Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

Part 1 - Part 2

In Part 1, we covered the basics of why flipping websites was a good way to get into the business, and in Part 2, we discussed how to protect yourself when making a purchase. Today we will talk about what kinds of websites you should be looking for when starting out, and how you can increase their value!

When you sit down and actually divide up the usual types of sites on the market, you really only end up with a few categories:

Trendy Sites

One of the more interesting ways to get started is by looking at what’s currently hot on the market. Often when people see someone selling a site online that makes a lot of money, people will rush into the market and try to make a site either for themselves or for resale. As of this post, the trend has been going strong towards Myspace mod sites for layouts, special effects, etc. When you buy a trendy site, you’re usually getting a site that was built primarily for resale, so rarely will it have good earnings - however if you take a look at the trends, you can sometimes find long tail terms and such to rank for.

For example, in 2006 we noticed the myspace trend in its infancy, and a quick keyword check showed a that the term “myspace layout” had fairly little competition and over 3 million searches per month. After some planning, we purchased a domain - www.myspacegraphics.biz - and a pre-made site for $75; after putting what amounted to maybe 8 hours of SEO work into the site, we quickly saw results as our traffic soared from 3000 visitors, to 20,000 visitors, to eventually 40,000 visitors a month.

Trendy sites are generally the easiest to buy on the cheap, since a lot of them are on the market. However, when it comes time to sell, you definitely will need something to set you apart from the crowd. At the same time, if you are in a crowded marketplace, then quite often it doesn’t take much either.

Another good example of an up-and-coming trend in this space is Mii Maker sites that help users create Mii avatars for the Nintendo Wii; the problem many of these sites face is, because of the wording, they quite often turn up with low paying advertising for completely unrelated items like form makers, button makers, and so on, so if you were looking to get involved you would have to tweak your onsite text to generate higher payout ads. Once you find the right mix, keep it for a few months then sell it.

Forums

With a forum, you really have to consider the amount of time you will spend managing the site. Unlike most types of sites, you really have to be dedicated to make a forum take off; if it does take off, you probably won’t want to sell it, but if you happen upon a forum for sale with a nice design and no traffic, and don’t mind putting a serious effort in, it can be a very satisfying and financially rewarding situation.

Really, to make a forum ready for resale, all you need to do is demonstrate that your site is growing and retaining users. Once you have a growth curve started, it’s generally not too difficult to find someone to take it over. However, the devil in this case really is in the details; to start off, you will probably want to populate the site with a good number of threads, create a number of accounts, and essentially talk to yourself about various topics for awhile. Once you have some topics, then it’s a matter of attracting visitors.

Getting visitors isn’t so hard with some link exchanges and advertising in other forums, however retaining them is where the difficulty lies. If possible, it might be a better idea to develop a site around the forum with lots of content to bring in the users, and then find a way to get them to use your forum - at least at the get go, think of a sitepoint as an example.

Niche Content Sites

This category is perhaps the easiest to create, maintain, and eventually sell, since you generally don’t to need to put hours into updates every month. The general idea with a content site is: you take something that doesn’t have unique content and isn’t monetized, and then fix it up with a nice design and strategically placed advertising blocks. If you want to go the extra mile, hire a freelance writer to rewrite the existing content so it is unique, and then put the word out on forums that you’re looking for some link exchanges with related sites, etc. Once you have a nice-looking site with unique content and a little bit of traffic, someone will be thrilled to take it off your hands and try to build it up.

E-Commerce sites

Generally when someone is selling a web store, the costs are too high to really pull a fix and flip. As well, the design and coding costs are much, much more than what you would pay for a standard html site or an open source CMS site. Personally, I would recommend you stay far, far away from these sites, just because it’s pretty rare that someone will sell a successful online store unless it’s in decline. While I would recommend them for advanced fix and flippers, for newbies it’s just too risky a proposition.

If you simply must try running an online store, then I would recommend looking into the site’s linking structure, as well the linking structure of the competition. If after taking a look at their links you feel it’s something you can replicate, then by all means, go for it.

At some point we will post a proper guide to turning around an online store, but at this time it’s simply too large of a procedure to recommend to newbies, and it goes beyond the scope of this post.

Honestly, I want to go more in-depth and put together some examples to give you a better visual idea of what to look for in a fix and flip, so I will expand this series to a 4th part with some researched examples.