Buying, Managing & Selling Websites For Profit - Learn the Real Tricks of the Trade

One of my main focuses when I advise people who are interested in flipping sites is that it is important to build a business rather than just make some fast cash. Most people will complain that it is too hard to setup a “business” but in reality it is really rather simple. I’m not talking about registering a company, I’m talking about building something sustainable that won’t be affected by market trends. Find an evergreen market and something that will ALWAYS be in demand. This should also be your strength. Personally, I’m quite a good writer, so if it was me I’d identify article marketing and build a business around that.

In my previous articles, I have discussed flipping and emphasised the importance of up-selling. If you are ignoring the future value of a client then you are losing out on serious revenue and exposing yourself to market changes. We’ve all seen in recent month the demise of turnkey flipping, much to the delight of many of us, but it has also left many people without a business overnight. I’m a big fan of site flipping, but selling turnkey sites at inflated prices was always going to die, and it allows plenty of room for those of us who look to supply the market quality sites with established traffic or revenues. There will always be a market for websites, so those who have claimed it is a dying art are plain wrong, in my opinion

End of rant and back on topic: here’s a way that all of the flippers out there would still have a solid revenue stream to fall back on when their front end fails (i.e. sites stop selling for a premium). I haven’t scaled this model exactly, but I do use something very similar with my online and offline clients. My thought process for this model may be different to yours, so feel free to twist it as you feel fit. I’m using article writing as a service, but anything similar will do the trick. At this stage I don’t worry too much about the numbers, but at this point I’ll look at it in a very basic way.

First thing you want to identify is a price on your own time. For me, I won’t touch anything for less than $100 an hour, but when starting out let’s go for $20 per hour, as I’m sure most people will be happy with that when starting out.

To earn $20 an hour writing articles, you would be charging $10 for a 500 word article, assuming it takes 30 minutes of your time to write it.

What’s all this got to do with site flipping anyway? Well, this is my way to get clients and it really is quite simple. If you sell enough sites you will realise that more often than not, buyers are lazy and don’t want to change what already works for a site. This is why hosting works so well as an up-sell, and it works exactly the same with articles and anything else.

To keep it simple, and slightly stereotypical, let’s pretend we want to flip Wordpres blogs. If you browse the low end market at Flippa you will see how popular these sites are, but you can really sell these anywhere. I wouldn’t actually recommend Flippa for this, as it can get costly and our focus is making a profit on the backend and not being concerned about the sales price of the blogs. I do this with more established blogs, and to this day still have a solid weekly income from the backend.

I’m not going into details of how to build the blog, but it doesn’t need to be anything special. Make it yourself or outsource it and you want to have about 100 (you don’t need all of these at once but it will make life easier). Add some unique content to each blog (make it really good) – this is important as it is your sales point. Don’t forget to add all the regular blog parts: nice theme, auto-responder for an opt-in list. I’m not making this a tutorial for building blogs, so am afraid you will have to look elsewhere for that.

Once you’ve got the blogs ready, it’s time to start “flipping” them. As they are new sites it isn’t technically flipping, but the definition seems to have been used in this context more and more lately. This would work well anywhere. Flippa, DP, Ebay, Craigslist, Gumtree, any webmaster forum. You want to provide real value with the blog. None of this $297 rubbish, go for $47 or something like that. The profit isn’t made on the front end, just make sure it at least breaks even. From here your buyer thinks (and has) got a real bargain. This makes it a lot easier to offer articles as a service. I would usually say something like this:

“Thanks for purchasing mywordpressblog.com, I hope you are happy with your purchase so far. As you will know, finding reliable writers is always a problem for blogs which rely on quality content. My company offers blog posts for a very affordable $10 per week. Is this something you would be interested in? If so, please let me know on me@email.com”

As you can tell, I’m not much of a salesman, but it’s important to emphasise value and put doubt in their mind as to the availability of quality content writers. Most people know they can get articles done for $5 each, so the pricing of $10 is just enough that they will struggle to say no. Sell 100 blogs and have a 50% success rate signing people up for articles and you straight away have an extra $500 a week just for writing articles. Don’t forget to up-sell hosting, auto-responder services (Aweber has a good affiliate program) and before long you will have a solid “business” without relying on a single marketplace like many of the “site flippers” who have so recently seen their flipping go downhill.

With a little bit of thought and hard work, you can quickly build a business with multiple revenue streams and on auto-pilot (if you outsource). There’s really nothing difficult about it and it leaves you with no problems if one side of the business starts to struggle.