Flipping Websites

The Art of Buying and Selling Websites

Flipping Websites vs Flipping Domains

October 27th, 2009 comments »

Flipping Websites vs Flipping Domains

Flipping websites and flipping domain names are both profitable ways to make some money online. While the concept is similar the actual practice of flipping websites is quite different from flipping domains.

Flipping websites is usually a longer-term and more profitable endeavor. On the other hand domain flipping yields less in the way of profits, but it can be quicker and requires less technical knowledge than flipping websites.

Spotting a valuable domain name is not easy. Here are three things (among many) that domain buyers should consider: the domain age, domain length and also domain extension. If you’ve got a domain with less than four characters, then you are onto something that will sell to someone. In fact every single four letter domain combination has been registered in the .COM tld.

As the internet gets more and more popular, good domain names are becoming harder to find. As a result it’s next to impossible to register a new domain name that really is exceptional, so instead if you want to flip domain names you should consider looking at drop-lists for names that are about to be de-registered.

Drop-lists are filled with thousands of domains that are about to be ‘dropped’ from the registrar’s database, as a ‘domainer’ or domain flipper it’s up to you to go through the list and separate the good from the bad. Look at page rank, domain age and back links to discover whether or not the domain’s worth anything, but be aware that there are also many other people doing exactly the same thing.

Once you’ve found some profitable domains it’s up to you to place back orders. If you’re lucky you may just win the domain, but more likely than not someone has already beaten you to it. A good domain name can sell for a small fortune and in the past domains have sold for millions. It all depends on what people are willing to pay.

Regardless of what people say, flipping works and it can generate a substantial income if you can show commitment and passion in this highly expert field. It’s not for beginners or those that think they can make a lot of money in a short period of time, so before you start flipping anything make sure to know your market, because it can be a very expensive investment if you start to make the wrong mistakes.

The bottom line for any form of flipping is that they can all be profitable. It’s simply a case of knowing what people are willing to pay for an item.

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Posted in Domains, buying, selling

Can Flipping Websites Be a Full Time Job?

October 25th, 2009 1 comment »

Can Flipping Websites Be a Full Time Job

Flipping websites involves a lot of work, and if you know what you’re doing and you work very hard you can make a decent income. After all it’s just like working as a web site designer, SEO consultant and internet marketer. In fact it’s a fusion of the three jobs, and if you can do them reasonably well, you can be assured that you have an opportunity to make a consistent income from buying poorly designed / optimized / marketed websites, improving them and then re-selling them for a profit.

The secret to website flipping is knowing exactly what a sites worth and more importantly, how long it will take to get a return on your initial investment. Remember that the investment you make is both a financial one and it is also time based.

When you’re thinking of turning website flipping into a full time income, the first thing you should do is work on it as a part time hobby. Build up a collection of short-term flips, longer-term flips and also sites to keep because they generate a good passive income. There is no reason to flip a good passive income website is there?

The golden rule of online business and Internet Marketing is passive income. As a site flipper you will get the opportunity to buy and sell sites that have this as the primary goal. Spend the time to build your own personal portfolio of the best performing earners so that there is always something making you money.

Getting good at site flipping isn’t difficult and after a while you will start to realize how much time it takes to get a site into shape, and most importantly you’ll know if a site is worthwhile. Remember, $30 an hour for 30 hours a week is a lot better than $15 an hour for 60; so don’t fall under the spell of online business, keep track of your hours and treat it like a real brick and mortar enterprise.

If you can make a success out of flipping websites then you can also market your services and experience to other people. Internet marketer’s long for the abilities of someone that has the skills of a good site flipper and as time goes on, those high ticket-price websites won’t look so scary. Whilst a $10,000 dollar website sounds like an insane prospect at first, you could soon be turning that into a $50,000 website.

Can you make money flipping websites? The answer really depends on the person. It’s like anything really.

If you can commit yourself, show passion and enthusiasm and exhibit creativity in your work, then you can certainly start to make a regular income from flipping websites.

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Posted in buying, how to, selling

Website Valuation

October 23rd, 2009 comments »

website valuation

Selling websites is a tricky business because surprisingly, up until recently, not many people valued them as tangible business assets. Instead, they thought that something which could fit on the size of a CD couldn’t actually be worth a great deal…

These days, websites are amongst some of the most valuable business assets a company can possess. Many companies wouldn’t even exist without their website. Think Google… Websites valued at anything from a nothing at all to billions of dollars!

When it comes to knowing your website’s value, how do you calculate it? Do you workout the time you’ve spent in hours developing it? Do you base its value on how many visitors it gets? It’s actually very complicated, and it depends on a number of factors. One rule of thumb is the more valuable a site is the more difficult it is to value!

Looking at the monthly profits is an important aspect of figuring how much your website is worth. One of the best rough calculations you can do in order to get a rough appraisal is to calculate the monthly profits for the past three months, then multiply by three + the age of your site. i.e. if my website generates $10,000 a month in profit and is 4 years old then I’d want to sell for $10,000 *(3+4) = $70,000.

But that’s just a general metric. It’s important to take into account other factors such as how many daily visitors you get. Chances are you’ve not went to great lengths to monetize your site, in which case, you can ask more based on the monthly visits. A good way to calculate is to add $1 for every hundred visitors your site gets, but remember to work this out based on an average over a reasonable period of time so you’re not basing you’re sites value on inaccurate information.

One of the other most important aspects of selling a site is its domain name. Usually domain names have separate value and it’s important to get a domain appraisal before you start to sell. In some cases, the domain can be worth more than the website, so take this into account when selling.

Ordinarily speaking, domain names need to be aged i.e. a few years old and they also need to have quality extensions. This means .com .net and .org. If your site is based on a .info domain then this will reduce how much you can ask, because .info domains and other ‘novelty’ domains are neither valuable nor attractive.

But the bottom line in selling a website for sale on the internet is that it is only ever worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. Don’t think because you spent 1,000 hours working on it that a site is worth $5,000 dollars because whilst it may very well be worth that much, it could also be worth less or alternatively more.

Don’t make the mistake of selling yourself short, and most importantly, don’t try to sell your site for more than it’s worth. If you can’t get a good price, hold on to it for a bit longer, because someone will buy it, eventually.

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Posted in how to, selling

Authenticating Domain Ownership

October 23rd, 2009 1 comment »

Authenticating Domain Ownership

When it comes to buying or selling any website regardless of whether or not it is to flip, one of the most important first steps is to verify who the website actually belongs to. This can be easier said than done these days thanks to services such as DomainsByProxy, but it’s actually a relatively straight forward task if you know what you’re doing.

The first thing you need to do is to check the WHOIS registry. One of the best things to do is to use Domain Tools. Domain Tools lets you find out the three most important things about a domain name being the current owner, previous owners and also any recent changes in web host or name server.

You might be wondering why it’s important to know these details, and the truth is it’s ordinarily not but when it comes to buying a website, you need to take every precaution to make sure that what you’re buying really does belong to you. The consequences of buying a hacked website mean that you lose out on your money, and in a few weeks you possibly get taken to court.

By checking the name server history on a site such as Domain Tools you can verify that the domain hasn’t been pointed elsewhere. If you see that the domain name has just recently changed ownership or the DNS server has changed, make sure to query the owner as it could be a sign that the ‘owner’ isn’t quite who they say they are.

One of the best ways to ensure a safe transaction is to be thoroughly vigilant. These days there are numerous websites becoming victims to hack attacks. If you have any cause for concern, then don’t go ahead with the sale. If the domain does look authentic and the owner appears who they say they are, also be wary that you may be buying from a disgruntled ex or someone with a grudge against the real owner. Use an escrow service for anything that’s going to involve money and most importantly before you hand anything over, make sure to see some evidence on paper.

Lastly, trademarked domain names are an important issue. If you are about to buy a website that has a domain name which uses another companies trademark, no matter what the seller tells you, you are breaking trademark law and the most likely reason the site is up for sale is that the previous owner has already been issued with a cease and desist letter, alongside an order to delete the domain name.

Copyright law states that any domain name using a company’s trademark belongs to that company. Facebooktips.com is a violation, microsofttips.com is another violation, and googlesucks.com is another. Make sure to check these issues first, and if a domain appears to be a trademark violation, don’t buy.

Buying a new website isn’t as hard as it sounds, and whilst you do need to be constantly vigilant, the best piece of advice we can give is to make sure that you know what you’re getting yourself into. Once again, the golden rule here is that if it looks too good to be true, chances are it really is.

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Posted in Domains, buying, how to

Essential Tools in a Site Flippers Tool Box

October 21st, 2009 comments »

Essential Tools in a Site Flippers Tool Box

When you start flipping sites, you need nothing more than a willingness to succeed and some entrepreneurial skill. The secret isn’t so much in being an expert in website design or SEO it’s in knowing how to develop an idea. Like anything, a little knowledge goes a long way, and when it comes to site flipping there are a few essential tools that can both save you a lot of time and also a lot of money.

SeoQuake – SeoQuake is actually a Firefox extension that is without doubt one of the best SEO tools and also coincidentally, incredibly useful for checking the sites vital statistics on Google, Yahoo as well as MSN. It can also tell you how old a website is as well as give you other information such as Alexa Pagerank which is useful in gauging just how popular a website actually is.

Domaintools.com – is a tool that can be used to check up on a domain name to see who its current owner is as well as any previous owner information, and so much more. It also gives a brief rundown on SEO history and other facts which can be useful in determining the value of a site.

Archive.org is a great tool to check how old a site is and also what the previous versions looked like. You can really go back in time with this tool, as it mirrors almost every change done to a website.

Aboutus.org can be a useful tool when looking for more information on a site. It’s generally a good place to look for information on large volume sites as this is like the Wikipedia of websites – people can post comments and other things about a site on Aboutus.org.

The tools you need to start site flipping really are quite basic. The list above is a very small one, yet it is also infinitely powerful, and some of them such as Google and SeoQuake are great tools to use in order to give you an idea of how much your site is actually worth.

Google tools are amongst the most powerful and the list can be broken down into keyword tools, analysis tools and stats tools. If you are building a website, then it’s important to use an accurate statistics package and Google Analytics is one of the best in the industry.

When it comes to flipping your website, one of the best places to go to is Flippa.com it’s the most popular place to sell websites these days and you can use it to check up on everything as well as a get a really good idea of how much your site is worth.

When it comes to selling, Flippa.com takes a 5% success fee, but it’s worth it. They have successfully sold sites from $10 up to $600,000 and all without a problem. In our opinion, it’s the single best resource for buying or selling any website.