One of the fastest growing ways to make money online is by buying and selling websites, also known as website flipping or blog flipping. There are many ways to work online from home but flipping websites has a certain appeal to entrepreneurs because it is exciting and the profit margin can be huge.
What is Website Flipping?
It’s similar to flipping houses or other real-estate in the offline world, except it is done online with “virtual real-estate” which is just a fancy way of saying websites. The website flipping process is pretty straightforward; you buy a site that can be fixed up for a low price, make improvements to the design, increase the traffic and earnings, then sell it for a profit. You can also start a new site and build it up before selling for a nice profit.
What Types of Websites Should I Buy and Sell?
If you are going to buy and sell websites to flip instead of building them yourself for flipping, there are basically two types you can get depending on how much money you have to start, whether you have time to work on them, and your interests…
1. Buy a new “startup” website.
Most people start with this when they are first getting into site flipping because it is the cheaper and less risky option. It’s also a good way to learn the process of buying and selling websites if you have never done it before. Somebody will have registered the domain and set up the site, there might be a little traffic and earnings, but usually not much. You buy it and “fix it up” by adding content, building traffic, monetizing it, etc… If you put enough time and effort into it you should be able to sell it for a substantial profit within a few months to a year or so.
There are two main dangers with startup sites. One is that they might not be original so a lot of other people have the exact same or similar sites and some of them will be better at marketing it than you are. It is best to either buy a site with original content, or edit the content after you buy it so that your site is unique.
The other danger is that you may end up not doing anything with it. Since it didn’t cost you very much money you might not be as fired up to develop it. It will sit on the internet for a year or two costing you money for hosting and bringing in no income. If you are not going to develop it then you shouldn’t buy a new startup site… see the next section for more on that.
2. Buy an established site that has existing traffic and is making money.
An established site will cost you more to buy but you won’t have to do as much work because it should already have traffic and income coming in. If the traffic is generated from search engines you should be able to let it run on autopilot while you spend time doing other things to increase its value.
Most established sites are priced for sale on the basis of their current income, with the price usually being between 10 and 24 times the monthly income. Some sites make a lot of money or get a lot of traffic (or both) and will be relatively expensive. However, a site that has been online for a year or two without much traffic and a low monthly income can be bought for pretty cheap.
What you get basically depends on how much money you have to spend, how much time you have to invest, and how comfortable you are with technology. A site that is based around online games is probably going to require some programming knowledge while a content site made up of articles and blog posts on a popular subject will be much easier to maintain.
One of the great things about this way of making money online is that if you buy a site at the price of 10 months income, you should make your money back in less than a year and then you can sell the site and make even more profit. So, you will have doubled or tripled your money in a year without doing much of anything. This is a much better rate of return than you will get on just about any other investment that you can do.
If you do enough extra work on it, you can increase the traffic and income during that year, and then flip it for 12-24 times your increased income. You can earn your money back many times over that way.
Things to Keep in Mind While Considering a Site Purchase…
You do need to do your due diligence when you are buying a site. Keep in mind that income and traffic stats can be faked or inflated, even if they are images. Most people won’t let you log into their accounts to check the information for yourself, so you need to look for other indicators of whether the stats are likely to be true or not.
One thing you can do is check some of the main keywords of the site to see where it ranks in Google and other search engines. You can ask what keywords the site owner has optimized the site for, or you can guess from the title tag and headings on the home page. But keep in mind that a little traffic may come in from hundreds of different keywords that all combine to create a lot of traffic, and sometimes a lot of traffic will come in from a keyword that the site is ranking for completely by chance.
You can also look through the recent posts on blogs to see if they have a lot of comments, and check how many RSS readers it has. Those can both be a good indicator of traffic. If the site has a forum, is it lively? Be cautious if there were suddenly a lot of forum posts, blog comments, or a sharp increase in readers in a very short time just before the site went on sale. This may mean the site owner has done a bunch of stuff to make the site look more popular than it really is.
Some other things to check are how many backlinks the sites has, it’s Alexa rankings, how many pages it has indexed in Google, what the Page Rank (PR) is, and whether or not the traffic and income information the seller gave is relative to what other sites with similar stats get.
You’ll have to do some learning before you can make money buying and selling websites but you will pick it up as you get more experience. So, even if you have a lot of money to spend on sites, it is probably best not to buy a very expensive site when you first venture into website flipping. It’s better to buy several cheaper startup sites when you are first getting going so you can get some experience while you work towards your goal of being able to work online from home flipping websites.
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