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:
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