My two previous site sales have involved sites that I’ve worked on for a long period of time. One site was 8 months old at the time of sale and the other was nearly three years old. While I think selling older, more established sites will generally be my M.O. , I’d be remiss if I didn’t attempt to capitalize on the shorter term site sales as well.
The stark reality is that most people trying to make money online never actually succeed. There are a whole host of reasons, lack of effort, paralysis by analysis, information overload, etc. but the biggest culprit I’ve seen is lack of action. People won’t actually put the methods and information they’re learning into practice. With that in mind, rather than spending all my time planning, plotting, budgeting, etc, I’m simply going to jump in.
Also, there has recently been quite a bit of discussion that the market is saturated and/or that the economy has reduced the number of interested buyers for younger sites. To put it bluntly, I believe there will always be a demand for high quality, profit producing websites. Site flipping has been growing more and more popular over the recent months and unfortunately, I think many of the new recruits are focusing more on quantity, rather than quality.
So, over the next 30 days I’m going to be starting a website (likely a blog) from scratch, promoting it, monetizing it (as best I can in such a short time period) and then selling it off. Not only will 30 days give me a chance to really launch the site properly, but it will also allow me to list in the Established Sites section of Sitepoint when it comes time for the sale. The entire time I’m working on the new site, I’ll also be chronicling my efforts here so you can follow along and use it as a game plan for a short sale of your own. I’m sure I’ll make a few mistakes along the way (that I promise to share here) but at the end of the 30 days, I’m also sure that I’ll prove there is a large market for quality sites and make some money along the way.
How much? Well, you’ll have to follow along to find out…
November 5th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
This will be interesteing Ben. I like this idea more than simply churning out startups, as much of the value in the site comes after you’ve put it live. What you do to get the traffic up will be particularly interesting.
reply:November 5th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
@Paul, I’m not a huge fan of churning out startups either and as I said, I think the real money is going to be in the middle to longer term (3-12 months) type sales. However, I think if you have quality content, any type of revenue, a good design, and a solid domain name you’ll make money on even a short sale.
I’ll be tracking the hours spent and in fact, I’m going to try to outsource as much of it as possible. I haven’t yet decided whether I’ll do daily or weekly updates but either way I’ll be sure to share all the info here.
reply:November 6th, 2008 at 4:35 am
This sounds really interesting – I think selling in the established section on sitepoint is a plus anyway as websites usually go for a lot more there! I havent tried making an established website yet, namely as Im not so good at the marketiting of them yet! lol
reply:November 8th, 2008 at 10:18 am
@Dan, websites do tend go for more in the Established, mainly because you have to have income from the site in order to list it in that section. I’ll be posting updates on how I market the site as well so be sure to follow along with me and hopefully we’ll see some good results that you can duplicate.
reply:November 8th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
[...] »Creating and Selling a Site in 30 Days [...]
reply:November 16th, 2008 at 10:44 am
You can’t get rich doing this but if you create 4 sites a month, add at least 20 pages of content, wait for indexing and a PR update you can make $100 -$200 each for each site.
So on average 4 sites a month will make you $500/mo.. To really make it work the system needs to be automated so you get some decent inbound links and free original content. That’s the secret.
Anyway, it would be a great business for a high school kid that needs a few bucks. Beats mowing lawns.
reply:November 21st, 2008 at 7:00 pm
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