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