How’s that for a catchy headline?!

One of the main ways to make money from Flipping Websites is to buy a fixer upper type of website. The idea is simple, you buy an old crappy site with some hidden value and then you fix it up for resale at a higher valuation. Beyond just flipping websites you should consider making most of these improvements to any website. Of course another option is to hold onto the site which is often what we do.

Here some relatively simple things you can do to fix up a website. This will improve the experience for your users and hopefully improve the value of your asset.

Make your website lightning fast

Have you noticed how much Google loves speed? They even have a chart that in the Google Websmaster Tools that shows you how fast or slow your site is relative to other sites. So clearly making your site faster is essential.

To improve website do the following:

• Add caching
• Remove unnecessary http requests
• Remove extra database calls
• Make all images web friend and low file size
• Use CSS image sprites. (if you even know what that is your probably don’t need to be reading this)

Create Kickass Content

Why do people visit one website over another? More often than not it has to do with how useful/interesting/engaging/unique the content of that website is. If you don’t have compelling information on your site you’re dead in the water. Spend a couple hours writing something that you know is useful and interesting. Do that often and you’ll get more and more traffic over time.

To improve your content do the following:

• Create super useful content
• Make the content unique and highly relevant
• Add photos and graphics to enhance the content
• Use flickr creative commons images for free high quality imagery
• Add personality to the writing. Be a jackass or a trouble maker if you want to engage people.

Design

Less is more
Simplicity: easier said than done. If you can strip away everything that is not essential from your site you’ll probably do well with your site.

Logo
Hire a freelancer to build you a new logo at 99 Designs

Rebuild the site
Use odesk to find a web developer to rebuild the website

Search
People want information and they want it NOW! Look at how successful Google has become. All they do is let people search. That said, if your site doesn’t have a good search mechanism you’re losing out. Your visitors may not be able to find the information they need by simply navigating around your site. Google even offers Custom Search Engines that you can use. This essentially allows you to harness Google search for your own site.

Overall Usability
Usability is huge. Get your mom to try to use your website or someone who isn’t as web savvy as you are. It will blow your mind to see how non-digital natives use the web. Just keep your site simple and people will like it. Just look at the Google homepage…

Navigation is key
Is your site easy to use? Is the navigation across the site the same? If you force your users to have to learn your bizarre navigation scheme they will be turned off and probably go somewhere else to find the information they need.

Test test test
Be sure to test your site across all the other operating systems and browsers. Browsershots.org is handy for this. Of course if you write valid code you shouldn’t have to worry about this too much.

Search Engine Optimization

Honestly don’t worry too much about SEO. I’ll say that again DO NOT WORRY about SEO. It seems like people are always in search of the quick fix or the quick buck. They spend more time on SEO than on their actual content. Clearly this is ass backward. Obviously you need to do all the SEO basics but your focus should be on creating a really high quality experience for your users. If your content is not useful or relevant for your users all the SEO tricks in the world won’t help you. If you haven’t done the basics take a look at the information below. Otherwise skip ahead!

Use Good Page Titles
Make sure you use unique, consistent, and relevant titles on every page in your site. If you’ve done this already just be sure to check that the title’s are both short and relevant to the page. Just look at the title of this page! It’s catchy, interesting, and relevant.

External Linking
Be sure to link to relevant and respected sites that will be useful for your visitors. A spammy garbage website would have no external links because it would try to trap visitors and give them no way out. Whereas your kickass amazing best site ever has lots of links to government and educational websites in your niche because you want to provide great resources to your users.

Internal Linking
Make sure you use lots of internal links throughout your site in the text of your site. This not only makes it easier for people to get around on your site but you get to choose the anchor text and the link.

Headers
It is often said that a significant gain can be had from using headers properly. If you have a paragraph or subject that needs a heading use the correct header tag with relevant keywords. This is pretty obvious because if you are going to write good content you would do this anyway to improve readability.

Keywords
A small thing you can do is highlight your important keywords with a bold tag. Do this only it improves readability of your text.

Marketing

Build backlinks
Obviously building backlinks is a critical step in this process but often people forget that they can have some influence here. If you’re going to do some link building don’t forget to build deep links into your site for your various keywords. Don’t just use one keyword and send everyone to your doorstep.

Build an email list
You’ve done lots of work to get someone to show up at your website. Now what? They read something or find the piece of information they need and they bounce. ACK! One way to capture a visitor is to give them something really valuable in exchange for their email so you can stay in touch with them over time. For example on this website we give away a free ebook about flipping websites. Did you get your copy yet? Once you have their email only send them highly relevant and targeted information. Don’t spam the hell out of them. It doesn’t do anyone any good. The goal of this is to be able to stay in touch with people who come to your site. It is not to spam them. If you’re a douchebag spammer GTFO!

Use Social Media
I hate the term social media but there is certainly something to it. Give your users a variety of choices for communicating with you and staying in touch. Not everyone wants to be on another email list but they may want to follow you on Twitter, or become a fan on Facebook. Give them a choice…

Be Useful
Go out to other forums and websites in your niche and provide help, resources, or just post comments to let people know you exist. If you do this in a non-douchey way and you actually help people, you’re chances of getting a link back will improve dramatically. Do this in an altruistic fashion. Meaning be genuinely useful and don’t expect anything in return. It’s all about the Karma bitches.

Guest posts
Find the biggest blog in your niche and do a guest post for them. Many big bloggers don’t have time to write the massively awesome content that you can create for them. So offer to write free content for them in exchange for a link with the anchor text you want of course.

That’s enough for now. I’ll add more later.

[photo by nikonvscanon]

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