How to Make $22,000 Flipping a Site on DigitalPoint

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Have you ever wanted how some people can buy a site and turn around in a remarkably short period of time and resell the site for a drastically higher price?

Well in this article you are going to learn how you too can learn to buy and sell websites like a pro.  Once you learn these techniques you will be able to discern good deals, snatch them quickly, monetize them and resell them for a decent profit.

In fact you may not even want to sell it once you have learned these strategies, instead you may want to keep the site and continue to build and develop it into a long-term income generating site.

Flipping I real estate is quite similar to flipping residential or commercial property. The same principles that will bring success in selling property are very much the same as those that work when selling websites. If you think about it the only difference is the Internet is a virtual zone which actually has many benefits, both in buying and selling websites.

I like to write articles in steps, I find they are easier to follow and provide an easy way of summarizing what we have learned at the end of the article. So I am going to provide each step and then elaborate, giving more detailed information on the pros and cons and what not. Please bear with me through this article, I already anticipate it being pretty large…

#1 – Discover your niche -
Many webmasters dabble in everything and while some of them are successful the vast majority of them have huge potential they are wasting because they are not focusing on their niche. You may get differing opinions on this subject but the fact is, if you focus on your individual niche and build up a website/s in this niche you will be much more likely to become successful. Successful people just tend to do what they are good at, sometimes they become good because of what they do but generally they are fine-tuning a skill they have already obtained.

How do to determine your niche?
You can use a tool such as Google Trends to get some ideas to start from… enter keywords related to subjects you are passionate and knowledgeable in.  Maybe you will get some ideas for websites that interest you. If you are a professional guitar player perhaps you would like to acquire a website which teaches people how to master guitar playing.

Maybe it is easier for you to just go to DigitalPoint MarketPlace or SitePoint MarketPlace and browse what is up for sale, sometimes you will notice sites related to niches you are interested in but wouldn’t have thought of right off the top of your head.  Its okay to browse sites now but before buying anything you should read the rest of the article.

Perhaps your not that concerned about the niche… you just want to get started with some advice on actually buying and selling sites… so we’ll move into step #2. (if you still need advice on step #1 just comment on the article)

#2 – Finding a website –
If your looking to flip a site quickly, that is to say buy a site and then resell it using the same medium but for a higher price, I would recommend the following sites: DigitalPoint MarketPlace, SitePoint MarketPlace, NamePros, and Webmaster-Talk. You can go to any of these sites and browse whats up for sale. And at this time none of these sites charge the buyers any fees so you will only be paying for the site itself. The first two sites mentioned, DigitalPoint and SitePoint are good places to buy and sell… the latter two I would recommend only for buying. Sites don’t usually go for as high of prices on Webmaster-Talk or NamePros… I have got some wicked deals on both of these sites.

When browsing these marketplaces, again look out for sites related to your niche, which have targeted and brandable domain names and which are established. Traffic is not a big deal, if it comes with some then that is cool, if not we can build that up later.

You should watch out for sites that are selling with high quality domains, preferably .com domains. These are getting harder and harder to find so the value of a established site with a excellent .com is rising steadily.
Don’t buy extremly long domains or those that have numerous dashes, underscores or other nonesense. For instance who wants Make-Money-Online-Money-Making.com yet people try and sell them… something like the following is less desirable then if it had no dashes but still is a fairly good name since it makes sense and is not overly long: Make-Money-Online.com – that name is actually worth pretty good due the niche its in.
The name is not everything but to alot of people, including myself, it means a great deal.

What I do need to warn you about is fraud, like any heavily trafficked marketplaces the above sites do attract crooks. Users who sell sites they don’t own, sites they own but don’t intend to transfer or sites they are selling multiple times even though they no longer own them. All of these have been seen on the above forums. To be careful of such schemes you should check out users reputation, how long they have been registered, if they are on DP, SP or NP(forgive my abbreviations) do they have iTrader or reputation from previous sales? If a new user without feedback is selling a site which claims to have high traffic/revenue I would be very leery of it. Look into it very carefully before buying the site… you can also buy under the condition that it is transferred before payment… this will only work out if you have good reputation on your end

Ask users to prove all traffic and revenue, this is also very important. Even webmasters you might consider honest don’t always feel it needful to inform buyers that they have used PPC to advertise. This means they might have gotten 15,000 people last month, but they paid for them. If you don’t realize this beforehand you might assume the traffic is organic and will continue. So check all traffic stats carefully and ask questions… the only stupid question is the one you never asked. If you get shady responses then  can the deal…

In this article we are mainly looking for sites to flip so we will not be delving too deep into starting websites from scratch but for the benefit of the beginners here who want to try their hand at starting a website from scratch I will try and explain some of it. If you are just interested in buying websites then skip down to step #3

A. Registering a domain name
First we need to find a domain name that is suitable to our niche. I recommend GoDaddy because their domains are cheap and they update the NameServers on domains fast… some of you are muttering “and?”  – in simple terms your NameServers(NS for short) is what allows you to host files on your site. It is basically the connection between your registrar, specifically your domain name and your hosting.

So now that we got that straight, click the above link. Once at GoDaddy enter some keywords related to your niche that make sense and are brandable. For instance lets try LearnGuitar, but when the results come back we discover that the .com is unavailable, whenever possible you should always register the .com.  Your site will be worth more with a .com then many other alternative TLDs and if it should become popular you will lose traffic to the .com TLD if you don’t own it.

We seem to be having trouble locating a suitable .com domain for our site so I am going to try a free tool called DomainsBot and see what it locates. I enter Master Guitar into the form box and press enter, without going to the second page I find a fairly good domain. The domain is: MasterGuitarPlaying.com – since this is an illustrative search for a domain we will not go any further. I think you have got the point… you of course can now copy the domain name over into GoDaddy and register it. You could go on and do other searches, DomainsBot is extremly good and finds really great names… if you got some cash to spend you can even find some domains that are for sale for fairly cheap(couple hundred bucks)

Atleast that gets you started on discovering a domain name to purchase… take a while and get used to searching around and look for some really good names. You might be surprised.When you got one move on to Step B.

B. Web Hosting
Perhaps one of the most competitive fields on the internet today is web hosting. The problem is that while many sites offer wicked deals, all web hosting is not created equal. When looking for hosting you want the following:

• Reliability
• Affordability
• Large Bandwidth Availability
• Easy Access to Control Panel
• Tools for Beginners
• Ability to Run Multiple Sites

There is a host I recommend which offers all the above. They have outstanding reliability, they are very affordable, especially for webmasters new to the game, they offer extremely large bandwidth loads, they have a easy-to-use control panel for administering a web site even if you have no previous experience. And you can host multiple sites on the same account. It is HostGator, everyone I have recommended loves them. For $7.95 you get unlimited(truly) bandwidth and disk space, unlimited domains(host as many sites as you want) as well as a no-questions-asked 45 day money back guarantee. So you have nothing to lose… if you decide after 40 days this is not for you you can get that whopping $7.95 back.

C. Setup a Website
The easiest and most common method of starting a website is to download WordPress blog software from WordPress.org. It is completely free and very customizable. If you purchased hosting from the above link you will get Fantastico which allows you to install WordPress as well as tons of other scripts free with the click of a button.

You can decide to develop each page individually if you like but it is recommended you just install WordPress for now. If you plan to just flip the site you will have put far less time into a WordPress blog then a full-fledged website built from scratch.

WordPress allows webmasters to write content quickly, mange it and customize their templates with ease. You will love it!

D. Develop Content
At this point you will need to develop content. Login to your blog and start writing some content, another cool feature of WordPress blogs is that you can now upload media. So if you create video tutorials on playing guitar you can upload them and embed them in your WordPress posts very easily. It is recommended that you also write a small article along-side your video as well. This provides some content for long-tail seo and also helps attract links…

Write unique articles, you can get ideas by searching Google or YouTube to find what people want but always create your own unique articles and videos. Never just copy them. One of the first thing DPers(Digital Point members) ask when buying a site is if the content on the site is unique and CopyScape.com passed. If the answer is no the sites tend to sell for much less unless they have wicked revenue.

For more details on this process please see step #4…

#3. – I found a site, how much should I pay for it?
Since your new to buying and selling sites I would recommend you try and get the site for less than 12 months income. You will have far lower risk since you should easily be able to resell it as is for the same price or even somewhat higher. It gives you leeway for error in starting out.

But if you want more specific advice here goes… check the revenue sources. If the site is monetized using Adsense or another form of contextual PPC type ads then there might be alot of room for improvement in monetization without even increasing traffic. For instance if the site is making $100/month from Adsense then there is a very good chance it can make $1000+ per month off affiliate income. Remember our guitar site example? Well if we do a little searching for affiliate programs related to guitar courses we might come up with the following course(which I highly recommend BTW) which gives $75 per sale, LearnandMasterGuitar.com

All we have to make is two sales per month to beat our Adsense revenue so it is easy to see that we could double or even quadruple our revenue very easily just by switching to affiliates. At this point we could turn around and take that site we bought for $1200($100 X 12 months) and resell it for $6-9K quite easily.  We put maybe a couple hours at most into this site since purchase and we have made $4800? That is outrageous but it is real, this is not bogus pie in the sky nonesense. I do this all the time, only I have kept many of the sites I have bought as long-term income generators.
But remember this scenario is if the only thing you do is change the revenue venue… if you increase traffic you will be able to see a much higher revenue increase. Is the flipping websites idea starting to appeal to you?

If the site is already using affiliate ads, perhaps they should be changed. Maybe the product/course the owner is advertising is really not that great. Maybe the advertisements were created using paint. Many sites use affiliate ads but don’t do any research on what works and what doesn’t. They just pick one that looks like it pays good and install it. You should look into this before buying the site and research alternatives and ideas for changing the affiliate configuration around. The best buys are those with adsense though as they can be quickly changed, you can spend a month promoting it and turn around and sell the site for $1,000′s more than you paid. How would you like flipping a site for $6-9K profit?

#4. – How can I increase traffic?
Increasing traffic is not as hard of an ordeal as you might think. It is far easier for an established site which is already gaining traffic but even for a site which gets little to no traffic it only takes a little work to start the ball rolling. Just stick with it and don’t give up.

The first method is creating content… “but wait…” I can hear someone saying, “haven’t we already discussed that?” – yes indeed. If you skipped the Starting your Website from Scratch section please go back to it and look for step D.  I could copy and paste it here again but the article is already getting pretty long.

When writing keep the long-tail in mind… long-tail keywords are generally phrases which have little to no competition and for which a ranking can be obtained usually as easy as creating an article with the said keyword in the title. These long-tail keywords can get anywhere from a few searches a day to a couple hundred.

You can research some good long-tail keywords by going to Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool or by using Keyword Elite. I love Keyword Elite, it builds large lists of  great keywords with low competition, it is easier to mange and export lists and has tons of options Google doesn’t offer. So if you got the money buy Keyword Elite, it is an investment you won’t regret – enter a number of keywords. For instance if you are creating an article on how to save money for college you might try “How to Save Money for College”, “Saving Money for School”, “Planned Savings for College” and “College Budgets”

We find the keyword “how to save money for college” averages 300 searches a month and is not overly competitive. While 300 searches may not seem like much it does add up fast… think about it. If you can write an article each day which averages 100 searches a month, by the end of the month you will have 3,000 uniques from just assumed long-tail searches. This is not counting other long-tail phrases that Google picks up that we had not accounted for, direct traffic and links or for other keywords you begin to rank for. So to build up 6-10K unique vistors in one month really is not that hard. It just takes patience and dedication to your content. If you think about it. If you can build 3,000 uniques the first month, by the end of the year you should have at least a minimum of over 100,000 uniques each month assuming no growth in competitive rankings(high traffic keywords) and no real growth in links and direct traffic.

As you can see the potential is really boundless and the ability to create a high traffic site in a matter of months or even weeks is not a fairy tale. You really can do it! Unfortunately it does take time and effort, so if your a lazy bum looking for free money now is your chance to shut your computer down and run to the sofa.

…other methods of bringing in traffic:

Social BookMarking
There are many plugins you can use on a WordPress blog to allow users to help submit your articles to social bookmark sites. I recommend you install one of these. You can submit your articles to sites such as Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Technorati, Furl, Propeller, Newsvine, StumbleUpon and many others. It is usually best to submit your best articles to these sites and let them get the traffic then to flood the sites with all your articles. The latter sometimes ruins the effect of any of your articles.

Ping
Many social bookmarking and news sites offer the ability to ping them when you post a new article to your blog, this is useful and generally produces some traffic. I recommend you ping Technorati… well actually here is a site which you can ping a bunch of services at once from. Check out Pingomatic
Pinging popular news sites and networks usually gets your posts indexed within 24 hours as well which is a plus.

Frequent Niche Forums
Frequent the respected and popular forums in your niche, become known and gain a reputation by posting helpful and contributive posts. Some of these forums allow links in sigs, take advantage of this but do not spam your links on the forum. The link value from a signature is worthless but the reputation and traffic gained can be very nice.

Comment on Authority Blogs
Find the authority blogs in your niche, let your face be seen often so that people begin to realize that you are the guy(or gal)  who is always bringing a new perspective to posts. Don’t post links inside your comments to your OWN sites… this will ruin your reputation. And usea your REAL name(first name and last inital is fine) and NOT keywords. This si frowned upon…  The traffic gained from just commenting something useful on authority blogs can be outstanding, I know some of my colleagues get 5-10K visitors a month just from this and its how some of them have become respected in their niches.

BTW a contributing and useful comment is NOT any of the following:

“Great post, check out my article on the same subject”

“I wrote about this sometime ago… want to check it out?”

“Nice topic, I hope people understand like I do”

I tried to write the way people comment… these comments are worthless and from my perspective would only be written by nobodies, definitely people who would not qualify for links on any of my sites.

Guest Bloggers
If you can get a reputed professional in your niche to write a article on your blog it will bring in both traffic and links. Whether it is one article or long-term the benefits can be amazing, sometimes the same article written by yourself wouldn’t have gotten dugg… but now that it is written by someone well known in the niche it will get dugg(using the popular expression for digg.com) and put your site on the map at the same time.

Publish Articles
While it is good to get professionals to write on your own blog it is also good to write for other authority blogs in your niche. I am not talking about publishing your articles in article directories. In fact I highly recommend you do not do that, they bring in little traffic and very little link-bait. Not worth your time and effort… your articles can be put to better use.

Instead you need to publish your articles on actual blogs and sites in your niche, sites which are recognized as authorities. Sometimes good content only needs to be presented to the world, this is a good way to do that.

BTW I am talking about writing unique articles to publish, DO NOT re-publish your blog articles on other sites.
#5. – Learning to Monetize a Site
We had given a few tips in step #3 to illustrate an example… if I seem like I am bouncing around I apologize, some of these steps intermingle and it is sometimes easier to explain different steps by combining methods for illustrative purposes so please bear with me.

I will go through some of the main methods and give you the pros and cons of each:

• Google Adsense and other contextual advertising
  If your going to use contextual advertising I recommend Adsense, it is the easiest to get started with and has decent CPC. You can use the Google Adwords Tool to find high paying keywords to target for your blog. That way you increase the income per click.
  Pros: Fast and easy to get started. Clicks are easier to generate then sales so in a high CPC(cost per click) niche you might make $1-3+ per click which adds up nicely.
  Cons: You will never make a killing off one click as you could with affiliates. In many niches clicks sell for 25 cents or less so it takes a long time to earn $100/day whereas, again, with affiliates you could make alot more with the same traffic.
  I don’t recommend Adsense for most websites. Sometimes it is the best solution if suitable Affiliates cannot be found but try your options, try different affiliates. See what converts best for your specific niche
• Affiliate Commissions
  Affiliates are awesome, you can make anything from $5-500 for one sale or lead depending on what you are promoting. My average commission per sale is $100… if you have a high traffic site it doesn’t take long for these commissions to add up. I have heard of sites making $50K with AdSense switching to affiliates and making over $500K with the same traffic.
  • Commission Junction
    This is one of my favorites. It offers an easy way to find affiliate programs that are suited to your niche, compare them and then decide on the best one/s. After this creating and installing the code is extremly easy. Acceptance into these programs is higher(sometimes automated) compared with applying seperately to each program. So there are benefits to going through a network like CJ. CJ also provides information on average 3 mont and 7-day EPC to give you an idea of what is converting best. Very useful!
  • ClickBank
    While this service can be good and I do use it, I would recommend you approach it with caution. There are many affiliates that go through ClickBank to pawn their worthless junk. I will NEVER advertise a piece of software or any service I cannot honestly recommend. For instance I have affiliate ads on my seo site for Seo Elite and Keyword Elite not because they have the best payouts but because I use them and can recommend them.  It helps build trust between your readers and yourself… if you are advertising garbage your readers will soon figure it out and may stop reading your blog. But if you advertise stuff that really works they will buy anything upon your recommendation… the advantages to advertising quality stuff are better than using the high converting junk affiliates.
  • Other Affiliate Networks and Programs
    There are many programs and networks I could have listed… but for the sake of time I have whittled it down to the two that I use most frequently, CJ being the #1. There are affiliate programs that do not go through CJ or any other affiliate network. You can find these only by doing google searches for your niche.  You can also find other networks to try out… do some research and see what works best for your niche.
• Advertisements, Placement and Size
  The best way to sell an affiliate product is to review it… however sometimes you just want to put up ads for the product. Believe it or not size and position of ads can greatly influence CTR…. many times its the smaller over the large ads that convert well. Do some testing, move ads around, see what converts best. After a few months of testing I figure out what is converting best and stick to it for a while… fluctuating the ads every few months can be a good idea though to keep everything fresh. Refrain from using those tower ads, because of the over-use of such ads they convert far worse than many of the smaller 150X150 or similiar ads.

#6. – Sell the Site
At this point you may want to keep the site, it may be worth more to you long term then the initial sale. But if you are just looking to flip sites then here are some tips for you.

Go back to DigitalPoint and SitePoint. I recommend listing on either or both of these sites.
Describe the site thoroughly and write a targeted and attractive title. Try and include in the title the traffic and revenue… the latter being very important. The title is crucial, perk interest and grab ahold of the users looking for revenue generating sites.

In your description, describe how easily you built up the traffic and revenue(don’t go into steps, just make it clear that you did this in less than a few months). Provide proof of traffic and revenue… be careful to edit the screenshots to black out anything that the public should not see(such as on Adsense screenshots). Also watermark the images so they can’t be stolen…

Try and get 18-24 months profit out of the site… if it is making $1000+ each month this should not be hard to do.
Explain all the high points of the site, the excellent domain name, the high conversion rates, the large FeedBurner and reader stats… etc etc – all of this adds to the value of the site and will make it easier to sell. Even explain how the site could be better monetized, your not perfect, let the buyer know that, it can be used to your advantage in a higher sale price.

Remember we originally purchased the site for $1,200. We can now sell it for about $24,000 give or take. We made a killing, a outlandish, unbelievable sale from 1-3 months of work. For someone new to this game that is excellent profit. If you took 3 months developing this site you will be making an average of $100,000-300,000 a year. As you get better at the game you will probably want to keep some of these sites for long term income, so your profits are only limited by your goals and foresight and your ability to see a plan through

Some webmasters will be skeptical of your ability to make this kind of profit from flipping sites on DP. If you follow the above steps carefully and put time and effort into the site you should have no trouble making good sales. I wish you luck as you try your hand at flipping websites. Post your comments and your stories here… I would love to hear how you make out on  your first sale.

Disclaimer: Although these methods DO work and I have used them myself I cannot make personal guarantees to YOUR success. The articles found on this site are meant to be used as reference material.  We are not responsible for any loss of money due to your use of said principles.

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