“Ultimate Website Flipping Guide”
For those of you still wondering what “website flipping” is, it’s the term used to describe the act of selling your website for profit. There are a number of reasons why you may wish to flip a website, from needing quick cash to getting rid of a website that isn’t profitable for you. It’s also a popular business model where websites are created solely for the purpose of being sold.
This guide will give you a few ideas on how to get your WordPress website ready for flipping, making sure that you can command the optimum price for it. It is meant as an overview guide to spark some ideas and get you started, opposed to a step by step, indepth instruction manual.
One thing to be aware of, before you start, is that if you are using paid plugins or themes, that the license you have bought may be for personal use only. You may find that you will have to buy a developers license, which means you can use the plugin/theme on an unlimited number of your own sites AND transfer the license to your customer. All the plugins mentioned in this report are either free or have developers licenses available. With free plugins you can usually use them without any restrictions but it’s good to double check.
One of the attributes that will help your listing sell for a better price is when it’s showing a regular monthly profit. You may find that once you’ve build your website and find it is more profitable than you first thought, you may decide not to sell it and to keep reaping the profits each month, that’s okay too!
Choosing Your Website Niche
Unfortunately no matter how nice your website looks, whether it’s monetized with affiliate links and Google Adsense, as well as getting regular traffic, if it’s not profitable, or have the potential to be profitable, then you’ve wasted all that time, effort and money for nothing. So it’s a good idea to do a little research before you start.
When website flipping, your motives are slightly different to someone who has long-term ambitions for the site. Your ultimate goal is to get it completed, receiving traffic and earning money as quickly as possible in order to flip it at a big fat profit.
So how do you pick a niche to focus on?
There are several ways, you can pick something that is “evergreen” which will never go out of date such as dating, dieting, self-help or health. Although these niches may seem saturated, these are always popular buys so long as you focus on a niche within these niches so there is less competition. This way it will become easier for you to get the website into profit.
To get an idea of what to focus on you can go to Amazon.com and see which products are selling the best in your chosen niche to see which direction to go in. Remember to check out the physical products too, not just the books! Although being an Amazon affiliate in many States is no longer possible, using the Amazon site for research can save you lots of research time and even give you profitable ideas that you’d not thought of. You can monetize your site selling digital and physical products without using Amazon, but we’ll cover that later on.
If you prefer to promote digital products then have a look on Clickbank.com to see which products are selling the best in each category. There are lots of different niches to look into so you’ll never be short of flipping ideas!
Another research technique is to check out what your competition is doing. Have a look on Flippa.com to see which websites are consistently selling well. This is also where you will be most likely selling your website too. It’s a good idea to also see what isn’t selling well and work out why, so you can learn from their mistakes. These mistakes could be anything from the wrong niche, no traffic, no profit or even a listing error. These are mistakes that you can capitalize on.
With your research, if you find that you want to create a site on “pink furry chairs” and the sites relating to “pink furry chairs” aren’t selling very well, then you know it might be better to choose another topic, unless the seller is making fundamental mistakes with their site and listing.
This initial research that you are doing can save you time and money on future projects. You may find that you hit a highly profitable niche and there is no reason why you can’t build several sites, using a similar model and flip them all over time. Or, keep them for your virtual real estate portfolio, knowing they will be bringing you in a regular income each month.
The trick initially is to find a strategy and niche that works and build on this knowledge to build yourself a highly profitable website flipping business. Also, as has been said before, if you find that you have built a highly profitable website, you don’t need to sell it, just flip the ones that aren’t so profitable.
Once you have your strategy worked out you may find that you know how to make a website profitable, so you may decide to buy a website that isn’t profitable, make it profitable and then flip it. The decision is entirely yours and the best way to know which way you are going to go is by getting started and just doing it!
Choosing Your Domain Name & Hosting
It is important before you start to get the basics right. This includes selecting an appropriate domain name, having a domain name registrar that makes it easy for you to transfer the domain to another person, as well as having a good hosting account.
Choosing a “good” domain depends on the keywords for your chosen niche.
The rule of thumb for choosing a domain name is that it should be 2 or 3 words, and with a dot com extension. However, you will often find that the dot com will be taken so may need to go with a dot net or dot org extension. The words within the domain should be all one word, without hyphens as your first choice, and with hypens on your second. After checking that the dot org and dot net’s are gone too.
You can get cheap domains to use at GoDaddy or NameCheap.
Next you need to make sure that you have a good hosting account, one that’s reliable as well as affordable, with the ability to have several websites hosted at the same time.
There are a multitude of hosting companies offering many different hosting packages. Unfortunately there aren’t that many that allow you to pay monthly, apart from Hostgator, where you can get a hosting package with unlimited domains, unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth for $7.96/month.
If you have the funds to pay a year upfront then Bluehost offers unlimited domains, unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth for the equivalent of $6.95/month which is payable in advance.
HostMonster is another hosting provider, offering a similar deal to Bluehost but the price is the equivalent of $5.95/month payable 12 months in advance.
Previously when selling your website you would need to backup the mysql database within your hosting account and this had to be taken into consideration when choosing your web host as not all made this access easy for you. However, there are a few WordPress plugins now that can backup your entire site without ever having to leave WordPress.
Once you’ve bought your domain and linked it with your hosting account, then it’s time to get to work!
Installing WordPress & Your Chosen Theme
Installing WordPress should be relatively straightforward, especially if your hosting company has Fanastico installed. Most hosting companies, such as Hostgator, BlueHost and HostMonster have Fantastico within their hosting packages.
There are many free guides online on how to install WordPress if you are not sure. Here is a brief description of how the installation process works.
You will find Fantastico (DeLuxe) within your cpanel account, you can get access to your cpanel account using the following url, replacing mydomain.com with your own domain name: HYPERLINK “http://mydomain.com/cpanel”http://mydomain.com/cpanel. Scroll down to near the bottom and you will find Fantastico. Click on it, then on the left hand side you will find different scripts you can install, WordPress is near the top.
Click on WordPress and then on “new installation” and fill out the instructions to install it. Take note of your username and password, make sure that your password is difficult to guess, to ensure you have a high level of security on your new site.
Once you have WordPress installed, you need to add your plugins and your chosen theme. Firstly your theme. If you are using a free theme and plan on customizing it, then make sure you check the theme license to make sure that you can use it on a site you are planning on selling. Some free themes don’t allow for commercial use or being transferred.
However, using a paid theme can add value to your listing. Not only that, often with a paid theme you have more rights with what you can do with it, than with a free theme. Within your listing you can also stipulate that you are using a template worth $x which automatically gives a much higher perceived value for your listing.
StudioPress has over 30 different styles and although the outlay for the entire portfolio may be slightly expensive at $249.95, you can choose the individual theme you like and then upgrade your license later on. Each theme costs $79.95 and with that you can customize it in any way you wish, take off the links back to StudioPress and put your own, as well as use it on a site that you can sell.
Another great place to get theme’s to use is Elegant Themes. It’s slightly cheaper than StudioPress and comes with a wide variety of themes to choose from and you can upgrade your membership to a developers license.
In order to make the theme fit your niche, it’s a good idea to customize it by adding appropriate images so that it fits the niche that you are in. You can get free images at HYPERLINK “http://sxc.hu/”sxc.hu or HYPERLINK “http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/”freedigitalphotos.net. Make sure that you look at the licenses with each image and adhere to them.
There are a few plugins that you should install as soon as you install WordPress, these are:
- Ultimate Google Analytics – This is so you can keep track of your website visitors as well as show this proof to your potential customers.
- Google XML Sitemaps – This is to inform Google about your site and any updates you do. It works within Google Webmaster Tools and you can see which pages of your website are indexed in Google and which ones aren’t.
- All-in-One SEO – This plugin allows you to set the search engine optimized settings for each page, such as title and description.
- Easy Privacy Policy – This sets up your sites privacy policy that adhere’s to Google Adsense’s privacy policy requirements. A few clicks and you’re done!
- Quick Page/Post Redirect – This is great for creating affiliate links with your own domain name in the url, so instead of having to use your affiliate link, you can create a page within your website and use a redirect.
These are the basic plugins you will need, however there are other one’s which are advisable, including the plugins that you will need to hold your affiliate banners and Adsense ad blocks. We’ll be going over the advertising options in a later section.
Adding Content
You can make adding content as simple or more involved as you like. There are different strategies for creating content and here are just two.
Strategy One
After doing some keyword research, pick the 5 to 8 keywords with the best chance of getting on page 1 of Google with a little bit of effort. Create a page for each of these keywords and use these pages as backlink targets. Then create a post every couple of days or weekly, using your keyword research. The content you are creating for this will be your own unique content.
Applying this type of strategy means that your site is very focused on a very small part of a particular niche and you are going for quality not quantity. You will start to receive traffic through your external effort of backlinking and marketing.
Strategy Two
Create your content using autoblogging, going for quantity over quality. Autoblogging is when the plugin that you’ve installed pulls content from the internet and posts it into your blog. This entails installing a plugin such as WPRobot which will not only create article content but offer up to 9 different ways to make money through your blog, but more about that later.
Using an autoblogging plugin makes it easier to set up multiple sites at a time and set them to receive content on a regular basis, rather than having to create all the content yourself. This then frees you up to focus on traffic generation and building more sites.
With WPRobot it allows you to pull content from Articles Base, PRWeb Press Releases, Yahoo Answers, Yelp Business Reviews, YouTube as well as rss feeds, it has over 20 places that you can pull content from.
You can also add plr content and write fresh content as well.
One of the great things about WPRobot is that it allows you to back date content, so that in a matter of hours you can have a site full of content that dates back a month, 3 months or any length of time if you want it to.
You can also back date posts manually too.
Now that we’ve covered the content, let’s move on to monetizing your site.
Monetizing Your Site
One of the most popular strategies for monetizing your site is by adding Google Adsense. There are a number of different plugins that you can use for Adsense, a simple and easy to use one is Quick Adsense. Due to Adsense rules you can only have up to 3 ad blocks on each page as well as up to 3 link units, and with this plugin you will be able to set this automatically.
Another way to monetize your site is to add affiliate banners, relating to the niche that you are in. There are a number of places to look for affiliate offers and it’s a good idea to try and use the same affiliate center for many of the banners rather than 10 different affiliate programs. By doing this you can accumulate your earnings to reach the minimum payout threshold faster, rather than waiting for all the affiliate programs reaching the minimum amount.
Please check the list of affiliate programs in the resources section in order to find thousands of different affiliate programs you can earn from.
There are several different advertising plugins that you can use, the best 2 which are Ad Codes Widget and Ad Squares Widget, which allow you to enter banner codes to be displayed. The Ad Codes Widget allows any size of banner while the other caters for 125 x 125 advertising buttons.
You could also set up an estore, buy some plr reports and brand them with your sites details and sell them for a low amount. By doing this you are offering your potential customer another income stream they can build on.
If you are using strategy 2 to add content, an autoblogging plugin like WPRobot can provide you with several income streams. You can set the plugin to import up to 9 different income streams from sources such as eBay, Amazon, Clickbank, ShareASale and Commission Junction. These will appear as blog posts on your website.
You don’t have to use all the modules available, you can easily pick and choose which ones you want to use as well as testing different combinations on your other WordPress installations. This is the best way to come up with a monetizing strategy that works best in your chosen niche.
The great thing about having a developers license for WPRobot is that it gives your customer added value and they can use the same version of WPRobot on up to 3 of their own sites. The minimum price you can charge for your website by having this installed is $140.
Once you start getting traffic to your website you can test which ads and their placements on your blog are bringing in the most money and replace the ones that aren’t doing anything.
Combine this with your Google Analytics results to see what people are searching for and you are on track to creating your perfect flipping strategy.
Getting Your Site Ready To List
So you’ve created the content and monetized your site and you are ready to sell your website. There are a few things that you will need to do before the sale goes through. The first is to get your site ready to list.
Your potential customers may want proof of the traffic that your website is receiving so it’s a good idea to install a Google Analytics plugin so that you can then offer this proof. Take a screen shot of the traffic your site has been receiving over the past month. You can either put this on the listing or have it available for any enquiries.
You will more than likely also be asked for proof of the earnings that your website has made so you will need to do something similar with this. Count up the total amount of earning from all your income sources for the past month, or from the start, listing each source and the amount. Take screen shots of these, again to provide to anyone enquiring about your listing.
As your potential customers will probably want to view your site before purchase, make sure that all your links work and that your site is looking it’s best!
There is generally a rule of thumb that you can sell your website for 10 times the monthly profit it generates. However, this isn’t always the case and you should always research what similar sites are going for and try and maximise your sites profits before selling.
Firstly you could offer your website for sale through your own email list before listing your website on website flipping sites such as HYPERLINK “http://flippa.com/”Flippa.com.
Selling Your Site
Once your site has been sold, you will need to do several things, including backing up your website and transferring the domain. The first thing to do is start the transfer of the domain because your customer can’t really do anything until this step has been completed. Your domain registrar will have details on how to do this.
Chances are your customer will have their own hosting account so you need to be able to easily back up your site into a zip file to transfer to your customer. Zipping your website is really easy using a plugin called Backup Buddy. With Backup Buddy you can backup your entire website including the WordPress database which includes all your content such as pages and blog posts, as well as your theme and all the plugins you’ve installed.
One of the advantages of using Backup Buddy is that you don’t need to leave your WordPress installation to create your backup, you can do everything within your dashboard.
With just a few clicks you can email your backup to your own email address to pass on to your customer once payment has been received. Make sure that you offer instructions on how to upload the file to their hosting account but with Backup Buddy it’s relatively easy.
Firstly, once the domain has bee transferred to your customer they need to link the domain with their hosting account. Next, within their hosting account they need to create a new database for the website. Once this is done, upload the importbuddy.php file that you will give them, then the backed up zip file, both to the root folder of their hosting account. The next steps are step by step actions as your customer then goes to domain.com/importbuddy.php and follows the online instructions. Very simple!
Your customer can then use the installed version of Backup Buddy to continue creating monthly backups of their site for extra piece of mind. This adds even more value to your listing!
Hopefully this guide has given you many ideas on how to build a website flipping business.
