Make Money By Flipping Sites
Make Money Online | February 28th, 2008 | 2 CommentsIt is yet another way how to make money online, the flipping sites. It doesn’t really matter what niche the site is, you can still really make money out of this, but don’t expect thousands of dollars of course.
Making money online by flipping sites I would call it a mixture of luck, knowledge and fast action. And I will try to explain the three points bellow on this post, where luck plays its role, when fast action is required and what I do mean with knowledge. But the fact is that you need to be prepared for this (yeah, for making money by flipping sites) and with prepared I mean you need to monitor the sites where the sites are being sold at (mainly on popular webmaster forums) and you need to have the cash ready to close the deal when the moment is right there in front of you.
Luck on Making Money by flipping sites
With luck I am referring to that exact moment when you find the desperate guy (sad but true) that is in need of fast cash for bad, has a great site and is prepared to sell that site to pull the money he needs.
It doesn’t happen often, but when it happens be there and grab the opportunity. But how do you know that the site is worth the money? Usually sites get sold mainly based on the revenue they pull on monthly basis, then multiplying the monthly revenue for 10 and thats the rough price the site is worth. Of course the price and value of the site is/can be influenced by other factors other than the monthly revenue, such as the domain name, investment on promotion and the type (origin and geographical location) of traffic the site has. But to have a real picture, the revenue is based on 10 months of revenue (so avoid whoever is asking for insane price for their site when his/her websites monthly revenue x 10 doesn’t match with the asking price).
Knowledge on Making Money by Flipping Sites
With knowledge I am not referring on how to pay for the site or how to transfer the site. In most of the cases the desperate seller is even ready to move the site for you or leave to you the hosting account.
What I am referring with knowledge is, knowing the weak parts of the site for which you have interest on acquiring. How does the seller monetize the website? Is there space to monetize the site in other ways as well and how? Can you increase the earnings by not doing anything else but just placing some extra options with which you can monetize your site with.
Lets say the seller is selling a website which pulls roughly $100 a month. And the revenue is coming from only one resource, for example Google adsense. This gives you a great opportunity to expand your earnings by using other type of advertising on the site for sure. But you can make a huge mistake and simply jump onto changing and replacing some of the Google ad blocks with an alternative publisher campaign. Keep the site just as the owner left it to you for at least one month (of course by using your Google AdSense codes), just make sure you will create channels for each ad block to trace better the results and which ad block does bring you the most of the revenue (you would not want to remove that).
Once you have the numbers (which for one month it should give you a clear picture) you are ready to replace the low earning channel with an alternative advertising campaign (even simply another PPC company or using affiliates).
Fast Action on Making Money by Flipping Sites
You have most likely figured already that with fast action i don’t mean buying it now and selling it after two hours, but rather concluding the deal after you have already examined the site which you are willing to purchase and you now know that you can increase the revenue of the site.
With fast action I also don’t mean paying the price the seller is asking. In most of the cases they are willing to pay it even for something less, and the signs appear already when you start asking for proofs of traffic stats and earnings. If the seller is asking $200 USD as starting price he will most likely drop to $180 later, and if he does thats the alert sign you always wanted to know (he is desperate to sell it).
Conclusion and Making the Money
After we have walked through the above three steps and we are sure on what we are buying we are ready to get the ball rolling and start making the money. As I previously mentioned, if the site is pulling already a good revenue stream just as it is then don’t try to be smart and make changes once you get your hands on the files, instead leave the site as it is, monitor it better by creating ad channels (we took as example a site which is being monetized by Google AdSense only) then take a really close lookup on the traffic stats and search engine rankings (if there is any, but I would not buy one without), can you improve the rankings? Are there still keywords the site is not being optimized for?
While monitoring the earnings and which channels work best for you, you can continue building your search engine rankings and optimizing the site (or its pages) for more keywords. After a month, you have most likely improved at least a bit the search engine rankings and slightly increased the traffic and you also have a more clear picture as of which ad blocks bring you the most revenue and which can be replaced with different revenue stream.
Once the changes have been applied and you have tried at least few other ways to monetize your new site (note just a few, not all ways. Just as you are willing to buy a site that has not used all the potential the same wants the next buyer to which you are willing to sell the site. But this applies on sites of which you want to get rid of).
The whole point is, how much money are you willing to make by selling this site? If the site you bought was bringing $20 a month and you bought it for $100 (which is 5 months of revenue) than expect to get those money back within 5 months. Keeping the site for three months in order to increase the revenue the site has most likely already pulled back the invested money (of course if you increased the revenue from other streams as well, and if you didn’t then tell me why in the earth you bought the site?) and in addition you have increased the value of the site presuming you now making $50 a month from the site and not $20 as the previous owner (yeah I like talking small numbers, but want to get impressed? Raise the numbers as many would do, but then we are one step far from the real things).
So you bought the site for $100 and you could sell it the next day for $200 (based on the revenue it was bringing) but now you have introduced other revenue streams to your site and increased the monthly revenue to $50 a month, which increases the value of the site during a sale to $500.
This is a method I use and apply only to sites for which I have no interest to keep them, but the only reason purchasing them is to flip and resell them for a higher price. And while increasing the revenue of the site I am constantly pulling back my investment of the purchase for the site.
Talking like this just with theories makes all stand somewhere between the sky and the ground and not credible much (but trust me it is doable and many are doing this actually even tho small revenue is being made but the hassle is worth as the work involved is minimal).
From other stand point of view writing an “theory” without actual examples gives me the space for a new post ;). If you want to follow up with me on this method for making money online subscribe to my RSS feed or have the post delivered via email in your inbox.
Flipping sites can be great. If you see a site for sale that you can quickly increase revenue it can be good.. I bought a site, changed the theme to an adsense optimized theme, waited a week, and sold it for double what i bought it.
Thats a great example of making money by flipping sites 😉 Fast, no time involved and money earned..