If you have been trying to find ways to make money online, you have most likely came across a lot of scams. There are so many scams out there, it is almost impossible to find a way how to make a large income from home. While affiliate marketing, eCommerce, and Multi Level Marketing can make you some money, unless you've had years of experience, your not likely to make much money.
Website flipping is becoming more popular everyday. Flipping has been responsible for making people six figures, and some people multi-millionaires. You don't have to sign up for a single program and you don't need tons of money to start. You could start with $5 if you wanted to. And another cool thing about website flipping is that you have control of how much money you make and how large your company grows.
You're probably thinking, "website flipping sounds great, but what the heck is it?"
The basic idea of website flipping is purchasing or building a website, making the site better (adding content, design, marketing, etc.) to hopefully receive a gain in revenue, and then selling the website for profit. Some website flippers flip sites in a few days to receive an immediate small amount of cash, and others flip their sites after many months or years for huge amounts of cash (sometimes even millions of dollars).
Okay, so you know what flipping is, but you don't know where to start. Here are the steps to a successful and profitable site flip.
1. BUYING a site vs. BUILDING a site.
In order to flip a website, you must first have a website. You can build a website, or you can purchase a website from website marketplaces such as flippa.com. Both ways have advantages and disadvantages, but it all comes down to personal preference and how much starting capital you have. Remember, you can always do a mix of both.
Building A Site
Building a website can be as cheap/expensive or easy/hard as you want it to be. Building a site requires some basic knowledge, but you don't have to know HTML or coding to create a nice looking site. At first, you want to choose a topic the site will be on. Some profitable topics in our world today are money, health, beauty, fashion, and politics. Keep in mind, you don't have to know a lot about your topic. Once you have a topic your site will be on, you want to start creating the site. You will need a domain name (xyz.com) that has something to do with your topic, but is short. Howtomakemoneyinoureconomytoday.com would be a horrible domain name. Makemoneytoday.com would be better. Most of the time, your preferred domain will be taken, so have some ideas in mind. You can buy a domain from godaddy.com for a few dollars each year. You will also need web hosting which you can buy from godaddy.com for $20 a year. Also, I would recommend installing WordPress (free) to create your website. It is free and very easy to use. All hosting accounts have instructions on how to install WordPress.
Once you have your site structured, you need content on your topic. If you know a lot about your topic, you can write your articles yourself. If you don't know stuff about your topic or if you dont have time to write it, you can outsource it. People on freelancer.com can write articles for a few dollars. The more articles you have, the more money you will get for your site in the long run. Along with articles, you should install Google AdSense (free) on your site, and some affiliate products related to your topic. If you don't know what affiliate products or AdSense are, look them up in Google. They are basically the ways your site will be making money.
Once you have your site made, you need to advertise the site to get traffic. The more content you have, the more traffic. The more traffic you have, the more your website will make. Try advertising your website on forums, articles, facebook, twitter, myspace, youtube, etc. Also, you could advertise your site in your city by posting fliers. Also, submit your website to Google. Getting your site submitted on Google takes years, but if you sell your site before its on Google, you can say that you've already submitted the site. For my company, we like to sell our websites after around 6 months. That gives us a few weeks to set up the site and start getting traffic, and then we have the 6 months to make money.
Buying A Website
If you don't want to build a website, you can purchase a website from $2-2000 + on sites like flippa.com. Of course, the more money you have, the better of a site you can buy. But, I recommend all beginners to start small with $20-$200 sites. That way if you screw up (not likely to happen), you didn't loose thousands of dollars. Just search flippa until you find a site that has a good price, and you like the site. The site does not have to have a great design or too much content, but it would help. Remember, if you buy a site with a horrible design, why not purchase that site, make the design better, and then sell it for profit? It is always good to buy a website that has some traffic already as it saves the hassle of building traffic yourself, but that is up to you.
Be sure to purchase your website through an Escrow service which allows you and the seller to safely do the transaction without anyone getting scammed. You can use escrow.com which is free.
Once you have the website, look for the site's weaknesses. Does it need a better design? Does it need more content? Your goal is to make the site better than when you purchased it. Just like when building a site, you can outsource articles to speed up time, although it costs money (not too much). Also, make sure you are advertising your new site a lot. That will get more traffic, which gets more money. If there not already, ad some affiliate products and ads to your site so you can make money from the site. That way, you make money while you own the website, and you make money when you sell the site for profit.
The next section will tell you about selling websites for profit.
2. Selling Your Website For Profit
Deciding on when to sell your website is a hard task. If you are doing flipping part time, you may not mind selling your website for large profits after a long time. However, if you don't have another source of income, you may want to sell your site soon to make a low but quick profit. It all depends on when you need the money. Keep in mind, if you want to make a six or more figure income by selling sites soon after you own them, you will have to do this very often in order to make a lot of money. But, if you sell the site after a few months or so, you can sell the site for very large profits, and make your six figure income after selling only a few websites.
When selling, you must have a price in mind. There are many ways to decide the price that you want to sell your website for. If your site has been making money, you usually want to sell your site for 3-5 times the annual revenue. So after six months you've made $6,000 total (1k per month), your predicted annual revenue is $12k. So you could sell that site for 36-60k. That is a nice profit for only six months. Then you repeat the process again for the last six months of the year, and you've just made your six figures. Also when pricing, keep in mind about if your site is indexed in Google or not. You could charge more for that.
Where do I sell my website?
If you want to sell your website on a marketplace like flippa.com, be ready to receive a lot of low offers. If you have a large site that you want to sell for $50k-100k or more, don't list it on flippa. Remember, people on flippa probably dont have 50k-100k or more to spend on a website. Instead, try selling your website to companies. Lets say you have a website or blog about dog toys. Your website has been making thousands each month from selling affiliate dog toys. You want to sell your website for 100 thousand dollars. So now, you must look for companies that could be interested in your site. Try looking for companies that sell dog related items, or better yet, a dog toy company. Create a list of all potential companies. Gather their contacts and craft a very nice business email explaining who you are, the site you want to sell, details about the site, your revenues, your traffic, and benefits that they could have if they buy the site. Be ready for a lot of rejections, but also be prepared for some interested. Be sure not to list a price in your email, as you want to know what they think is a good price. Instead, say that you are willing to discuss prices. Remember that companies have a lot of money to spend, but they also want the best deal.
When you receive companies who are interested, email them a price you have in mind showing that it is 3-5 times yearly revenue, but also explain that you are willing to further discuss a price. If the companies like the price, they will email you again stating that they are ready to buy. If you have more than one company interested, state in an email to all of the interested companies that their are many companies interested. Also state that the best offer will get the site. Since all of these companies know that their competitors may also be interested, they will be sending you large figures. Then, simply choose the largest amount and hand over your website.
Although their are many methods to website flipping, all of them have the same few things in common.
1. They make great money.
2. They don't require large start up costs.
3. You control your growth.
I hope this article gave you some good info on website flipping.
Joe Tommy is the co-founder, CEO, and President of an internet asset firm which purchases websites, makes them better, and then sells the assets for profit. His company, Tommy Media, Inc. has been around for 5 years and has sold numerous websites for large profits. The company recently sold a large music based website for 1.8 million dollars.