Website Flipping Guide

There are many ways that you can work online from home to make money. One way that is becoming popular with people who have an entrepreneurial spirit is website flipping.

Flipping websites is like flipping real estate: you buy something that is neglected, improve it and sell it for a profit. Sometimes you don't even have to improve it: if the site has traffic (or the house has tenants) it will bring in money for you without you doing anything and still maintain its resale value.

There are two approaches depending how much money you have to start, whether you have time to work on it, and your interests.

1. Buy a brand new 'turnkey' site

Most people start with this and it is a good way to learn if you have not owned websites before. Somebody will have registered the domain and set up the site and you can have a lot of fun learning all about how to maintain it, add information, build traffic etc. If you put in the time then in a year or so you should have some income from it and you can sell it as an established site for a good profit.

There are two main dangers with turnkey sites. One is that tons of other people have the exact same site and some of them will be better at attracting traffic than you are. It is best to either buy a site with original content, or edit the content after you own it so that your site is unique.

The other danger is that you may not do anything with it. It will sit on the internet for a year or two costing you money for hosting and bringing in no income. If you are not going to develop the site then you should not buy a brand new site ... see the next section.

2. Buy an established site that is already making money

An established site will cost you more in the beginning but you will not have to do so much work because it should already have traffic coming to it. If the traffic is generated from search engines you should be able to let it run on autopilot.

Most established sites are priced for sale on the basis of their current income, with the price usually being between 12 and 24 months income. Some sites make a lot of money and will therefore be expensive. A site that has been running for a year or two without much traffic will have a low income and can be picked up for not much more than the price of a brand new site.

What you get depends on your capital and the technology that you are comfortable with. A site that is based around online games is going to require some programming knowledge while an information-based site made up of articles on a popular subject will be much easier to maintain.

In order to profit from the sites that you purchase the best thing to do is to increase the levels of traffic which are reaching them. This is easy to do in a number of FREE ways and you can find out more at The 10 Stage Traffic Method

You do need to do your due diligence when you are buying a site. Keep in mind that anything that is shown to you as an image (sales records, site statistics etc) can be faked. Nobody is going to let you log into their accounts to check the information for yourself, so you need to look for other indicators of whether the results are likely to be true.

For a static site, one way to do this is to take some keywords from the site, enter these into Google and see where the site shows up. You can ask what keywords the site owner is aiming to optimize for or you can guess from the headings on the home page. But keep in mind that sometimes a lot of traffic will come in from a keyword that appears on the site completely by chance.

For a blog, you can look through the recent posts to see if they have comments. This is a good indicator of traffic. If the site has a forum, is it lively? Be cautious if there were suddenly a lot of forum posts or blog comments in a very short time just before the site went on sale, however. This may mean the site owner has paid people to post to make the site look more popular than it is.

You can check other things too. Use a backlink checker tool to find an estimation of how many backlinks there are in Google and Yahoo. Look up the site in the Way Back Machine to be sure it was never anything nasty in the past.

There will be a learning curve and you will pick up many things from experience. So even if you have a lot of money to spend, it is probably best not to buy a very expensive site when you first venture into website flipping. It is better to buy several cheaper sites when you are just beginning to work online from home flipping websites.

The other important aspect of website flipping is building a list, both for those niche websites and blogs that you have purchased and also for your main business i.e. those people who may want to buy the website so that you can profit.

A great step-by-step ebook which I recommend you take a look at is List Sneakiness.

The great thing about this way of making money is that if you buy it at the price of 12 months income and leave it running on autopilot, you should make your money back in one year and then you can sell the site on for the same price or more. So you have doubled your money in a year without doing anything. This is a much better rate of return than you will get on virtually any investment that you can think of.

If you do a little work on it, you can increase the income during that year and then sell it for 12-24 times your increased income. You can get your money back many times over that way.