Flipping Websites for Fun and Profit!

By: Michael Dunlop     Topics: Blog

For the last six months or so I switched from flipping hamburgers to flipping websites and I would like to share some of my experiences. The idea of flipping, i.e. buying something for the purpose or reselling it for a profit -or- create something and selling it fast, has been around for a long time in the real estate world. On the net, things are a bit different.

Websites are virtual real estate, not brick and mortar ones. Do they have value? You bet! Ask all the internet marketing experts and all the successful webmasters who make a fulltime living out of their sites.
I think you see where I am getting with this, why not apply the same principles of real estate into the virtual world? Remember, the world is virtual, not the profits!

I am a regular visitor and contributor at various forums and online communities and have noticed that people do pay handsome amounts of money for all sorts of sites. Some are established, some are not. I wanted an opportunity to make money part-time, after homework and during my weekends. I also LOVE selling; I love the business aspect of it. The hunt for the deal.
I am a businessman at heart, like most of you here. I don’t want to work in the same office for the rest of my life – I want to go out and make deals. I want to have control, be my own boss and maybe … retire at 21! So I thought to myself: “If you want to be a businessman you better start thinking and acting like one!”

I have some experience creating sites – I have a page on MySpace! What did you say? It doesn’t count? Ok, then I am technically challenged! But I know how to use a keyboard and I am smart. In the end I realized that this was all I needed.

I needed a roadmap – a guide
Remember, a good business person doesn’t need to know the technical details, all he needs to know is how to organize and put things together. So I started reading posts, asking questions in forums and devouring any flipping websites’ material I could get my hands on. Soon I realized that you don’t need to know html, just some basic commands to get by. You don’t need to be a graphic artist – or hire one – there are lots of places you can get quality graphics for free and they are good enough for what I wanted to do. Later on, for my first $10,000 deal I will probably hire a graphic artist.
You don’t even need a lot of money to start. What a big difference with real estate! Actually it cost me less than $10 to get my site created and sold. In less than a week I had made my first $100 for 8-10 hours of work. Not bad at all. What if I could replicate the steps, automate some of them and refine some others? Maybe it could be better? …. A week later I was proven right again, this time $135 in-my-paypal-account right! In a few weeks I was clearing around $1000 a month and now, six months down the road, I am aiming for the $2,000 mark!

I finally saw the light! I found a way to make some serious, fast cash without having to flip hamburgers or paint picket fences! Not that I ever made any serious money from flipping hamburgers…
Joking aside – I have FUN doing it. Now, how many people can claim that?
It’s not my intention here to make all this sound too easy but it definitely is not hard. All it requires is some determination, logical thinking and persistence. There are certain steps you have to take to make yourself stand out.

The three most important aspects are:

1. Keyword selection – there are still a lot under-utilized keywords
2. Contents
3. Places to advertise your sale and how to make your ad known and stand out

There are a few details that could make a difference but these are the primary ones.

JD Swenson, a known internet marketing guru, created a series of videos where he describes step by step the methods he uses in flipping websites and making quite a lot of money from it. What I liked about the videos is that they are real examples where JD picks his keywords all the way to the actual links of the sales. Go check it out at www.flippingwebsites.net .

I hope that this article will benefit some of you and will shed some light into the mysteries of flipping websites for fun and profit. Next week I will write a new post describing and explaining of How to Value a website. This is an art by itself and requires some special attention.
Till then, remember that you will have more regrets by not trying something than by trying it and failing!
So go flip some sites and have fun!