Flipping Easy

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”
~ Lao Tzu, father of Taoism

Chances are you’ve heard that quote so many times it has almost become cliche. But much like the thousand mile journey, building a website begins with a few seemingly small steps, that can have major impact on the overall success of the site. I’m going to walk you through the “single steps” or processes I went through when choosing the niche and domain name for my Creating and Selling a Site in 30 Days case study.

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.

One of the most common questions I’ve run into in this industry is whether or not to set a Buy It Now (BIN) price when selling a site. Rather than answering that question directly, let’s explore the issue a bit and I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did.

For those of you that don’t know how a BIN price works, it’s basically setting a price at which you’re willing to not only sell the site, but also end the auction immediately and accept no further bids. For example, if I’m selling a site and the starting bid is $200, I might set the BIN price at say $1,000. If a buyer comes in and bid’s the BIN price, the auction ends and I sell the site to that buyer for $1,000.

From a buyer’s perspective, there are only a few reasons one would want to bid the BIN price.

1. You want to get your hands on the site immediately and don’t want to have to wait for the auction to end.
2. You don’t want to deal with all the hassle of bidding and tracking an auction.
3. You are worried that bidding will push the price of the site higher than the BIN price.

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.

Welcome to Flipping Easy!

Unfortunately you’re just a tad early. We’re going to officially launch on Nov 3 but until then, you can check out the About page to see what’s planned for the site.

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