I hope you’re all having a happy holiday season! There are a lot of exciting things in store for Flipping Easy in the coming year but I wanted to provide one last useful post for 2008.

While researching the topic of buying and selling websites, I was struck by how little information is offered for free in this industry. There are more courses and eBooks out there than you can shake a stick at but only a handful of sites are offering what I would consider quality information without making you fork over a chunk of change first.

As I was sifting through a bunch of long winded sales letters and product pitch pages, I decided to start collecting all the useful posts and articles about site flipping from across the web into one long list. In the spirit of the holiday season, I figured I’d share that list with you (after checking it twice of course), so without further ado…

Flipping Overviews

1. How to Buy a Website and Flip it for Profit – Entrepreneurs Journey
2. Flip a Web Site Fixer-upper – Sitepoint
3. How to Invest in Websites in Your Spare Time – Entrepreneurs Journey
4. How to Make Money from Website Flipping – Net Business Blog
5. Buying and Selling Websites Offers Quick Profits – Guardian.co.uk
6. Find an Under Valued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. – NYtimes.com
7. Flipping Websites – An Additional Income Stream for Freelance Writers – All Freelance Writing

Buying Sites

1. Buying a Website 101 – BuyEstablishedWebsites.com
2. A Few Things to Consider When Buying a Website – WebsiteBroker
3. What You Need to Know Before Buying Websites – DigitalWebTalk
4. One Tip to Double Your Flipping Profits – BuyEstablishedWebsites.com
5. Finding, Evaluating, and Buying a Site – WebsiteBroker

Valuing Sites

1. The Ultimate Web Site Valuation Guide – Sitepoint
2. How To Sell A Website – How Much Is Your Website Worth? – Entrepreneurs Journey
3. Valuation of Websites – WebsiteBroker
4. What’s Your Website Worth? – Sitepoint

Selling Sites

1. The Website Seller – John Cow
2. How to Avoid Being Scammed by Fraudulent Buyers – Suite J
3. Selling Websites 101 – BuyEstablishedWebsites.com
4. To Flip or Not to Flip? – All Freelance Writing
5. Hunting Down Buyers – Suite J

Case Studies

1. Flipping a Site for Profit – Sitepoint
2. The Anatomy of a Website Flip – BuyEstablishedWebsites.com
3. Lessons from an Acquisition – Ask Shane
4. Once I Bought a Website – Sitepoint
5. Flipping Websites (Week 1, Week 2 and Week 3) – All Freelance Writing

Free eBooks

1. Site Flipping for Wealth – SmarterWealth.net

I’ll continue to maintain the list in the coming year so if I’ve missed any, or you find newly published posts that I might not catch, please feel free to drop me a link for inclusion. Just be sure to mention the Resource List in your email so my filter catches it.

(Note: please only send me links to free resources, I’m not going to promote someone’s product with this list).

While going to the “school of hard knocks” is often seen as a badge of honor, attending means making and learning from a lot of mistakes. Unfortunately when it comes to buying and selling websites, making mistakes almost always means losing money and all of the sudden the school of hard knocks doesn’t sound so glamorous.

While you should always learn from your mistakes, in flipping being able to learn from the mistakes of others can literally pay huge dividends. To help in that endeavor, I’ve compiled a list of 5 common mistakes people make when flipping sites that will absolutely cost you money.

1) The White Elephant

If the website in question is being sold to you and your purpose is to re-sell it, remember that there is always a reason the site is up for sale. It may be that the site is not and never has been profitable. The site may be more work to maintain than it’s worth. The sale may be the current owner’s last-ditch effort to recoup some of his or her losses.

Whatever the reason, it’s important for you to know as many of the risks and challenges that you’ll face with a site as possible. Doing your research, reading up on the site, and asking the seller questions will help you avoid buying someone else’s white elephant.

2) Dead on Arrival

To measure the potential value of a site you must ask yourself these questions:

• “What market share does this site have and how difficult would it be to gain market share?”
• “Is this subject already saturated?” or “Do we really need another [fill-in-the-blank]-type site?”
• “What would make someone interested in (the site’s niche) visit this site?”
• “Can the site’s traffic be monetized more effectively?”

The answers to these questions may sometimes talk you out of a good investment but they will most certainly talk you out of many more bad ones, and you don’t want to be the “greater fool” (See #5 below). The last thing you want to do is buy a site that’s “dead on arrival” and has no chance of being resuscitated.

3) Starting Low

When selling a site, if your asking price is too low it can suggest to potential buyers that you see no value in the site and will let it go at any price just to be rid of it. Any product for sale must be presented to display worth, but also within limits (See #4 below) to appear to be delivering value. Obviously a price of $100 implies much more value than a price of $1.

As such, you must think carefully about where you start the bidding for your auction. I usually start my auctions at 75% of the reserve price to give people at least a ballpark idea of where I’m hoping the auction will end up. Others start the bidding lower to attract bidders’ interest and get the action moving on the auction. There are pros and cons to each approach, just be aware of the implications your starting price might have on perception and participation.

4) Starting High

On the other hand, starting the bidding or your asking price too high can often deter potential bidders or prevent your site from selling all together. Remember, the value of a product is not determined by the price asked, rather, it is determined by the price one is willing to pay for it. Obviously you want to get as much as possible for your site but you also have to be realistic.

Before listing the site for sale, ask yourself what a reasonable final sale price would be. Decide before hand what your best and worst case scenarios will be, and then stick to your guns during the auction. It’s easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and suddenly decide that your site is worth more than it really is or panic and accept less than your site is really worth.

5) The Greater Fool Theory

The “Greater Fool” theory is often used to justify questionable investments, assuming that no matter what, you’ll always be able to sell to the “greater fool.” This theory is popular among momentum investors and plays on the fact that as more and more money is made, there will be people jumping on the bandwagon hoping to make an easy buck. Even if the property you’re buying isn’t worth the price you’re paying, as long as you’ll be able to sell it for an even higher price, it’s a good investment.

The problem with this theory is that you’re relying not on the quality or value of your property (in this case a website) but instead on the gullibility of others. While actually works quite often, I for one like to be able to stand behind my product. I’d prefer to have buyers so happy with the transaction that they become repeat customers.

Also, bubbles always burst, momentum always shifts and if you’re caught on the wrong side of that swing, the greater fool theory will have once again been proven true, but you’ll be playing the part of the fool.

These principles are not absolute rules, they simply offer a guideline to success when buying and selling websites. As with any learned skill, you’re going to make mistakes while flipping sites. And, you absolutely should make sure you’re learning learning from those mistakes and getting better with each and every transaction.

However, if you can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid these 5 common flipping mistakes, you’ll learn the ropes of this industry while making money, not losing it.

I recently listed Private Party sales as one of the only two places I would suggest selling a website. Not only can private sales save you the time and money involved in listing a site for auction, they also often result in a much higher sale price and thus, a bigger profit on your flip. Unfortunately, finding people that want to buy their site outside of a marketplace listing can be difficult and sometimes intimidating for people that are new to site flipping. To help you overcome that initial fear or hesitancy, I’ve compiled a quick list of three easy places to find private party buyers for your website.

Businesses in your Niche

If you’ve picked a profitable niche for your website, chances are there are businesses that are in the same niche or at the very least, would be able to serve your reader base. While many businesses are becoming more and more web-savvy, their web presence almost always leaves room for improvement. By contacting these businesses letting them know what your site is and how it could benefit their business, you can quite often create an interested bidder that wouldn’t have otherwise been involved in the process. And, businesses will usually have a built in method for monetizing your site’s traffic so the site may very well be worth much more to them (read as: much higher sale price), than it would be to a random SitePoint bidder.

Previous Buyers

In the business world it’s a tried and true statistic that once someone buys from you, they’re MUCH more likely to buy from you again. That’s why customer lists are so valuable and why companies will often break even or lose money on low end products just to acquire another customer who will purchase higher priced items from the same company later on.

While websites are often higher dollar transactions, the same principle holds true. If someone has purchased a site from you in the past, they are much more likely to buy one from you in the future. By keeping a list of your buyers and their contact information, you can often sell your site with a simple email or two, without ever having to put it up for auction. Some site flippers that focus on creating and selling turnkey sites will even get requests for other sites from their previous buyers. Now I don’t know about you but I think having ready and willing customers requesting sites from me would be a lot better than having to go through the trouble finding buyers or creating auction listings.

Readers

The final often overlooked source of potential private party buyers is your site’s readers! If your website has been up and running for a while I’m going to assume that it has a bit of traffic and probably a few frequent visitors. If your site is a blog, chances are you’ve developed a group of loyal readers or subscribers. Whether this group is 5 people or 5,000, they’re also a pool of potential buyers.

These people already see the value in your site, otherwise they wouldn’t keep coming back. While many of them might just be there for the infomation you present, chances are you’ll have a few people that have considered starting a site of their own. By letting your visitors or readers know that your site is for sale, you’re alerting them of the opportunity to own the site they’ve been visiting, without having to do all the work of creating their own site or starting their own blog.

If you rely stricktly on marketplaces auctions, you’re not only severly limiting the size of your pool of potential buyers, but you’ll also be leaving a lot of money on the the table in the sales you do make. While you may not find a private buyer for every site you sell, these are three very easy ways to give it a shot.

Have you ever tried selling a site privately? If so, did you make more or less than you would have listing it for auction?  What were some problems or challenges you faced? If you have any other tips or questions about finding private buyers for your sites, please leave them in the comment section below!

One of the question that comes up a lot when people first hear about buying and selling websites is “Where should I sell my site?”

To be honest, I find this to be a very simple question, as there are really only two places I would ever, EVER, sell a website. Now obviously there are a lot more than two places out there that will let you sell your site, so chances are I’m going to be stepping on some toes with this post. It’s not that the other places out there are horrible, or that you’d never be able to sell you site. The issue is simply that when selling things, you have to go where the buyers are. And in my experience, the buyers of websites are in only two places.

I should also mention that I’m talking about selling websites. Domain names are entirely different and there are several different places that I would suggest selling you domain names.

Now that I’ve got those qualifications out of the way, the only places I’d suggest you sell your website are SitePoint and in a Private Party sale.

SitePoint

This one’s no surprise to many of you. SitePoint has one of the most active marketplaces for websites and more importantly, the sites that sell tend to go for higher prices! SitePoint has become known as the place to buy and sell quality sites and that very perception will help you sell your site.

However, I should also mention that when selling a site here, you’re going to be side by side with other high quality sites, so it’s important to have a quality offering that you can stand behind. SitePoint has some of the savviest buyers around so if you’re trying to sell a low quality site or you’re trying to pull a fast one and get away with it, chances are you won’t be able to do it here.

Despite the savvy nature of the buyers, it’s still critical that you have good sales copy for your listing. As I said, a lot of sites come through this marketplace and your listing is going to need all the help it can get to stand out. Your sales copy is a perspective buyer’s first impression of your site so spend time on it, and make sure you’ve got your bases covered. Sell the idea or the dream behind your website but make sure you can back up every single claim or it will come back to bite you in one way or another.

Private Party

While SitePoint is great, their marketplace falls far short of having universal reach. What this means to you is that the person or company that might value your site the most, might be unaware that it is for sale or even exists. That’s why, as I mentioned earlier, you have to go where the buyers are. Sometimes, that means approaching a perspective buyer privately. While this can be a bit of a hassle since it requires individual contact, it can also pay off in a big way when it comes to your final sale price. These private party sales tend to intimidate new site flippers but there are three easy places to find potential private party buyers of your site that I’ll be discussing in my next post. Make sure you’re subscribed to the blog through one of our two different options (RSS feed or RSS by Email) so that you don’t miss 3 Easy Places to Find Private Party Buyers for Your Website.

While there are plenty of places that allow you to list your website for sale these are the only two “places” I would recommend you sell your site. Disagree with me? Have I left out your favorite place to sell sites? Weigh in with your opinion in the comment section below!

The following is a guest post by Lee (aka Glitterbidder) of Unique Turnkey Websites. If you would like to guest post here on FlippingEasy.com drop me a line via the contact page.

If you browse through any of the places that sell websites, you’ll notice a wide variety of sites for sale. Generally, you will find that the dominant sellers deal in two types of sites – quickie sites that are usually made by scripts and content sites which typically include premium themes.  Obviously, the “quickie” sites are easy to make, however they don’t sell for nearly as much as the content sites which can take a flipper many hours and a few bucks to get in premium condition.

So, this begs the question which is better quality or quantity?

Quantity

There are pros and cons to each. Some people that build sites using scripts or auto updating content can bang out these sites in minutes.  Once you’ve recoup your initial cost for the scripts they barely cost anything but the domain registration and fees that you pay to list them.  So, you really don’t have too much invested in them and you can sell them for less money and still make a tidy profit.

The drawback to these sites, however, is that they are not in as high demand as the unique content sites and, while you don’t have too much invested in them, relisting them several times to find a buyer can really eat into your profits. The other thing is that in order to make a decent amount of money, you’ll need to list many sites each week. The more sites you sell, the more time you’ll have to spend doing customer support.

Quality

The quality content sites, on the other hand, can be very time consuming to make. I know I can spend four or five hours putting mine together and I don’t even write the content myself! Finding photos to go on the site, customizing the header and getting the colors, layout and look and feel just right can take quite some time but it does have a payoff in the premium price that you can ask.

In addition, you have to have a wide variety of skill sets in order to put the site together as you need to be able to handle the technical aspects as well as graphics and good English skills to make sure that the content is up to par.  Not only that but you probably will have to lay out some money to buy the photos and, if you buy it instead of writing it yourself, the content of the site as well as the cost of a premium theme or template.

The payoff for these quality content sites can be pretty good though. Not only that, but they are in very high demand so you have a good chance of selling your site without having to re-list it. In addition, if it doesn’t sell you could always hold it back and do some promotion as these sites have a better chance of getting traffic and even producing some earnings in the coming months than the sites built with scripts do. Then you can sell your site two months later for twice as much as you asked in the first place! Not only that but you will have to sell fewer of them to make the same amount of money so your customer support time will be less.

Which is Right for You?

When it comes to answering the question of which type of site is better, it really depends on what you want out of your site flipping business. There are also many factors that go into which kind of site is better for you to focus on. If you don’t have a lot of time or money, the quick sites might be better. If you’re trying to build up a business of premium sites, then you probably want to focus on the content sites.

Finally, you really need to think about what you enjoy doing – if you like building a premium site that there’s your answer. However, if you just like to make a quick site and get a couple bucks for it so that you can have a nice dinner out then that’s fine too.  There is no right or wrong way, it’s all about what works for you!

Lee Dobbins
http://www.uniqueturnkeywebsites.com

By the time you read this I should be in the recovery room after some minor back surgery to fix a issue I had with a disc. I tell you this for two reasons. First of all, I’ll be out of commission for a while so posting here is going to be a bit more spread out than I’d like it to be. I have a few posts ready and there might even be a guest post or two but even so, posting frequency is going to slow down slightly.

More importantly though, the thought occurred to me that surgery really is what’s often required for a successful site flip. So, in the spirit of embracing the post slowing annoyance also known as a partial discectomy, I’d like to discuss the 4 stages of Site Surgery.

Diagnosis

More often than not in flipping, you’ll be dealing with a site that has some sort of issue or problem. The first step in a successful flip is going to be diagnose or identify what is wrong. While the problem might be something obvious like a horrible design, it might also be something a bit more subtle like using the wrong types of offers to monetize the traffic.

Prescription

Like any good doctor, once you make the diagnosis you’ll need to figure out what course of action is needed. Does the site need a complete redesign or just a few tweaks? Do you need to have a bunch of brand new content written or would one or two viral posts suffice? Perhaps the site would be improved by moving it to a new domain or just some better sales copy on the auction listing. Once you’ve decided what prescription is needed it’s time to move on to treatment.

Treatment

No practitioner will proclaim to be able to do any and all procedures you might need. That’s precisely why there are brain surgeons, podiatrists, and everything in between. Rather than become a jack of all trades, medicine encourages specialization. The same principle applies to buying and selling websites. Instead of spending time learning Photoshop to improve a site’s design or becoming a prolific copywriter to improve a site’s content, “refer” your site to a specialist. Spend your time on whatever aspect of site flipping you’re best at. You’ll not only be more efficient that way, but you’ll also avoid a lot of frustration and possible burnout.

Follow Up

After treatment, any good doctor will tell you that you absolutely MUST follow up. Once you make the changes, tracking the results will tell you whether or not it was the right course of treatment. Has the new design resulted in a lower bounce rate? Have the new articles attracted the traffic or the links you were hoping for? Are the new product offerings or ads resulting in increased revenue? By following up after treatment you’ll be able to identify whether further work is needed or the site has been “healed” and is ready for sale.

Did I miss any steps in the process? Why type of site “surgeon” are you? Feel free to weigh in with your opinion in the comment section below!

One of the most common questions about selling a website is when to pull the trigger and actually list it for sale. There are so many unknown elements when selling that even once you’ve decided to sell, it is incredibly easy to begin second guessing yourself. In the end, the decision to sell is ultimately one that you will have to make for yourself. However, I thought it might be useful to discuss a few of the questions to consider, that will hopefully make the decision making process a bit less stressful for you.

While every site and site owner are different, I’ve found that almost all of them fall into one of the following three scenarios:

The Pet Project

The Pet Project is a site that someone created from scratch and likely spent a lot of time and effort creating. And whether the owner realizes it or not, they almost certainly have some emotional attachment to it as well. Most often the site owner has come to the realization that their site holds some sort of value but may not be sure how much or whether they actually want to part with the site.

In my most recent site sale, I found myself in precisely in this position. I had built the site as a labor of love and really hadn’t given much thought to how much it was actually worth. However, when the offer to buy came in, I found the following questions to be helpful in the decision making process:

What benefit do I currently receive?

Pet Projects usually allow the owner to do something they benefit from even if it isn’t monetarily. For example, the site might allow them to learn or teach a topic they love or to connect with like minded people.

How will selling the site affect that benefit?

Once you’ve established what kind of benefit you’re getting from the site, ask yourself if selling the site would change or put an end to that benefit. If the value is in the community surrounding your site, will you still be able to participate in it? Also, if you do decide to sell, is there any other way you can gain the same benefit, perhaps at another site?

Can I handle the change?

This is one of the most questions that somehow seems to fly under the radar but it’s a critical one. Can you handle watching your site change dramatically? You’ve spent a lot of time and effort creating the site and yet once you sell it, chances are it will change significantly. It can be very difficult watching this transition, especially if you don’t agree with the direction the new owner is headed. What would your reaction be if the new owner stopped updating the blog you’re considering selling? What if they decided to plaster it with ads and post lower quality materials? Remember, once you sell your site, you no longer control it’s destiny.

The Business

If your website is an online business, the questions that you have to answer are a little bit more cut and dried. You know how much income the site brings in every month and you also know how much time and effort it requires to maintain. My first site sale fell into this category and while it wasn’t an easy decision to make, the answers to the following questions helped me put things into perspective.

How much am I currently making per hour of work?

This seems like a fairly obvious question but many online entrepreneurs focus solely on the amount of money coming in, not how much time they’re spending bringing it in. For example, if your site makes $1,000 a month and requires only 5 hours of your time, you might be much less willing to sell than if it required 20 hours to maintain.

What will take your site to the next level?

One statement I’ve read countless times when people sell their site is that with a “little work” the site could “easily” be making twice as much. While that pitch might work on less experienced buyers, more seasoned site buyers will see right through it. However, if some extra work would in fact increase your earnings significantly, it might well be worth the added effort to drastically increase your final sale price.

Is Outsourcing an Option?

One of the most common reasons people decide to sell their money making site, is that they lose interest in the topic or get burned out. If your site requires a lot of time and effort, it can be a really daunting task to maintain it day in and day out for months or years on end. However, if that’s the only reason you’re considering selling, outsourcing that work might be a viable option for you. Writers can be hired to take over your blog, students or other freelancers can often be hired to take care of the monotonous day to day activities, the possibilities really are endless in today’s wired world.

The Flip

While a website that you’ve purchased with the intent to “flip” or resell will often have originally fallen into one of the previous two categories, it’s an entirely different situation when you’ve purchased the site. Chances are you don’t have the emotional connection to the site that we see in Pet Projects and you may already utilize outsourcing methods that were discussed as an option for The Business sites.

When deciding whether to list a flip for sale, the questions are pretty simple:

What return will I see on my investment?

Now remember, we’re not just talking financial investment here. If you buy a site and sell it the next day with the only work being a listing fee, you won’t need to make as much from the sale before you turn a profit. On the other hand, if you buy a site and spend 40 hours improving it, you’re going to need to get significantly more from the site to cover the cost of your time.

Depending on the investment, you might also have to ask yourself whether or not you could make more by listing at a later date, whether you should cut your losses and sell now, or several other questions but in the end, they all boil down to maximizing those three little letters, ROI.

Have you considered selling a website recently? If so, did you ask yourself these kinds of questions? Experienced site flippers, what kinds of questions do you consider when debating whether or not to sell? Weigh in with your opinion in the comment section below!

The business of buying and selling websites had drawn a lot of comparisons to the real estate industry. And, for the most part I think it’s a fairly accurate comparison. Instead of property we buy and sell domains. Instead of homes or buildings we buy and sell websites. Fortunately for us, there are also a few important differences.

Most notably, there is almost no barrier to entry which means you don’t have nearly the risk factor. Also, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you know the real estate market has taken a beating. Loans are hard to come by, the market is flooded with homes, and prices have plummeted. The “virtual” real estate industry of buying and selling sites, has suffered no such collapse.

Despite those differences, I’m going to use the real estate illustration to explain the 3 types of business models that make up the website industry.

The Quick Flip

We’ve all seen the shows on tv where people buy an old, run down house, fix it up, and sell it off for a huge profit. That’s essentially what the Quick Flip is. You buy a website that could use some work (whether it’s a new design, better content, more traffic, or a way to monetize the traffic that’s already there), make the necessary changes, and sell it for more than your investment. Occasionally you won’t have to do any work other than re-listing the site for sale!

The Mid-Term

No no, don’t worry, I’m not talking about some big test you have to take. I used the name because this model is basically anything in between the Quick Flip and the Long Investment. Often when flipping a website it can be beneficial to hang on to it for a few months to allow your improvements to manifest in higher traffic levels, increased earnings, or more subscribers. For example, if you do some basic search engine optimization (SEO) work on a site, it can take a while for you to see the higher rankings. Also, if you’ve attracted several new links to the website, you may want to wait for Google to update the PageRank score of the site which can increase your sale value as well.

Establishing a longer pattern of your metrics, whether it’s income or traffic can help assure potential buyers that the site will continue to have similar success even after they buy it. No one wants to get duped into buying a one hit wonder and by holding a site a bit longer, you can lay down that track record and demand a higher price when it comes time to sell.

The Long Investment

As the name suggests, this model should be viewed as a longer term investment. Whether you decide to build a site from scratch and need to develop it before selling it off, or you buy a site that requires a longer time-line before selling again, the goal is to increase the site’s value over a much longer period of time than the previous two models. In fact, when working with Investment type sites, you may decide not to sell at all, and instead enjoy the monthly revenue streams the site is generating.

To the experienced site flippers out there, which model is your favorite?

Which do you find makes you the most money?

Feel free to weigh in with your opinion in the comment section below!