How to Increase the Value of Your Blog Before Flipping It
When it comes to blog flipping and site flipping in general the most important factor in determining the value of your website is how much money it makes on a monthly basis. You can get a lot more out of your site if it has money already coming in consistently.
There’s no doubt that search engine rankings, great content, domain age, existing traffic, etc… Are all great and will help increase the value of your site. However, most potential buyers are really going to look at the monthly earnings and how much effort is needed to achieve that income each month. Passive residual income is definitely the best.
Therefore, if you want to dramatically increase the value of your blog/site before you put it up for sale then you need to get it bringing in some money. So, how do you do that? It’s really not as difficult as you might think.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to make money from your blog or even a static website is to sell advertising on it. Even if it doesn’t have the best stats as far as traffic and rankings are concerned, you can still usually find people willing to at least pay something in order to get a link or banner on your site. Even a little advertising revenue can go a long way for increasing the value of your website before you flip it.
You can typically find advertisers simply by contacting other website owners in your niche to let them know you have opened your site up to advertising. There are also plenty of forums with sections on them where you can post to let people know you have advertising spots open. And there are several popular websites that exist for the sole purpose of connecting people looking for advertisers with people who are looking to advertise.
Basically it all boils down to getting the word out there by any means available to let as many people as you can know that they can advertise on your site. Keep the prices low enough to attract people but not so low that you aren’t really increasing the value of your site. Every little bit that you can increase the monthly earnings will make the site much more valuable in the eyes of potential buyers.
That’s pretty much all there is to it. Increase the monthly earnings of your website by getting a few advertisers and you will certainly increase the value of it. And blog flipping is all about getting the maximum amount of money possible from your sale.
Sell Your Websites for Cash at SiteRedeemr
Most people think of Flippa, Digitalpoint, and eBay when they think of site flipping marketplaces. But there’s another way to flip a website if you are ready to sell it, or if you just have any sitting around that you haven’t done anything with in a long time and getting some money out of them sounds like a good idea. It’s a site called “SiteRedeemr” and they will pay you for your websites.
The process is quite simple. All you do is give them your name, email, URL of the site, and the price you would like to get for the site. They review it and give you a quotation. If you are happy with the price they offer then just accept it. Then they will transfer everything over and send you the money. All of it is free and there is no obligation to sell. You can send them a blog, static website, or domain for them possibly buy.
If nothing else, you could submit a site to them just to see how much they think it’s worth. That could be one way to judge the price of your site before you sell it to someone else. But chances are they try to low ball you as much as possible and they don’t know everything about the site, so don’t rely on them too much for a valuation on an established website.
Anyway, I just thought I would let you know about SiteRedeemr since it seems to be an easy way to sell a website. Just another web site flipping resource to add to your list.
On a related note, here is a very informative post written on one of my favorite blogs today… Buying & Selling Websites for Profit: An In-Depth Guide. It contains a lot of useful site flipping tips from someone who knows what he is talking about when it comes to all aspects of making money online.
Record Site Flip on Flippa – $250,000 for Retweet.com
The leading marketplace for site flipping is flippa.com and they just had a record breaking site sale of $250,000 today. Before they opened up Flippa, they were the Sitepoint Marketplace and there were sites sold on their for higher prices over the years, but this is a record breaking sale for the current site.
The website that sold was Retweet.com which is a competitor to tweetmeme.com and finds the most retweeted stories on Twitter while also providing website/blog owners with the ability to add a retweet button to their site thus making it very easy for visitors to retweet the content. It’s tag line is “news for the people, by the people” and they are a great place to find real-time updates on popular stuff being discussed from around the web.
Anyway, the part of this site flip that really interests me is that if you look at the right sidebar of the auction listing under the site details you will see that this site makes no money. The owners are claiming no profit or revenue at all, yet someone was still willing to shell out $250,000 for it. Granted it does get plenty of traffic with 12 million unique visitors per month and over 26 million page views, and it also has a PR5. But that’s still an insane amount of money to pay for a site that is not going to be giving you any return on investment for now.
Just one more example of how profitable site flipping can be. I’d say flipping a website for $250,000 when it isn’t earning you anything is a great way to make money online! They are laughing all the way to the bank after this sale.
Blogging Tips Sells for Big Money
The popular “blogging tips” website (blog) http://www.bloggingtips.com was just sold for $60,000 on Flippa. Another excellent example of how much money you can make flipping blogs and websites.
According to the seller this blogs net monthly profit is only $1100 — so that means he flipped this blog for over 54 times the monthly profit! That’s absolutely incredible!
Typically an established blog or static website with stats comparative to BloggingTips.com would sell for maybe around 24 times its monthly profits. He more than doubled that number.
Of course, this is a case of blog flipping where the site was built up for a long time before it was sold. But that’s still a lot of money to be deposited into your bank account in one lump sum! You could spend your time building up a few established sites per year with the intent of making money flipping them, and you could easily earn a 6 figure income doing it.
Here’s the link to the auction if you are curious to check it out: Established Blogging Site for Sale
Site flipping is still a very good way to make money online. The market is still strong even in these tough times. It might not quite be as strong as it once was but it hasn’t gone anywhere, and won’t be any time soon. There’s still a lot of opportunity for you to make money online flipping websites and blogs!
Why Flip Blogs?
I get asked quite frequently why I recommend flipping blogs instead of flipping websites of other types such as static sites, ecommerce sites, single page sales letter sites, mini-sites, or any other types of websites that aren’t blogs.
There’s actually no easy answer to that question, but I will try to explain my reasoning a little bit here if you’ll bear with me. I’ve flipped many types of web sites. One of my favorite site flipping business models is to write an information product, create a sales letter, establish a couple months of good sales, then flip it for large profit. That’s a great way to make a lot of money flipping websites, so why don’t I recommend you start here?
Well, the reason is because this more elaborate site flipping business model I just described works well for me because I happen to have several key skills that are necessary to do this sort of thing. I have a lot of internet marketing and other online business experience. I can write compelling sales copy and I understand how to create a good product. I’m not bragging, I am just pointing out that there’s quite a lot of experience both online and offline that make this model viable for me. If you have it then, by all means, go for it! But most of the readers of this blog do not have that same level of experience.
However, the typical person who reads this blog does have enough knowledge and experience to build a blog in a hot niche and flip it for profit. And besides the fact that I know you have the skills necessary to build and sell start-up blogs, another great reason for you to do this is the fact that the market is huge!
Blogs are HOT sellers! And rightly so because by their very nature, blogs can easily do what most other, more static websites can’t. For instance, they are easy to update, easy to manage, and when you use WordPress and create new content, it’s very easy for Google to find out about it. Blogs are also naturally interconnected which makes it very easy for the search engine spiders to crawl them. That’s not necessarily the case with a static site.
Another great reason to flip blogs instead of other types of web sites is simply because people love blogs. People associate blogs with quality information that is updated frequently and there’s more interaction on them. Blogs are open and other people can comment on them or even submit guest posts as most owners allow. That fact alone gives your visitors a sense of ownership of your information. They are much more likely to trust information on blogs more than information that comes from static sites.
In addition to all of this, blogs are relatively easy to build and make them look cool. There are a ton of free themes and plug-ins out there that you can use on your blog, which will make your site very functional and give it a very professional, polished look. This helps a lot when you go to flip it because website buyers respond to the visual aspects of sites. A cool looking blog will sell for much more money than a static site with the same information, traffic, and earnings.
So, why flip blogs?
I think I have answered that question well enough above. If you are just getting started then I recommend using blog flipping as your main site flipping business model. But I am not saying you should only flip blogs. Expand your horizons and see what works best for you!
