From Flipping Homes To Flipping Websites

A few years ago I was on top of the world. Its always been said to find your passion or calling in life and you will never look back. Well, I found it and it was called flipping homes. Yes, we bought, rehabbed, and flipped properties. I loved every minute of it. No, I wasn’t one of those who researched and read all day long. I took action. I had a partner and we flipped multiple homes every year. We both thoroughly enjoyed what we were doing. Better yet, my partner was my brother and we had never been closer. Then the economy started to take its toll. We could have bought houses left and right but the retail buyers weren’t buying any longer. Prices started to drop. What was once sold in days was now taking 6+ months. We had to face the facts. We were out of business.

The thought of taking something that was beat up and fixing it up was what we both enjoyed. But to do the same thing with lets say cars and resell a certain number of them, requires a license. So, we decided to sit down and figure out our strengths and try to work with that. One thing came to mind immediately, we were good at selling our properties on the internet. We setup websites, drove traffic to those websites, and sold our properties through internet marketing. What if we could apply the same thing (flipping) to another business. Bingo. Light went off. We could sell properties but this time it would be internet properties or in other words, websites. We could either take a brand new website and make it look pretty, just like building a custom house from scratch or we could take an old beat up and neglected website, make it look beautiful, and flip it. Yes, we discovered a new business, flipping websites.

The only thing is that we needed to learn how we would go about flipping websites from start to finish. Again, we could start with a new website or fix up a neglected website. The number one thing that a website needs is traffic. If we weflipre going to be flipping websites, we needed either loads of traffic or a way to show that we were making money (called monetization) from the site. We brainstormed for a while and came up with the following areas which would help propel any website to get traffic and top rankings in the search engines:

Article Marketing
Blog Commenting
Press Releases
Guest Blog Writer
Backlinks
Social Media
Social Bookmarking

We were now armed with a number of ways to take any website and make it better. We realized that some websites could be flipped in a matter of days while others could take months. There are a lot of factors that come into play, including the domain name. So, we went about taking action. We were no longer flipping homes, we were flipping websites. We found that if a website was already monetized, we could sell it for about 10 times earnings. Plus, we could flip this website in a matter of days and sometimes weeks. If a website was not monetized but received a certain number of hits, we could flip that website depending on the niche and what cost per click advertisers might be willing to pay. We started to realize that flipping websites was going to be a lot of work but this could be fun.

We found a few forums and a site called Flippa where we could not only buy websites but sell websites as well. The best thing about this business is that you can take a niche that you are familiar with and run with it. If you happen to come across a site that looks like it has potential to be bought, rehabbed, and flipped but you are unfamiliar with the niche, you can outsource the work. Just like hiring subcontractors when we used to flip homes.

A year later and we look back at all that we’ve learned. We are no longer flipping homes, we are now flipping websites.