What is your most successful business model for creating a site to sell?

What business model is best for creating a site to sell and How to build and sell a guitar site are not the same. i would have a different approach for each of these.

For creating and selling sites, there are a few different types that most sites fit into:

1. Verifiable earnings
Sites that make money that can be verified by the seller seem to sell very easily and for random multiples of monthly or yearly income.

2. Potential
Sites that don't have verifiable income basically are sold on potential. These usually sell for much less then sites that make money.

3. Cheap and fast
These go by all kinds of names, turnkey, template, autoblog. On flippa, there are tons of sites that are put up for sale a few days after the domain was registered.

About a year ago I started making sites with the intention to sell them. Most of them were of the non-verifiable income variety. What I started seeing right away was that sites with potential were sitting around not selling, and selling for less and less month after month. I could see that I was not going to make enough money to sell any of my made-to-sell sites right away.

Now there are levels of potential, things that can make your site easier to sell for more money:
- actual traffic
- unique content
- quality of domain name
- high quality backlinks
- lots of backlinks
- old website
- old non-dropped domain
- PageRank
- search engine rankings for keywords
- exact match domain for high volume/high CPC search phrase

Go to this page - http://flippa.com/buy/sold - and look around. These are sites that have sold. In particular, look at
- sites that were established in the last few days/weeks/months that actually sold
- usernames who have sold lots and lots of sites

You should start seeing some patterns of why certain sites sold and for how much. There are some sellers that sell nearly the same setup/template over and over again...many times a few days after registering the domain name. Looking at these types of sites grouped together, you can see the ones that sold for more, ones that sold quickly, and might find some markets that are worth your time to target.

https://flippa.com/buy?filterby=cust...ksearch=Search

That search shows all auctions with keyword guitar and should give you a few good ideas about how other people have made money with guitar sites and what they have been selling for, along with what sites did not sell.

Many sites with only potential can be sold but may rely heavily on how motivated the seller is to sell, and usually this means accepting less money then seller really wants. Sites that make verifiable income have many more motivated buyers.

A few people here say they have bought crappy sites from flippa with decent domain names, removed the site, and sold the domain elsewhere for profit. I also look for original looking sites with crappy domain names that can easily be improved by switching the domain name with a much better one.

To answer your original question on the best model to sell sites IMO:

1. Buy sites that are making money already and improve earnings. Be able to prove it.

2. Make sites with the intention to make money. Install analytics. Promote the site. Make some money that you can verify (affiliate, adsense, clickbank, whatever). Track and document earnings.

3. Fix up old unwanted sites, sites that have some of the potential factors already, and monetize them. analytics. Promote. Make some money that you can verify.

4. try to match as many of the desired potential variables as possible.

Many options in between

LAST. Make turnkey/template/autoblog type sites.