Improve Your Internet Marketing

Website “flipping” has become a very hot topic. Unfortunately, most marketers who try to develop a business in flipping websites fail. A quick perusal of Sitepoint or Digital Point demonstrates this - only a small fraction of website auctions result in a sale.

(EDIT: Matt Mickiewicz, one of SitePoints founders, stopped by to point out “Approximately 36% of the auctions on SitePoint’s Marketplace end with a winner being declared.” See comment below).

Website flipping can be extremely lucrative - just not the way most new “flippers” are going about it. Here is Part 1 of a 3-part series on successful flipping, how to build a site to flip.

While flipping may seem like “buying & selling a business”, there are important and subtle distinctions. Flipping generally implies that the site was developed expressly for the purpose of reselling it at a profit. This is different from “buying & selling a business” where the main objective is the actual business.

The most important factors in making a website valuable, either to sell or buy, are traffic, revenue, and unique content. In fact, any two of those three will equal success.

If a site has traffic and revenue, for instance, there will always be buyers for it. With traffic and unique content, there will still be buyers who know how to monetize the traffic. Content and revenue? Buyers who know how to build traffic. You get the point.

Building a site to flip is not too much different from building a site to keep, but there are some important things to keep in mind.

When you are flipping a site, it is imperative that you show ‘proof’ of your stats. The very first thing you should do, therefore, is install Google Analytics on the site. You will not get a buyer simply by stating how much traffic your site gets; you must be able to post screenshots.

Never build a site on a sub-domain. Whatever links or Pagerank you get will not be able to be transferred - unless you transfer the top-level domain with it.

Also, keep a record of all your expenses. Buyers want to know what it costs to maintain the site, which means hosting, how much you might have spent on PPC, etc.

When building a site for flipping, you must of course consider how it will be monetized. The 3 main methods are product sales, advertising, and membership fees.

The method you choose will depend a lot on your niche and how you plan to generate traffic. For instance, it may be lucrative to generate traffic via Pay Per Click (PPC) to a product sales site, while the same method will likely prove unprofitable for an advertising model (”Adsense Arbitrage”).

In part 2 of this series, we’ll look at setting up a site and generating traffic.