subject: Site Flipping: Website Flipping Secrets [print this page] Site flipping can be a very profitable business model but you can also loose your shirt if you're not careful about what you're doing. That's exactly what happened to me when I was first getting started a few years ago trying my hand at website flipping.
I saw everyone doing it online, everywhere I turned people were bragging about how much money they were making for 2 5 hours worth of work designing, building and flipping websites for a healthy profit.
After a few of them showed me their real-time stats after their sites had sold I couldn't believe they were averaging $300 - $500 a website.
Not bad considering the costs involved in site flipping which was $10 for a domain name and a few bucks for hosting. Actually, I learned later that these guys were making even more money on the backend because they were selling cheap hosting to their customers who just bought one of their websites.
It was a genius idea Sell a website you worked on for a few hours and then charge them a monthly recurring fee for hosting that site. Of course the new owners could take their site and host it themselves but most of them paid the $8 a month to keep it hosted were it was.
I had seen enough so I decided to try my luck. Now the first thing I want you to realize is my very first website flip took me a lot longer than 5 hours to build. I had nothing to follow except for a few vague instructions from my friends.
After 2 days of intense work I listed my website on Sitepoint (Its called Flippa now) and after the first week there were no bids and less than 10 views. Man, I thought this was easy?
Considering I never outsourced any work or spent money on elaborate graphics I was only going to be out $10 for the domain name. Not to bad and I was ready to walk away but after doing some research online I discovered I was doing everything completely wrong.
I had the "build it and they will come" mentality which I needed to correct if I was going to make any money online with site flipping.
What I needed to be doing was promoting the heck out of my website listing in order for it to gain attention and sell. I had started the bid at $200 and a reserve of $400 which was a huge mistake that I learned about later.
One of the most valuable lessons I learned after getting a cheap course on website flipping was I needed to find a market that was willing to buy my website. I made the mistake of building a website without looking into the supply and demand factor.
Another mistake I made was listing the website for a high dollar value instead of listing it at a lower amount and let the anticipation and excitement build up which would lay the ground work for a bidding war.
A few mistakes behind me and I decided to try it again. I did my research, found a hot market that people were willing to spend money in and started working again.
Here's a tip for you: I went to SitePoint and searched for successful auctions and looked at the kinds of sites that had sold for $500 - $1,000. I checked their stats, their listing pages and how it was structured. I used the course I bought to refine some of the things I had discovered basically I just wanted to make sure I was doing everything correctly.
Those sites that I was modelling were worth more than I was going to sell this website for but I figured if I could give the same value as those more expensive websites then this one would sell extremely fast.
I was right with my assumption because my second site that I listed a week later sold within a few days for $437. I only spent $10 for a domain name and maybe 12 hours of work went into the website. I was hooked and made many more websites that resulted in a huge income that year.
