Flipping Easy

The entire premise of flipping websites hinges on the ability to increase the value of a site you’ve purchased, before selling it off for a profit. While the usual suspects of redesigning the site, increasing revenue, and boosting traffic are discussed quite a bit, one of my favorite methods tends to get the cold shoulder.

Link Building

Ok, being in the search engine optimization (SEO) field for so long has obviously made me a bit biased. I automatically place value on links pointing to a site. However, many of you, and more importantly many of your buyers might not view links the same way I do. So if your buyers might not value it, why am I insisting that link building is still a worthwhile way to increase the value of any site you plan on flipping?

Click Through Traffic

Unless this is your first time on the internet you realize that links are the way the web is traveled. When someone links to your site, they’re telling their visitors that your page or site is worth looking at. Every time one of those links, you’re increasing traffic to your site. If you manage to receive links from popular sites, the increase in traffic can be quite substantial. Obviously not every link will bring thousands of new visitors but click through traffic isn’t the only way links will benefit your site.

Search Engine Traffic

Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and explain all the ins and outs of SEO in a single post. (There are plenty of great SEO blogs you can check out for that kind of info.) But the basic premise is that links pointing to your site (also known as inbound links) are viewed by search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) as a “vote” for your site.

Each of those votes help your site rank better in the search engines for whatever anchor text (the blue clickable text of the link) the link uses. For example, this link to my Site Flipping Resource List will help that page rank better in a Google search for that term. The higher you rank for popular search terms, the more traffic your site will receive.

More Money

An increase of traffic doesn’t always correlate to an increase in income. Traffic that isn’t unrelated or uninterested in your site’s topic probably won’t provide much value.

However, when someone clicks on a link or a listing in the search engines they usually have a good idea what your site is about. As a result, the visitors will convert at a much better rate than say social media traffic. And increased conversions, whether that’s purchasing a product or subscribing to a blog, are always reflected in the bottom line.

So now that you know the value of inbound links, how do you actually go about building them? Check back Wednesday (or subscribe to the blog via email or our RSS feed) for the second half of this post when I’ll share 5 cheap and easy methods for building links.

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