How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit
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The stock market and real estate industry have long been populated by day traders and “flippers”, those that buy and sell in a short period of time in order to make a quick profit. In the real estate industry the life of a house flipper can be very appealing. Buy a renovator’s dream property at a discounted price, renovate and modernize it and then sell it at a few months later at a profit. This process can then be repeated over and over for a reasonably stable income. You might even get rich.
Flipping Fun
The life of a house flipper is often romanticized, with images of married couples buying old houses, spending a fun-filled six months working renovating and then making a cool $20-$50K profit on the sale and moving on to the next property. Do this three times a year and you have a recipe for a fairly nice lifestyle.
If you plan to renovate yourself then you better have the skills to do it or have the friends or family willing to help out. Alternatively you can hire professionals to perform the labor but you must factor in the cost into your expenses. There are also many other variables that need to be carefully controlled such as financing fees, real estate agent costs, legal fees, government charges and all the other issues that come with buying and selling property. Those with a keen eye for a bargain can do exceptionally well but it’s just as easy to lose money if you don’t do your research and plan. Watching the real estate market, tracking house prices and monitoring economic conditions are all important activities for a successful house flipper. Provided you do your homework and control your variables you stand a fair chance of succeeding.
Trading on the stock market is another area where the educated and diligent researchers can succeed. Knowing market trends, tracking company performance and economic indicators can all provide an extra edge and if you work on it full time you just may come out on top more often than not. Both the stock market and real estate industry have long been considered staple investment opportunities and even full time careers for those that choose to take on the challenge.
There is unique breed of entrepreneur that has taken the concept of flipping to another area; buying and selling businesses. A shrewd entrepreneur will locate an underperforming business, buy it, work their magic to improve performance and then sell it for a nice margin. It is by no means easy and certainly requires a lot of research and due diligence, but the rewards are there and no doubt it’s a heap of fun too (entrepreneur’s wet dream 
).
Flipping Websites
Buying and selling businesses is appealing but given the high costs of making the purchase it is quite difficult to start, especially as a young entrepreneur. If you go wrong you may end up loosing a lot of money (just as you can with the stock market and real estate), so you really want to be sure of your skills and ability before investing.
The Internet is very new and the whole online commerce industry is just establishing marketing practices that work. Quite frankly, and this may sound harsh, but most of the people running businesses online have very poor websites. A lot of people running popular sites are not taking advantage of their traffic by monetizing it (this could be by choice or ignorance). Making a profit may be as simple as implementing a smart AdSense campaign on a popular site after buying it from an owner wishing to move on to other things. Perhaps an e-commerce site could use some search engine marketing or some tweaking to an AdWords campaign might do the trick, or better still, monetize, optimize, affiliate and upsell for maximum gain – make use of all the marketing tricks at your disposal.
I’m sure if we did some statistical sampling of the web industry search engine optimization techniques would be understood by a minority of webmasters and implemented well by even fewer. Search engine optimization is becoming mainstream and no doubt as the web continues to mature more and more people will study, test and build better websites, but it’s definitely still early days.
What this says to me is “business opportunity“. For those with the know-how, the energy to implement and a little bit of funds to buy the sites there are big gains to be made. What makes it even more appealing, especially for young or new entrepreneurs, is the price – we are talking about a lot less funds then it would take to invest in shares, buy property or purchase a bricks and mortar “real world” business. Websites with potential go for as low as a few hundred dollars.
The Advantages of Buying A Website
The big advantage of buying a site is you don’t have to establish an audience and wait for the site to be indexed within search engines. Most webmasters, even those that don’t know their SEO from their XML, will understand the benefit of link exchanges. Even the most poorly managed sites should have some form of backlink network developed and return a result in the major search engines. It may not be a top ten search result but it will be a result ready for you to optimize and improve.
Taking over a mature site (at least 12 months old) will mean you avoid the Google sandbox, a significant perk of buying established web property. Of course it really depends at what stage you take over a website as to how much of a step-up you gain and will no doubt reflect how much the owner will expect to receive for it (traffic for cash in simpler terms, but there are other variables to consider when selling a website).
Top 7 Website Acquisition Strategies
Before undertaking a search for a website acquisition a smart web entrepreneur will stop and have a good think about what she wants the site to do and how it will fit within her overall web business strategy. Here is a list of the top 7 strategies to consider when buying a new website:
- Buy a site that has targeted traffic for a product or service you already produce or sell. You can direct traffic from the new site to your products/services through advertising, email lists or sales pages. This is a great way to establish a customer base very quickly but you have to be confident that the traffic is quality, targeted traffic. Don’t fall into the trap of buying a high traffic site that consumes lots of bandwidth but doesn’t have the type of user you can leverage for revenue, otherwise you might be buying a liability, not an asset.
- Buy a site to generate advertising revenue. In this instance you might not change the site other than by working to increase the amount of traffic and improve the performance of advertisements on the site. Sites with lots of good content but are poorly optimized are perfect for this strategy. Once you own the rights to the content you can then further leverage it by repacking and republishing the content in other ways – perhaps information products, article marketing or as free give away enticements to join an email list.
- Buy a site specifically to flip it quickly. This is perhaps the most risky venture (day-trading!) because you need to find sites that are clearly underperforming with the potential for a big upside result after you complete your renovation. Ideally you should locate e-commerce sites selling a product that has an established market that is only just starting to take off online AND the current owners are not good at search engine optimization or online marketing and are willing to sell.
The theory is that you can quickly implement your changes, tweaking a few percentage point increases in multiple areas, resulting in a good double figure increase in sales in a short period of time. If you can complete your work just before the general marketplace catches up you can make a mint by selling the site at a premium before the Internet becomes saturated and your early mover advantage is eroded or the market slows.
The web is one of the fastest industries in terms of competitive action due to the very low barriers to entry. To execute day-trading style website buying and selling requires an entrepreneur with their finger on the pulse of the web. They must be in tune with what’s new and willing to gamble on what’s going to be new tomorrow in order to have success.
- Purchase a community driven site. A site with a massive forum filled with a nice target niche audience can be a gold mine to a entrepreneur. Often these sites were built by hobbyist fans, not aimed to profit in any way. Their website might have ballooned in growth to the point where the bandwidth is costing them a lot each month and since they are not skilled in website monetization they will be willing to sell the site at a bargain price. This can be a great strategy to make advertising revenue but be very careful with audience selection. Some forum communities are very difficult to make money from and may end up costing you more in ongoing hosting fees. Ideally choose a community demographic that has established high keyword prices in AdSense/high value to advertisers (electronic gadgets for example), has a good selection of affiliate products you could market or suits some products or services you already sell yourself.
- Look for a site operating in a highly popular keyword niche or one you expect will become popular in the near future. Keywords drive search engine traffic and if you can pick the trends before they become trends you may own some valuable property. Consider if you could guess what tomorrow’s “blog†or “podcast†will be and buy the sites with established keyword rich content before they become mainstream topics and overpriced.
- Remove the competition or merge with the competition. In this case you buy competing websites or negotiate a merger to combine with them to create one large enterprise. Depending on the industry you operate in this can be a very smart strategy to create market dominance. One of the best examples is website hosting. Often smaller hosts are bought up by larger hosting businesses with the result increased stability and professionalism.
- Purchase a site strictly for the domain name. Obviously in this case you don’t care too much about what is already developed in terms of website content, you just want the street address (URL). Imagine a few years ago if you purchased
mp3.comorblog.com. In this case the address itself is of significant value regardless of the website, or if you are good at picking trends, you might see the future value in a domain name before the market realizes it.
There are many other options available for how to use a new website acquisition and of course what you do with a new website and what type of website you search for will depend on your skills, the industry you operate in and your cash to spend. Remember to take some time listing a few goals you want your new website to achieve and strategize exactly what you will do with the new website before you buy it.
Investing Time And Energy Into Your New Website
Make sure you have the time to manage your new investment in web property. Remember just the transfer process and daily maintenance of your site will take time and energy and if you don’t have it available now then maybe you should hold off making the purchase. It would be a shame if your good intentions to improve a website result in you instead killing it because you don’t have the time to maintain the status quo. Remember a new website comes with new responsibilities, for example support emails and phone, server maintenance, SPAM control and the usual day-to-day activities of a webmaster. Don’t get caught up in the excitement of the purchase making you blind to the reality of how much additional work will be added to your daily activities.
Where To Locate Websites For Sale
I could point you in the direction of a few good website trading sites (this article has some links – How To Sell A Website) but you will be very lucky if you find a bargain there. To find good sites you have to search deep into the web. Use the main search engines to find websites operating in an industry you feel confident buying into. Don’t look for the big sites, the sites on the first few pages of search results unless they show clear potential – perhaps in industries with low competition so “bad” sites show up in the first page of search results. Professional or popular keyword sites are usually too expensive, well managed (they wouldn’t appear in the first few pages of the search results if they weren’t) and the owner likely won’t be interested in making the sale or will be looking for six figures if they are.
You must look deep in the search results. Find the solo-webmasters that perhaps don’t take their site too seriously but have been diligent over the years adding content consistently, if not in large quantities. You need to find the good sites with potential, not great sites already optimized or poor sites going nowhere. The more research you do during the search phase the smarter buy you will make. No matter how much time you put into the search it’s going to be gamble when you do decide to buy. There are just too many variables to consider and control, but by being smart and patient you reduce the risk.
Buying The Website
Once you find a good site that meets your criteria start monitoring and researching it. Check backlinks, investigate it’s history (try the Wayback Machine) and if the site has a community (forums, chatrooms, comment system, helpdesk, etc) see what goes on there. Check the site design, the structure of the links, headings, titles and keyword density. Check the site statistics if they are available (look for those little webstat icons or try Alexa rankings).
Once you get a good feel for the site and you are interested in buying it’s time to contact the owner. You should be able to find an email address for the website owner somewhere on the site, if you can’t do a domain name lookup in the WhoIs database where you will find the email address for the person that registered the domain. Remember some websites will simply be hobbies for the owner which will make the purchasing process that much easier, while others will be fully fledged businesses making the transfer process just that little bit longer (think about business registration and incorporation detail transfers – now consider you may not even be located in the same country!).
Start casually by introducing yourself to the owner, state you like the site and then slowly gauge how much interest the owner has in their web property. Eventually you are going to have to express your interest in making a purchase and you can spend as much time as you like communicating with the owner to negotiate a deal. Like with buying anything, the negotiation process can be laborious as you gather the information you need to calculate a price. This process can be swift and easy or slow and painful depending on your attitudes and the willingness of the owner to make the sale and release private information about their website. You will need to know details like website statistics, revenues, and costs, all information that the current owner may be hesitant to give out (see How Much Is Your Website Worth? for a discussion of important website metrics when determining the value of a site). Demonstrating your sincerity at this point will go a long way in helping you to divulge as much information as you can order to properly evaluate the website.
If you are lucky the owner of the site may simply be so excited that their website will make them some money that a few hundred dollars will seal the deal, others, the more savvy owners will realise the value of their asset and you might have more difficulty negotiating and will pay a higher price. Remember you are never under any obligation to buy so don’t force yourself to offer too much because there are plenty, literally millions, of other sites out there.
Don’t Forget The Little Details
When you finally agree on a price don’t forget to look after the little technical details as you manage the transfer of ownership. Here is a list of some important factors:
- Transfer of the domain name registration details, the business name, incorporation information, hosting ownership and any third party software or subscriptions to your name. Check that everything, absolutely everything, has your name on it by the time the deal is done.
- Get a contract made up outlining the deal and have all parties sign and date it. Also consider creating a clause stopping the previous owner starting up a competing site immediately after the sale.
- Download the email lists. Download the email lists. Download the email lists. There is nothing more important in a web business then the mailing lists so make sure you have these safely in hand with backups.
- Outline how much support, if any, will be provided by the ex-owner for a transition period. Having the owner available for questions for a few months after the sale can make the transfer less stressful.
Buying A Website Is A Very Effective Entry Strategy
Given the time it takes to get a new website off the ground because of issues like the Google Sandbox and the amount of work and effort it takes to create a site, produce content and build backlinks, the prospect of buying a ready established domain and website is very appealing. If you have a sound understanding of search engine optimization and the industry you work in online, you should have no problem finding under optimized websites, or perhaps fully fledged web e-commerce businesses to buy. By adding content, fixing title tags, linking structure and all the other good search engine marketing practices you can very quickly start reaping rewards. Sites with quality traffic but no monetization strategy are huge opportunities ready for you to step in, stick some advertisements up, use your AdSense optimization skills and boom, start profiting immediately. Alternatively you might look for sites that augment your existing web enterprises and purchase the targeted traffic to effectively “buy customers”. No matter what your strategy, the web is ripe with opportunities for smart investors and you don’t have to have a wallet the size of Rupert Murdoch’s to start buying and profiting.
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[...] If however you are looking for something interesting to read right now, I can highly recommend Yaro’s post about How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit – it is very informative. [...]
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[...] Flipping Websites: Entrepreneur’s Journey offers an interesting post on how to buy a website and flip it for profit. [...]
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How to Buy and Trade Existing Websites
I added yet another talented Aussie, Yaro Starak, who writes the exceptional blog Entrepreneur’s Journey to my RSS feed reader (and suggest you do so to), and would like to introduce you to this clever article he has written on the topic “How to Buy …
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[...] Last night I was at one of my favourite forums, the SitePoint Marketplace checking out websites for sale. My last article on how to buy a website and sell it for profit piqued my interest in online property so I thought I would start actively monitoring forums to try and find a bargain or a site that would fit well in my portfolio. [...]
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[...] rather than real estate. You can read a good overview in an article by Yaro Starak called “How to buy a website and flip it for profit” where he gives some pointers on what to do and how to get [...]
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[...] you don’t necessarily have to build the blog from scratch yourself – you can go out and buy a blog that’s already established. With an asset available you can offer exposure and traffic to [...]
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[...] into Google this blog turns up as the number one ranking article for the previous article I wrote, How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit. At the moment though, I’m not much of a flipper, more a buy, renovate and hold type of [...]
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[...] little extra change? Invest in a website. November 9th, 2007 I was reading a pretty informative post by Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs journey and thought I’d share a few quick thoughts on [...]
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[...] All-In-One: All About Flipping Web Sites Good article here. How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit – Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak (Disclosure: I have no commercial interest through this link) Regards, James [...]
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[...] This is not a way I personally have tried to make money online with, but I’ve heard of several people who have done it, like Yaro Starak. [...]
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[...] as of now, I’m just a learner or to say better, a total zero on the basic elements of how to buy or sell a website. Back in April 2009, I was thinking of John Reese and his domain income.com, [...]
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Excellent article Yaro! I wonder how much ebay.co.uk is going for – shhh, I might consider buying it! I’ve got a few pounds somewhere
Great stuff, some great points about flipping websites. I use a piece of software called SiteSnipe (link in header) to find, research, and analyze websites for sale.
One of the things will make you the most money when flipping a website is showing traffic and revenue. Even if it is just a little smidge or traffic and revenue – that is better than nothing! Believe me, I flip sites constantly and traffic and revenue bring in more bids!
Excellent article. Anyone know any good websites for sale? Mine is not for sale.
Your best article yet I think, Yaro.
S.
Cool article! Flipping websites has always interested me – but I’ve never done it.
One of the major pitfalls is being able to verify seller claims, esp. if the seller is located in another country. If you get swindled it can be tough recovering your losses. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to get around this? I’m sure it can be done, it just sounds like a bit of a pain.
Will
Having been recently offered a fair amount of money for myweblog.com, I can say that I took the offer with a giant grain of salt.
Personally I think the reason for the offer was the domain name and not so much the content or the system that I have written. It was hard to try to figure out what the value of the website was, so I replied to the email suggesting the price was far too low. Offer was raised by a small margin, but nothing that would make me want to sell it of.
Nevertheless, buying websites is something that I would be keen to investigate. I am still, even after being online for over 10 years, trying to see websites as assets. Since the majority of websites can fit on a CD, its hard to fathom paying thousands of dollars for them. So the best way to look at it, is not the actual website, but the visitors. Some might argue, but I don’t even think the content is so much as important as the visitors. Usually, those two are correlated, so its no problem.
Gee, Yaro, I thought getting rich quick was the Great AMERICAN Dream!
Thanks for another very interesting and informative article, Yaro. Who knows, with your new podcasting expertese, maybe you’ll soon become the Carlton Sheets of Web site flipping!
(FYI, Sheets is famous on US TV for his 30-min infomercials about how to buy real estate with no money down.)
Hi Tom,
Thanks very much for your comments and write up on your blog too, much appreciated!
I’m not sure about the quick part but certainly the getting rich part sounds great, though to be honest I’m not sure how much of my current life I would change if I was richer in a monetary sense. I might buy and sell websites simply for thrills and the feeling of achievement…
How goes the consulting/copywriting business in Maine?
This is a stunningly great article — easily among the best I have ever read. All I can say is “Wow.”
Really excellent article.
One note I would make is regarding transfer of the domain name registration details, as well as changes to improve the monetization potential of the site.
There is concern that changing the whois info could raise red flags with Google, as could making large scale changes to the site. You’d likely want to exercise some stealth on this front.
There’s a good discussion on this topic over at Jim Boykin’s blog.
Hi Yaro,
Ever since I’ve been reading the Solo network of sites/blogs, I am really impressed with your knowledge for being so young. I think by focusing your efforts in areas that give you energy, your excitement and ability to generate a healthy living will come naturally.
Yaro – I would like to pay you for the template of this site and instructions on how to best set it up. I think instructions on how to build “blogs in a box” are a huge opportunity. Why? Because guys like me who can do very well in the traditional direct and interactive marketing area, need to focus on how to do what you are doing (to some level). And be able to repurpose this for our clients.
I see the template is Borja’s and Wordpress. Or would you be willing to show me direction on how to set this up? Possibly an article? Some of my sites are: http://seosmb.blogspot.com
Hello Mike – This blog’s design is just a modified “pool” theme. You can get the Pool Theme from the link in my footer and then you need to go into the WordPress theme editor for your blog and starting playing around with colours etc. It’s not too hard – if you don’t do the web design for your websites I would suggest asking your designer to do it for you.
If you get stuck I would be happy to help, just email me.
Cheers, Yaro
I like the article, and am considering buying a few websites myself. I’d appreciate your advice on the topic Yaro.
lecentre, of Centrerion.blogspot.com
Thanks for all the hard work and for adding this feature. It made my life much easier. i’m buying sites:)
yes i have to agree with you…
i got to buy few sites – your article is realyy helpful!
So Yaro how many websites have you ‘flipped’? Do you use any tools for research? Are you going to return my call??
Hi Ben – you know it’s kinda weird when people who you meet in real life know you from your blog. To be expected I guess, but still strange. Be good to meet you soon.
Regarding your questions – technically I haven’t really “flipped” any sites since I consider flipping a very specific type of business – you buy with the intention of improving performance and then selling shortly after.
I have sold one website for over 10K and bought a blog for 2K and bidded for another blog and website but didn’t win.
To be honest I usually make the mistake of being too opportunist when it comes to websites for sale since it is a distraction. I know I could make money but it isn’t the business I’m in. If I one day decide to focus on flipping that will be a different story.
In terms of research tools – just what I have already mentioned – Alexa and PageRank stats, backlink analysing through search engines and technorati, whois to see how old the domain is – all readily available and free web services.
Nice.
Your so right about ‘flipping’ sites being a specific type of online business. It’s so risky with so many elements involved.
You should check out the ’seo for firefox’ tool Aaron Wall (seobook.com) just put out for FF. It’s excellent for researching sites and compeditors.
Was good to finally meet you Yaro! Certainly is weird meeting someone online first
Hi Ben – it was good to meet you too and thanks for the tip about Aaron’s tool. I know Aaron so I suspect it will be a well thought out piece of software.
Someone else below asked this already.
I am getting nailed with Spam in my guestbook for our catalog website. Is there anyway to stop this?
If not, there really isn’t any point in leaving it up and active. Any help will be greatly
appreciated.
Thanks
Unless your guestbook software has some sort of in-built spam protection or you can get a spam plug-in or something I doubt you can do much.
I suspect most advanced guestbooks have spam protection nowadays but perhaps the older/free ones don’t.
I personally use a forum as my guestbook and find it works fairly well.
Dont buy sites with popular HTML bases or PHP. Becase a spammers devide it to SPAM.
Yea, article is really interesting (and very detailed). I thought, that it is impossible to have profit from bought sites.
To be honest I usually make the mistake of being too opportunist when it comes to websites for sale since it is a distraction. I know I could make money but it isn’t the business I’m in. If I one day decide to focus on flipping that will be a different story.
Keep up the good work. Greetings
Your article is very similar, if not exactly the same, to this article here: http://www.votanweb.com/content/show/32
Or maybe you both had an agreement to publish your/his article on each other’s websites?
Just wondering who is the true author of this article. It’s a good article.
Hi Anonymous,
My article is the original. Many people steal my content without asking and don’t reference me as the original source.
As much as I hate it it’s not that big a deal because they will be the ones punished in search rankings for producing duplicate content. My site has too much ranking authority for that too happen when a site like that steals my content.
Nice article Yaro. This is going to be a good year for this type of internet marketing I feel. I have been buying and selling websites, with various degrees of success, for the last year or so.
I just started my own blog on the subject if you are interested:
http://www.flipwebsites.com
Plus I know a fellow marketer who has a simular domain and is coming out with a course soon for under $100. If your interested I will send you a link when it comes out.
Keep up the good work.
Tim Phelan
Excellent article yaro. I was thinking on this model to grow my adsense business. Your views have made me confident on this implementation.
Great article tons of really good information here, thanks! You just got another subscriber after reading this one article.
Keep up the great work!
I learned a lot from this article, and buying a site or blog in a niche you are versed in is a sound strategy.
Ohhh. man, Yaro! As a Stock Market trader, THIS is something which I can really relate to!
Wow. As soon as I finished the article, I was pouncing on the google search engine box, pounding out search after search. This article is such a motivator.
Thanks Yaro!
Very interresting article. Can I translate it and insert into my webpage?
N, by all means, you can translate this article and use it as long as you list my name as author and link back to this site as the source.
Sorry but your article doesn’t make sense:
You say:
“Given the time it takes to get a new website off the ground because of issues like the Google Sandbox and the amount of work and effort it takes to create a site, produce content and build backlinks, the prospect of buying a ready established domain and website is very appealing. If you have a sound understanding of search engine optimization and the industry you work in online, you should have no problem finding under optimized websites, or perhaps fully fledged web e-commerce businesses to buy.”
Ok, now I’ll tell you that if you know about SEO, you know how to get your site indexed in 24h, Google sandbox is no problem.
And if a website is low in the google results, it is not because of poor SEO, but because of poor/no backlinks. The proof is that you often find some ugly & non optimised webpages in the top ranks of google, don’t you wonder why? It’s because despite no SEO and poor design, these are pages with LOTS of backlinks.
So when you say “buy an non SEOptimized website which is low in the ranking, fill in a few keywords and do a nice layout, and you can avoid the sandbox and the hassle of getting backlinks”, I’d say don’t bother to buy a crappy website, you’d better spend your money to employ some cheap indian to create a new website, and some cheap indian to sends emails to other webmasters to get backlinks.
Hey Alan,
I agree with you – yes it’s all about links etc for SEO, however what I’m saying is you can buy an established site with an aged domain (domains that have been registered for many years are good for SEO) and then go to work increasing the SEO.
It’s like buying a restaurant that already functions, maybe even makes a profit and optimizing so it makes a big profit, rather than starting a new restaurant from scratch.
Really enjoyed this article. I was thinking about the idea of “site flipping” in the car, on the way to work this morning. I wrote an article where I referenced you. Nice job.
Hi Ben – you know it’s kinda weird when people who you meet in real life know you from your blog. To be expected I guess, but still strange. Be good to meet you soon.
Hi Yaro,
Ever since I’ve been reading the Solo network of sites/blogs, I am really impressed with your knowledge for being so young. I think by focusing your efforts in areas that give you energy, your excitement and ability to generate a healthy living will come naturally.
I happened across this article and couldn’t stop reading! I have had an addiction to collecting domain names for a while now and your article has my head spinning with new ideas! Thanks so much – I have bookmarked your site and will return again and again!
Hi Yaro, I just read your article and I find it very interesting. I am new at flipping websites. In fact, I bought a series of videos about flipping websites on
http://www.flippingwebsites.net
Those videos are very easy to understand and helpful.
About flipping website, I have the following question : is it better to create websites and then sell them or buy websites and sell them or both are accepted?
Thank you
Regards,
Sally
I bought my broadband site a year ago and now getting offers for twice as much. Still not selling it.
Property development for those of us reluctant to do any manual labour, brilliant.
Nice article Yaro! Its a very good strategy. I have been interested in the buying and selling of businesses for years now. Check out my site and tell me what you think for a start!
Dave
Editor in Chief, PhotographyBB Online
Great post and I really enjoyed your article. I am thinking to enter the business of flipping websites and you have given me a headstart and some really great pointers to be taken into account.
This is a really good article… I just started flippin sites… thanks for the good ideas to take into consideration!
Well, pretty interesting “flippin” strategy. Thanks for ideas!
how about this for an idea, it seems simple and i think it could work.
Get the local yellow pages, find a section in it. Lets say lawn mowing services. See how many people are on there. See how many have website’s or not. Then make a site an optimize it, so it will be on the first page for that area. and then sell it. Anyone with any business sense will buy it, because you already have that ranking.
The market seems to be changing for buying and selling websites. The low end is starting to churn and get flooded with template quick sites.
I would suggest only buying a site with good SERP rank and an established growth rate.
Great BLOG Yaro!
Michael
Best article I’ve read this week!
Very well written!
After reading it I started to search google for websites to buy
Bookmarked this one
Hi yaro,
once I saw your post on the forum I followed it up to here,) I thought you are promoting a series of e-books that i purchased about flipping websites, and I am surprised to see your link leading me to articles, I wish If I came across thsi post last time.
Always your articles are awesome.
Great post.
I’m looking into the possibilities of flipping websites.
Great tips on flipping sites – I would also comment that buying a blog that is older and where the blogger is not very active with writing regularly or imbedding ads in the site are ripe for purchasing, redeveloping, monetizing and flipping too.
david
Excellent article. I’ve picked up a few tricks I never thought of. Keep up the great post
Seriously, I never knew that so many things are related to buying a website/blog. This articles helps me a lot to understand how things works. Not just buying a website, but how to selling it too.
Great post. Website flipping is really going to be an interesting industry to watch in the coming years. There is definitely big money to be made and lost there.
This article gives you all the information some people are charging up to $250 for. Thank you for all the great info, I’m thinking about selling my silk plant site but I’m not sure what it’s worth. It’s on schedule to do about $240,000 in sales this year and has some great rankings for most of our major keywords. Profit margins are about 30% and it has a mailing list of over 3,000. Does anyone know what it’s worth on the market? The site pulls in about 25,000 – 30,000 visitors per month.
thanks for the info yaro – What do you do when your site is not revenue generative yet but clearly is built to do so?
E.g. My pet project is a recruitment website for the digital industry but as it is not my main business so it gets very little of my time. Too build users and traffic it has been free to post jobs since it went live. Although it just sits there with little optimisation, promotion or attention from me it gets a regular 3000 – 4000 uniques a month and has 1600 digital jobs on it from over 100 recruiters and employers inthe UK. I want to sell it now as a ‘ready to go business’ and struggling to value it? Any tips?
It’s up to you really – get it making money then sell it, or try and sell it as is but accept that you won’t get as much for it.
nice article i really enjoyed . this is something i have been considering getting into. The problem i suppose would be finding a site that is worth buying in the first place.
Now we’ll just have to wait for the Flip this Website show on A&E!
Nice! Do you think value of sites has remained constant? especially with economic challenges….
Great article, love the detail and all the resources come in very handy for research. Thank you Yaro.
If I might I’d like to add another take on the ‘Day Flipping’ strategy. Quite a few people have left comments stating they would like to get into website flipping but are worried of losing money if they go in for a website but find they have mistakenly over-valued it in the first place. Hence cutting into their profits or even leaving them with a loss!
If you are a beginner there is a way of getting into flipping without this risk, you can simply develop niche sites from scratch and then flip them very quickly. Say within a week.
Some people think this is too much hard work but in actual fact there are ways and means to build a niche blog, fill it with keyword rich content, SEO it for your customer and plug it into various affiliate programs in about an hours work.
Obviously this strategy is on a smaller scale and you are looking at between $50-$250 profit for each site, not thousands of dollars, but this isn’t bad for a $7 investment in a .com domain name and one hours work.
The benefits are, this method cuts out all the risk and you can simply do it more often. Say you do 6 sites a week and flip them the same week, you are looking at $3,500+ profit per month not including all your back end profits. You could provide hosting for your customers for example, and this is repeated income from month to month or year to year.
Start out small time and build up your business with your confidence and experience.
This is a very nice intro to website flipping, thank you Yaro! I will recommend it.
For me the money making angles for flipping a website fall into three (rough) categories:
-Bad website: Buy website, improve website and flip it.
-Bad monetizing: Buy website, improve adsense or affilate offers, flip it.
-Bad SEO: (my favorite): Buy website, do massive SEO campaign, flip it.
Of course there is a lot to be said and done.. But these are the major quick fix-em-uppers to make your website flipping really profitable as far as I’m concerned.
Hope it ads to your article, which is solid anyway!
All the best,
Mary
Hi Yaro, how is it that this page shows as a video result on Google but there’s no related video? It has a thumbnail but I can’t see the video anywhere on this page.
You have to be careful and do research too. I once bought a site that had a whole bunch of bad links pointed to it and was banned by Google. It took me about 4 months to get it all straightened out.
Good article which has stood the test of time. wish i had read it earlier as what you say about buying an existing website over creating a new one has a lot of merit as although there is a lot of satisafaction in seeing a new site develop the work required is enormous with no guarantee that it will pay off. Although i currently have no plans to start another website if i was to i think i would probably go for one that has been established for awhile.
Indeed, despite the age of this post I found it very useful for anyone interested in learning how to buy a website that can be sold for profit. Very well written, Yaro. By the way, you are ranking #1 for the term “Internet business blog” as you wanted to,
not just for your name.
I wish I had read this earlier. For some reason I didn’t think it could be more profitable or wise to buy an existing website. I figured it would be too much trouble, or something or the other. But still very glad I read this, for future reference
Great article. I think the concept of flipping has finally made it mainstream since the New York Times did a great article about website flipping in their Technology section.
Wow, this has to be one of the best articles on website flipping I’ve ever read. Very informational and motivational.
Thanks,
Andy
Hey Mr.Yaro, you are clearly well informed as well as an intelligent business man. I look up to anyone who can start from scratch and go big and I must say, I am looking to do the same. I have only one question: who sends the cheques? Do “hits” turn into dollar bills? I don’t understand how there can be any profit made if there is nothing being officially sold. Anyways, please reply I am very curious, thanks, Dave
Very interesting! I had heard about buying and selling websites, but didn’t know much about it. Thanks once again for sharing some great information.
I can see that I will be spending some time reading through all your posts. There is some great information here.
Having looked around the web, I have Identified a site worth going at, some of your pointers are priceless common sense and will help to galvanise the process. I’m not sure about flipping though, unlike a property flip a great deal of hard work is needed in both a company build and flip and a website build and flip. I’m sure there will be many who chase fools gold in the future.
I would only say that beginners should not miss out on the learnings from building a website versus buying one. Buying one simply for the convenience of immediate ownership ends up being quite risky itself as there is a lot of work involved to understand something you did not build.
I actually sell a blog flipping product that teaches anyone how easy it is to build (and flip) blogs. The sad part is they could pay $19.99 for my ebook to learn how easy it is or go off to SitePoint and buy a brand new blog for $149 that a pro put together in a few hours. Unlike real estate, the internet is much less transparent in terms of valuation.
That was a really detailed article… I was reading it and every time I came up with a question it got answered in upcoming paragraphs. I still think that to find a right website to flip would be real challenge, and even if anybody finds one there is still a question of a price.
Wow, sounds like a good opportunity, but since this article was written it seems the market has become swamped with with low grade websites for sales and lots of scammers?
I’ve been looking at Sitepoint Martketplace for the last week and even though it seems sales are taking place, I’ve found it impossible to identify anything I would be 100% happy handing my precious cash over for.
Anyone else found this or have any tips to screen out all the junk that seems to be out there? I also found it hard to find many blogs sale, seems there are tons of other types of site out there.
Yes I agree, I really like the idea of site flipping in principle, but have found it very hard to indentify any really good sites. The market has been literally swamped with people asking for insane amounts of money for very poor looking sites. That’s one of the reasons I started webchalkboard.com. I hope to offer people a quality over quantity marketplace for buying and selling websites. It is tricky though, I haven’t been brave enough to buy a site from someone yet, but will be dipping my toes in the water very soon I suspect.
Interesting site Tom, I hope it’s a success for you. I’ve bm’d it and will check it for listings in future.
I think the quality over quantity is the future key and whilst I’ve not read up on potential development in the SE industry, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google isnt working on technology to filter all these spams sites and sites purely made from rss excerpts etc. ‘Content is king’ is one of my favourite phrases but at the moment content is just being replicated and spammed everywhere and is in danger of losing it’s crown!
Flipping sites and selling domains has pretty much dried up for me over the last few months or so. Very similar to the real estate market. In the meantime I just keep building more and more sites and building up the traffic on them and waiting for someone to come along.
Even though it is harder to flip websites at the moment, is website flipping a good way to make money if you go about it the right way? are there still buyers out there willing to pay?
How and where do you sell your sites?
Yes, that’d be interesting to know – I’ve never sold a site and I do have some that might be suitable.
You are a true guru. I think that someone who wants to “flip” a website will have to wait longer to take their profit nowadays, but the profits could be much bigger.
This is definitely a solid option to making some extra money quickly, but overall I think its better to keep all your sites and automate them as much as possible. Long term you’ll end up making more that way.
I have a few sites that are optimized but are not doing well in the search results nor are they doing much in sales. however I spend absolutely nothing in marketing costs so the $5k a month in sales brings me a profit of $1200 / month in pure profit after all expenses. I only spend a few hours a week on the site so i’m sure if I spent a little more time I could do a lot more business. I would also like to know how to sell a site and where to list it for the best chance of getting an offer.
How do you judge how much to pay for a website?
The worth of a keyword rich domain can not be underestimated, and if you can pick one of these up for cheap, no matter what the existing site looks like, you’ve struck gold, for sure. Thanks for a flipping great article…..pun intended, heheheheheheh!
Very informational post. I think that flipping website/blogs is a great way to make money. I had flipped a few sites in the past and think I will flip some more after reading this post.
Thanks
I am 100% sure this article is a good reference for people, those looking to buy a website and flip it for profit. Very good and well described seven website acquisition strategies. Great work.
Hi Yaro,
Just went through your blog and wanted to say that you are such an amazing writer with great knowledge. One more thing, I always hate reading but your blog is so informative that I could not stop my self to read it on.
We are software company in India and in the business of buying and selling of websites. We have more than 200 websites in our bank. As the maturity of our websites are in the bracket of 2 to 12 years, they are well established with a huge growth potential. Due to their maturity, they draw a steady flow of traffic and hence the prospective buyer can start earning from the very first day. Its not only about the selling of website(s), its about investing.
In our business model the buyer is guaranteed of a steady source of income from our website(s) via Google AdSense program. These sites generate USD 80-100K annual revenues per year.
Your help, advise, suggestions, any sort of business partnership with our company would be highly appreciated.
I really look forward to your reply.
Thanks in anticipation.
Hi Yaro-
It has been a long time since you made this post. Do you still think there is opportunity given the current economic downturn? I would be interested in hearing your perspective today.
Regards
Hi Yaro,
I hope you had a chance to review my above comment.
Kindly let me know your initial thoughts on the same.
Regards,
This is quite a thorough article, but I also noticed it’s a bit older and I’m wondering if you still flip websites? If you do, I’m curious what you think of the current industry, it’s growing popularity, Flippa.com, etc. I think it’s time for a “Part II”.
I’ve been flipping sites for over a year now and it’s a large part of my income. I started off with really cheap sites and now flip $1-2k sites on a regular basis. …working on moving into 5 figure sites exclusively…
Anyway, hope to see you write more on website flipping.
Cheers
Jay
I’ve never flipped any website or blog before, but I do think that in order to buy an established website and flip it for profit, we need a large modal to start it, unless we can get someone would like to pay me before getting the site, and I’ll use the money to pay the site owner, just like a hidden middle man.
Anyway, I’ll take some time to learn how to buy website and flip it. Thanks for the article Yaro!
Cheers,
Lee
Where are I can buy a website? Can you recommend such place? Thank you!
i ve fount a site for you that selling web sites.
websitebrooker(dot)com.
Great article Yaro! I do make money with site selling. I dont buy and flip, I build my own mini blogs from scratch and then sell them for profits.
It is a very good income model.
Greati article. Thanks for sharing this information. I am buying websites drop it at the top of google and sell it for profit, too. If you it right, this income model makes a lot money.
Best regards,
Volksphone!
Sounds like a great idea if you have some cash and SEO expertise. I wonder how competitive the marketplace is right now?
Excellent article! There is so many ways to make money on the internet and website flipping is on way that’s is over looked, but is so profitable.
This is an article that you definitely want to re-read!
Personally I don’t like flipping a website unless big profit can be made. When you take the time to setup a decent website, you are usually much better off to hold onto that website to market and monetize it. By flipping it, you are settling for much lower long term profit.
after trying flipping sites for a while and i have learn that it isn’t easy as people said it was. most people are looking for big revenue making site.
Sounds like a fair bit of money would be needed to gobble up competing sites particularly in a field which is oversubscribed!!
Great article. The website flipping industry is really starting to take off. I get dozens of questions every month about how to flip websites for profit!
I’ve tried flipping sites. And failed miserably
Maybe I’ll try again! Good info!
I am curious which is more advantageous: buying an established website or to build one from scratch. Nonetheless, a well written article Yaro. Kudos!
damn, really amazing tips, can i translate in indonesian for my other blog? i will give backlink and author in my post with this article (translate), can i do that yaro?
Really great flipping techniques. I’ve been thinking about selling one of my niche blogs for a while, i wonder how much i can get for it. Looks like im going to flippa haha…
Is flipping websites easy? In relation to working a 9-5 job it is easy. But that doesn’t mean that work doesn’t have to be put into it. It requires a system, discipline and patience.
Ie. I created a site last march for $60 total cost. It took till october to rank #1 in google. At that point it started to make $130 per month. I sold that site in december for $1500. So I made $1851 off of a $60 investment.
Now I have taken that money and reinvested it once again. Ask me if I don’t love site flipping!
To me site flipping has to be one of the highest ROI investments you could possibly ever utilize short of winning the lottery.
But where do you find sites that are for sale?
Also can adsense really make enough money just to cover even the hosting account?