8/29/2011

Make Money Online via Blog or Site Flipping

Recently I sold one of my websites – a DoFollow Blog Directory that I had launched exactly 10 months back. I am not really into website flipping nor did I make any good money from this particular deal. Basically due to pressure from my regular job I was not finding much time to manage my websites and blogs. As you might have noticed, I have not been regular on DollarShower.com as well.
Though I am not an expert in the area of blog flipping, I already realize its potential to make money online. In this post, let me share my first experience of site flipping and general guidelines for those who want to get into the online flipping business.

What is website flipping?

In layman terms, website flipping is the business of buying and selling websites. Essentially when you are doing site flipping business, you are doing one of the following things:
1. Buy a new domain, build website or blog content around it, scale it and sell it for a profit
2. Buy an existing website or blog, improve it and sell it
Needless to say, when the website is a blog and when you sell the same, it is called blog flipping.

Types of flipping

As you probably recall, domain flipping (the art of registering/buying domain names and selling them) was a major business in late 90s and early 2000. Getting a shorter meaningful domain name was considered a major thing then and those who got into that act early enough made thousands of dollars in no time.
The website flipping is not exactly having the same business potential but it can be a profitable business if done carefully.

Short term flipping

In the case of short term flipping, you buy and keep a number of websites, build minimal content or improvise existing content and flip for a relatively small margin in a short time span, say less than a couple of months. In such a business model, one needs to have several websites under his ownership to make any meaningful profit.

Flip long term asset

Many people own websites or blogs that are meant for long term regular income generation. At times, they might decide to sell it of due to change in lifestyle, family status, regular work status, need for money etc and this is more about long term flipping. In this case, the seller may not be exactly looking at replicating the success of this model again.
Though there are not clearly defined categories, the above mentioned categories are what I have generally seen. Please pitch in if I am wrong in my assumption here.

Tips for successful site flipping

1. Minimize initial investment

Since we consider flipping as a business, obviously low-investment, high-return should be the strategy. Hence initial investment on domain name registration, picking a shared hosting service, buying themes/web development services etc should be as minimal as possible. One should go for cheapest domain names and reuse of existing hosting accounts, free themes etc wherever applicable.

2. Improve rapidly

The improvement on the website in terms of content, link building, social network presences etc should be done at a rapid pace that you can minimize the total time duration and hold period before you flip the site. Typically, this should be something like less than two or three months.

3. Brand it to improve value

If you can spend a little more money on a good logo, a decent theme, overall coordinated social presence and collaboration, that would definitely add value to the entity to be flipped.

4. Care about ranks and stats

One of the things that potential buyers are crazy about is the ranks and stats. Good Google page rank, traffic ranks and search positioning etc add a lot of value to your site while flipping the same. You have to also care about not degrading the same while the auction is in progress.

5. Monetize before you flip

Most of the time, websites that already make money definitely get sold faster than others with monetizing potential but not yet monetized. Also, adding proof of income to the auction list will add more value.

6. Flip while it is still scaling high

One needs to sell a website that is going up in ranks and stats and almost reaching the peak with your optimized efforts. Nobody would really buy sites that are not active and going down in ranks for a while. So timing is very important as well. Other things to consider are the time of domain registration or hosting renewal – you should be able to sell your sites before such recurring expenses take place.

7. Price it right

The bidding (or auction) process needs you to set your BIN (Buy-It-Now) price and threshold price or the minimum price at which you are willing to sell. A good BIN price would be something like 10x your current income from the site though it depends a great deal on a lot of parameters such as age of domain, content quality, income pattern etc. Also, a lot of young bloggers do not really count the effort that they have put in to write blog posts while selling their sites. You have to really price the site right including the intellectual property value and associated efforts.

8. Proper propaganda for optimum sell price

Once you have your bid listed, you need to really promote the sale intention via blog posts, twitter, facebook etc. I didn’t quite do this and hence resulted in low interest of a potentially good site. Also, you should be available for answering queries from potential buyers and also approve their bids on time.
The following article talks about 20 sites where you can flip or sell your website, blog or domains. I used Flippa.com in my particular case.

My flipping story

I sold DoFollowBlogsList.com for a mere $160 and that price didn’t do justice to the coding work I did, if not for anything else. However, I didn’t want to hold it anyhow and I am sure the person who bought it can actually flip it for twice of thrice that price in a few months from now.
Though, I do not believe that site flipping is not a consistent means of making money on the Internet, it can work in your favor at times.
Happy blog flipping!

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