How to make money online from website flipping? This time I will discuss another online business that has a great earning potential. If you have the skills in developing websites or blogs, and or if you have the talent in promoting and monetizing them, then flipping websites can be a profitable online venture for you. Actually, the biggest income I earned from my years of online entrepreneurship came from selling blogs. Adsense rocks, but website flipping, if made a full-time business and done right, can give someone the biggest paycheck of his life.
What is website flipping?
It is the art of developing a website from scratch or buying a developed website, then selling it for profit. It is like flipping real estate properties, where you develop a real estate or buy a developed one, and then selling it to earn profit. The former is online, while the latter is offline. Furthermore, website flipping can be done with small capital, while real estate trading requires a bigger investment.
How does it work?
If you have a bigger fund or capital, you can buy websites that are already developed or websites in their development stage that have big revenue potentials. The art here is to further develop and monetize these websites in order to increase their market values, and sell them at higher selling price than the price you have bought them before. It’s like buying a house and lot, improving it to increase its market value, then selling it for a markup price. For a website to increase its value overtime, you need to know how to attract more traffic to your website through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and other site promotions, and be able to convert this increased traffic into profit. Some capitalists who don’t know how to do online marketing hire their own SEO experts and website developers.
You can also start from scratch. For online entrepreneurs who don’t have enough money to buy developed websites, making a website out of nothing is a wiser choice. But of course, since you lack funds, you should be equipped with website development and marketing skills. Here, you initially need to spend for the registration of your domain name ($10 a year) and for your web hosting ($10 a month). Thus, you can develop a website for six months and sell it. Let’s assume you will initially spend $130 ($10 domain registration + $120 one year web hosting fee) for developing a website for six months. Your website can be a blog which uses free WordPress software. You will manually do the SEO works so that you will not spend more cash. If you can write 1 quality blog post a day, your blog will contain 180 quality blog posts in 6 months. If you do it full-time, you can even make 2-3 good posts a day.
Now, with a quality blog containing 180 or more quality blog posts, receiving a decent traffic. You can already sell that blog for 10 – 20 times of your initial cost of $130. So if you can sell your blog after six months for $2,600, then you will have an estimated profit of $2,320 ($2,600 – $130 – $150[estimated listing fee]). This is without counting your own labor and hard work in developing and promoting the site. Last year, I sold a blog with 190 quality blog posts for $3,100. You can do more than that if your website or blog has higher page rank and is earning higher revenue. Thus, you need to monetize your blog before you offer it for sale. You can put Adsense on it, place affiliate links, offer banner advertising, make paid posts and other monetization schemes to show that your blog is actually earning. This will also make you earn money while developing your site. Remember that most buyers, which are web investors, are attracted to websites that have big income potentials.
Where to buy and sale websites?
Flippa.com is my top choice when it comes to website flipping marketplace. The site charges a listing fee of $20 and a sales commission of 5% on your sale or a minimum of $5, whichever is higher. That’s an extra cost, but it will give you more confidence that you will be transacting business with reliable buyers or sellers. Having a Paypal account will aid you to pay and receive online payments relative to your online transactions. If you don’t have a Paypal account yet, you can register a free Paypal account by visiting this link. You can also sell your websites or blogs directly to buyers without having a middle-party. You can contact companies or other website owners, whom you think will be interested in buying your website. However, it may take you a long time to find one and it may also not guarantee that the buyer, whom you are transacting with, is a trusted one. In Flippa, you can check first the reputation or the positive feedback score of the potential buyers who will offer you to buy your website. Remember that in the real estate business, most real estate developers hire real estate brokers to become the middleman between them and their buyers.
Tips in selling your website
To make a successful sale of your website or blog, the following tips will help you.
1. Choose a short and marketable domain name. A dot com has a higher value than the rest of the domain extensions (.net, .org, .info, etc.,).
2. Install Google analytics in your website. You will use this as a reliable proof of your traffic when offering your website for sale.
3. Monetize and maximize the earning potential of your blog. This will increase the value of your website, as well as the selling price.
4. Always check the reputation and positive feedback score of your buyers.
5. Make a clear description of what you are selling (what includes in the sale). You can also make a sales contract.
6. Build social pages and subscribers list (Twitter account, Facebook page, RSS readers) of your website. This will also increase the value of your website.
7. Don’t overprice or undervalue your website. You can check Flippa and review their list of previously sold websites to gain an idea of the right price you can set for your website.
8. Be diligent and patient. Developing a website needs hard work, while finding the right buyers requires patience.
Do you have your own experience in website flipping? Feel free to share it by making a comment below. Thank you.
Victorino Q. Abrugar is a marketing strategist and business consultant from Tacloban City, Philippines. Vic has been in the online marketing industry for more than 7 years, practicing problogging, web development, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and consulting.
Working on some blogs directed on the US and European market… hope to sell these sites for a profit in a couple of months. Still getting used to he whole SEO concept and adding more quality articles on the sites.