Website flipping is a thriving business today. It is the process of buying a website that you think has the potential of being improved and then later selling it for a profit. The term “flipping” originally comes from the real estate business, where people would often buy properties, and after a little renovation work on it, sell them for huge profits. In these days of economic recession where most other media of investment is showing declining results, site flipping is showing promise of great dividends. Website flipping however requires a certain informed judgment and discernment to make a success out of it.
How to flip websites
The first step in flipping websites for profit is to find a website that is in the same niche in which you want to promote yourself. Once you have found the niche that you are interested in, finding websites for sale in that niche is not too difficult. There are many websites that list sites for sale like BuySellWebsites.com. These sites allow you to place your bid to get sites at low prices.
The most important thing to remember while flipping websites is that websites with potential can be bought for as low as a few hundred dollars. Once you have bought the website you will start with a process called value addition. There are plenty of ways you can improve a website. For example, you can add more content that is related to the website which users will find relevant. Adding Google AdSense to the website is another way of monetizing the site. If the niche products have related products selling on Amazon or Click Bank, add these to the site.
Another great way of value edition is by building an email mailing list. For this, you can add an opt-in box to the website. Once you have completed the value additions and you start seeing money trickling in, the time for site flipping has come. You can use the services of the same websites which you used to buy the website in the first place. You can now expect a price of around 7 to 12 times the monthly income generated by your website.
Flipping websites for profit
Flipping websites for profit, however, needs a marketing strategy if you should make a success out of it. In fact, you could call flipping websites for profit an art that can be mastered.
When buying and selling websites, the most important aspect that you will have to keep in mind is the revenue of the sites. Here is where you will need to implement a business plan. In-depth revenue statistics are required if you must know the true financial feasibility of the website. You should collect as much revenue data about the site that you are planning to buy; data from at least a year back is recommended. If it is a new website, then try to collect data from the start. The most successful business strategy would be to buy a site where the revenue has been steadily increasing every month, or at the least, where the revenue remains constant for some months.
While buying websites, don’t fall for those which have generated large revenue last month because of a new event or a trending topic. This is because certain events and trends have only a small shelf life in terms of public interest.
Value addition for site flipping
Increasing the value of sites before you flip websites is important when you flip websites for profit. The two key points to improve our revenue and traffic. Most websites that are put up for sale are neglected and traffic to these sites has lessened. But if the website niche itself has potential, then there are a lot of things that can be done to improve the rating of the website.
Increasing revenue should be your first target during makeovers. Redo the site’s ad layouts. Change some colors and positions of some AdSense units and you may suddenly see a great improvement in the click-through ratio. One must remember that humans have a tendency to read the webpage diagonally. This is why placements of ad units strategically are important.
Too many flashy graphics distract and too many outbound links draw away attention. Arrange everything in such a manner that people do have not much choice but to leave the website by clicking on an ad. Most people will not click an ad if they know that it is an ad. So the strategy is to present an ad unit in such a way that it does not appear like an ad.
Increasing traffic is the next important aspect to improve while looking at flipping websites. To do this, you will first need to get search engines to rank your site very high. SEO and more SEO is the key to this. This should just take about half an hour every day and anyways you will be selling off the site in a couple of months. So, all your hard work should pay off when you go in for site flipping.
Article marketing, blogs, and social bookmarking are some strategies to get the search engines to notice you. Blog comments can help in a great way. Follow blogs belonging to the niche and submit sensible and pertinent comments and of course, obey rules like using URLs only in the URL field. You can make your comment stick and at the same time get maximum linking benefits.
Build some backlinks and examine all your content to make sure that they are search engine optimized. Quality content is now turning out to be the winner compared to content that simply had some words put around keyword phrases.
How to flip websites is an art that can be mastered using business plans and marketing strategies and a little common sense, added with the skill to move fast after observing results in the ever-changing world of the internet.