x. This is a general rule and sometimes a site can be sold for a lot more than that whilst earning less, depending on other factors.

If you'd like to know what these factors are and how to get your first successful site flip under your belt, check this out: Website Flipping Program "Project Archimedes"