Accelerated Flipping Profits

Transcription

1 Accelerated Flipping Profits By: Jonathan Heusman Thanks for purchasing this report! You have personal rights only to this content, and may not resell this report or give it away by any means without the written consent of the author. If it is found you have shared this report, the author will tell your mother and look down at you with a very disappointed look. Or worse You have been WARNED

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3 Table Of Contents: Chapter 1: Introduction to site flipping Chapter 2: Site Flip Case Studies (From Flippa) Chapter 3: What to flip? Chapter 4: How to make a flip successful? Chapter 5: Conclusion

4 Chapter 1: Introduction to Site-Flipping What is it? Site-flipping has been around for a quite a long time now. Ever since the general public was able to register their own domains and build their own websites, there has likely been site-flipping happening. Because it has been around so long, it has evolved and turned into an industry of its own with thousands of people making their living online by flipping sites. In case you are not familiar, I will give a brief description of exactly what site-flipping is. Site-flipping is the act of selling a website that you have created or acquired at an earlier time. The biggest factor in determining the market value of a website that you are flipping is its monthly income. Industry standard is to pay 12 to 18 times the monthly income for a website, but this rule is not hard and fast. Using what you learn later in this guide, you will often be able to flip a site for 24 to 36 times the monthly income. There are several different site flipping techniques being used. Some site-flippers will try to acquire what they believe are underperforming websites, work on them for a month or two to increase the traffic and income, possibly give them a nicer design and then flip them for much more than they paid for them. Kind of like those house flipping shows. Other site-flippers will try to purchase websites that are making an income for lower than 12 times its monthly income and turn around and flip them immediately for a larger amount for an instant profit. Another very common way that site-flippers operate is to build their own niche sites, get them ranking and getting traffic and flip them within 3 to 6 months or even sometimes even a year later. This may be my favorite method, but it is obviously not the fastest if you are looking for quick cash. However, it is the cheapest if you don t have money starting out to invest in already established sites. Why It Is A Great Business Model The great thing about site-flipping is that you can take a site that is making $50 per month and flip it for up to $1500 or more of instant cash. Making $50 of income per month on auto pilot is great, but what if you could take that $1500 from a one-time sale and re-invest it in building 5 more sites making $50 per month? Then you take those 5 new sites making $50 per month and you flip each of them for $1500, making you $7500. Now you can take that $7500 and invest it to make 25 sites making $50 per month and flip all of them for $1500 each and well you get the picture. That is just to give you an idea of how you can systemize your site-flipping to quickly ramp it up to making some very good cash.

5 However, maybe you would prefer to go the flip this site method and purchase underperforming websites to work on for a month or two and flip them for way more than you bought them for. Or maybe you want to just try to purchase websites that are making income for cheap and then flip them immediately for a quick payday. The choice of how you decide to go about site-flipping is completely up to you and which way you think you could have the most success with. I will go into a little bit more detail for each method and what I have found to be most successful for each in Chapter 3. Site-Flip Successes Before moving on to the meat of this guide, I just wanted to quickly share with you one of the success I have had to show you that this is for real and if you follow what I am teaching you, you can easily get similar results. Howtopickle.com: I flipped this niche site over 2 years ago, but the methods I used still work just as well today. This particular site made about $100/month in Adsense and also had a guide on Clickbank that brought in about $100/month. So the income for this site was roughly $200/month. If you were to go by the 12 to 18 times monthly income to value this site, you would figure it would sell for $2400-$3600. However, as you can see from the screeshot below, it actually sold for $6200 which was about 32 times monthly income. $200/month income is just $6.67 per day. Do you think you could build a site that makes that much in Adsense or by selling a guide or some other information? I bet you can.

6 This is just one of the successes to show you that regular people just like you are achieving phenomenal results just by knowing and doing a few things differently than most other people do. I hope you enjoy what you are about to learn. Now we will move on to some more recent case studies and see some examples of what other sellers are doing wrong and could be doing better.

7 Chapter 2: Site Flip Case Studies To continue a little bit with where we left off at in Chapter 1, I think it is a good idea to look at some other successful site-flips on the popular site-flipping website Flippa. We can learn a lot by seeing what other site-flippers are doing to bring attention and higher bids to their auctions. We can see what kind of niches have the best-selling sites, what their listings look like and see what we can take away to use in our own site-flipping sites and auctions to improve our chances of a successful sale. Case Study 1: mentalismsecretsrevealed.com - This auction was for a site selling an e-book on Clickbank. If you look at it, the first thing you want to look at is the income number vs what it sold for. The average monthly income listed is $123 and the site ended up selling for $2400. This is not bad, but could have done much better in my opinion with some tweaks to his listing. This user sold their auction for nearly 20 times monthly income which is very respectable. The first quick tweak I would have made is to highlight the best features of the site in the auction description. This would be things such as the average monthly income, monthly traffic, if the content is 100% unique, information about the e-book that may be pertinent, how old the site is, etc Detailing these things at the very beginning will catch potential buyers attention and get more people looking at your auction. One thing they did very well is to have headlines for different sections of their listing to break things up. This just makes it easier for potential buyers to digest the information and get the facts they want. The seller also clearly listed everything that is included in the auction so that visitors would not have to be bothered with asking or trying to guess. Overall, this is a decent listing which is why he got a decent price. But what I will teach you later is how to post an outstanding listing so that you can get an outstanding price. Case Study 2: classicartpaintings.com - This auction was for a site showcasing classic art paintings. It had some very good #1 rankings but not very much income. The average monthly income is listed at $73, but the auction sold for $2600. That is 35 times the monthly income of the site. Pretty good! A big part of the reason this seller was able to get such a good price is because it is easy to see the potential to make more

8 money due to the #1 rankings and how little the seller has monetized the site. His listing however does leave a bit to be desired and he most likely could have gotten quite a bit more out of this auction. The first thing he could have done differently is his auction title. In the title he says Huge Potential. While that sounds good in your head, any flipper that has been around a bit usually reads that and thinks that it is most likely just one of the worthless turnkey sites people try to sell by saying how much potential it has. But what is even a bigger mistake is he did not highlight that it has number one rankings or what amount of traffic the site is getting. You want to use the headline to highlight the absolute best things about the site that people will want to know. Aka, traffic and income. Now inside his listing, he really should have ordered it differently. The financial and traffic details should be at or near the top, not at the bottom. People are really not that concerned with WHY you are selling a site. Sure, it is worth talking about if you feel it will add value to the listing, but near the bottom is a better place. I think this particular auction would have also greatly benefited from a site walkthrough video highlighting some of the cool things about it as well as an analytics video showing the kind of traffic it gets and from what keywords. This really just adds that extra layer of proof and credibility. In a video of traffic details you can show yourself actually Googling some of your high ranking terms and really show off how well the site is doing. Yes, you usually will upload a verified Google Analytics report already, but a video walkthrough allows you to gain that extra credibility. In this particular auctions case, he states that he only had 2 weeks of analytics to show, so something extra would have really helped. It should also be noted that the further back you can show data for Google Analytics or earned income, the better. One last thing, he only has 1 bid on the auction which likely means he started the auction at $2600. This is not a good idea because it scares people off. What you want is as many people as possible bidding on your site, so that when it gets close to ending, emotions start to take over and hopefully a bidding war will start. I always start my sites at $1.00 with no reserve. If your site is making income and has traffic, trust me you don t have to worry about your site selling for $1.00. Bidders will see the value and start bidding it up rapidly. This will especially happpen as it gets close to the end of the auction. Case Study 3: Howtopickle.com -

9 This is one of my sites that I flipped and mentioned earlier. I built it originally without the intent of flipping, but as I learned how to effectively flip sites, I decided it would be a good idea to do. So this site is obviously all about pickling. It is an evergreen niche which is a very good niche to flip sites in. People like to know that if they are buying a site, it will not be something that loses popularity. This site averaged $192/month income and the auction sold for $6,200. That means it sold for about 32 times the average monthly income. It actually should have sold for more, but after the auction ended, a bidder messaged me and told me he fell asleep. He was prepared to bid up to $7,500. This is a good lesson to take in. Pay attention to when you list your auction and when it will end. You don t want an auction listing to end at 2:00 am because there won t be any bidders on to stay up and get in a bidding war over your site. I would recommend trying to have your site end around Noon, PST. This gives plenty of time for a bidding war. However, during the last 4 hours of an auction, any bid that you accept will reset the time to 4 hours, so there is still a chance your auction will not end till the wee hours of the morning, but, you will have provided a good amount of time for a bidding war. One thing I would change about how my listing was formatted is I did not have good spacing between sections. It makes it a little difficult to read. However, this overall template was very successful for me, so I would recommend looking at how the information is ordered and what information I included. Feel free to use it as a template of sorts as it is proven to do well. Notice the types of things I highlight in the headline as well as throughout the listing. One thing I could have done better is highlight some of the keywords that the site was ranking well for. However, I did cover some of that in the traffic video. Unfortunately it looks like the buyer has removed the videos, so you can t watch them as an example. However, all they really did was do some Google searches with the high ranking keywords to show how well the site was ranking. If you look at the comments on this auction, one thing you might notice is that I did not post the Analytics proof within the first 24 hours. This was in the hope that someone would comment asking for them, then I could reply saying I posted them. This helps get the auction more active so more people will take a look. Small tricks like this will go a long way. I will talk more about some of the effective things you can do once your listing is posted to help increase its exposure and bids.

10 Case Study Takeaways Looking at each of these case study s, you can see that they all post similar information, but what can really make a big difference is how the information is displayed. For example, if the first case study site would have put more emphasis on their income and traffic early on in the auction, they may have grabbed more people s attention. It could have also talked more about its rankings and search stats to emphasize where traffic was coming from. That is something that my site listing could have done better as well. Lastly, the first and second listings could have each added video proof of their traffic and income to add credibility to their listings. They also could have both added personal contact information within the listing so that people would have peace of mind that you were not trying to hide anything. Overall, these are all pretty good listings. Take a look at all 3, take the comments I have for each and develop your own listing template that you believe will do well. If you prefer to just copy what has already worked, you can use my listing (case study 3) as as an example to create your own listing. Take note of the improvements you could make to it as well for a most epic site listing. I hope this gives you some good ideas and good perspective on the importance of a good listing to get the most money for your flip. If all it takes is an extra minutes creating your listing in order to make twice as much off your flip, that is time very well spent.

11 Chapter 3: What to Flip? There are typically three ways that you can acquire (or create) sites to flip. You can focus on just one of the methods, two of them or all three. You may even start off by using one of the methods and then eventually change to a different method. But if you can master just one of these methods, you will do very well. There is no right or wrong way to go about it as long as you are taking action on at least one of these 3. The best thing that you can do is assess your own skill set to determine which method makes the most sense to use first, and then go from there. So what are the three methods that you can use to acquire sites to flip? 1) Build your own niche sites 2) Purchase already built sites 3) Outsource the creation of your own niche sites. You may be able to think of other ways to acquire sites to flip, but these are the core three and the methods that the most people have success with. I will go into a little more detail of how to use each of these methods so that you can decide which would work best for you. Build your own niche sites Building your own niche site is the most time consuming but also the most cost effective method of acquiring sites to flip. There are a few main keys to make this really successful. The first main key is to do your niche research and choose a niche that has a decent amount of traffic with low to medium competition. If you aren t sure how to go about this, you may want to do a little searching on how to do niche research. However, the basis of niche research is to use a keyword tool such as the Google Keyword Tool to brainstorm keywords and check what kind of traffic they get. Once you pick a couple of keywords that you think would be good to build a site around, do a Google search and see what kind of sites you would be competing with on the first page. If all of the sites are high Pagerank, well established sites, you would do best to keep looking, however if there are lower Pagerank sites and some that have very few backlinks and are not very old, then you are likely looking at a viable niche to build a site in.

12 As a rule of thumb, if you take the average of the Pagerank for the top 10 results for a keyword and it is 3 or less, then you should be able to rank a site without months and months of effort. Once you have chosen your niche, you will want to research some longer tail keywords within the niche that you can write articles around. Again, to be thorough, use the same research as above to determine keywords that you can rank pages for. If you choose keywords this way, you will have a better chance of having more pages ranked on page 1 for different keywords. For building your site, I recommend using Wordpress because it is very widely used and really easy to setup and use once you have done it once or twice. If you are not familiar with Wordpress, there are a ton of tutorials out there to help you get up and going with it. Your domain name does not have to be exact match for your main niche keyword, just something that CONTAINS your main niche keyword. So if your main niche is fishtanks, then you can have something like fishtankscenter.com or fishtanktips.com or something similar. As always, it is best if you can get a.com domain name. So once you have your domain and have setup Wordpress, you need to get some content. Use the research you did earlier to find related keywords to your niche that would be rankable and write an article around each of them. If you don t like writing, then you can outsource this part too. Post one article right away, most likely your main niche keyword article, then every 2 or 3 days, post another of your articles. In between posting articles you will want to perform some SEO such as blog commenting, social bookmarking and social media sites linking back to not only your main page, but also your other article pages as you get them posted. Consistent and varied SEO will do wonders to get your content ranked. Now, as of right now you should not have placed any Adsense ads or anything of that nature on your site. Wait a couple weeks until your site is starting to show up in the search results, then add some Adsense to your pages. Make sure you have some above the fold. Following this basic blueprint, you should be able to rank a site for low to medium competition keywords on the first page of Google with relative ease. And within a month or two hopefully you will be making anywhere from $2 to $10 in Adsense per day or more if you do a good job! $10 per day would be a $300 per month site which you could flip for $7,000 to $10,000. Not too shabby eh? This method is all about getting a system down and optimizing each

13 step. Some people build 5 or 10 of these sites each month and outsource all of the content and SEO, meaning they do very little work. This goes to show, this method lends itself quite well to outsourcing. Once you have a system down building sites like this, you can train an outsourcer to do the majority of the work while you focus on the tracking and flipping. Ok, let s move on to method 2. Purchase Already Built Sites This is probably the fastest method to get into site flipping but it is also the riskiest. There are many people out there trying to sell sites that will claim they are making a certain amount of money or getting a certain amount of traffic but they really are not even close. The number one rule to follow when purchasing websites is to verify everything that the seller says with stats. Ask them to send you screenshots of their analytics, their Adsense numbers or any other forms of income that their site makes. Ask them what keywords they rank for so that you can do a search in Google and see. Even ask if they will show you a live video of their screen as they access their stats. It is just very important to verify these things. If you are talking to a seller about buying their site and something just doesn t seem right, then trust your gut and move on. It is not worth losing $500 on a site that seems too good to be true only to find out that it is. Now as far as where and how to acquire already built sites that are making money or have decent traffic, there are a couple of different places I would recommend looking. 1) Digitalpoint Forums Digital Point forums has a buy and sell section dedicated to buying and selling sites. Most of the sites you see here are not the highest quality, but you will find some diamonds in the rough if you have a little patience and are willing to weed wade through the muck. I would recommend being the most on your guard when purchasing a site from anyone here. One thing I would recommend is to post a thread that is a WTB thread, or Want To Buy. Then you can specify that you are looking for sites that are making some income and getting traffic and users will contact you that you would not have known have sites for sale otherwise. I actually just purchased an established site there the other day that was hit by penguin. I will be doing SEO to recover it s rankings and within a month or two, should be able to flip it for a hefty profit. If you can recover sites that were hit by the

14 latest Google algorithm update, then there is some good money to be made in buying, recovering and flipping these sites. 2) Flippa Flippa is one of the biggest site flipping marketplaces online. It is actually where I recommend selling your sites. However, that does not mean it is a bad place to purchase underperforming sites. It takes a little experience, but at Flippa you can look for auctions that are poorly listed or sites that look like they could be improved a lot with just a little bit of work. What do I mean by that? Well, if a site that is for sale currently ranks on page 2 for a really good keyword and the page 1 competition does not look that strong, then it probably wouldn t be that hard to do a little bit of SEO and backlinking to get the site to page 1. This would increase traffic and income and allow you to turn around and sell the site for a nice little profit. Also, some people do a horrible job of creating their Flippa listings, posting no analytics and no proof and just in general having a bad description of their site. If you can privately message these people and get them to send you their stats and they are what they say, then you can probably purchase the site at a decent price. When most buyers on Flippa see a site with a poor listing and no Analytics or income posted they will just keep moving along. So your bidding competition becomes very small. 3) Contacting webmasters directly This method can be pretty hit or miss, but if you hit, you can often times hit big. A lot of times, people built sites years and years ago just for fun and have never monetized it or maybe monetized it very poorly. Meanwhile, they are raking in the traffic for some very high traffic search terms because their site is so well established and has good content. What you can do is search for sites like this, find the webmaster contact and shoot them an expressing interest in their site. Most webmasters will not want to part with their pride and joy but occasionally one will need money or have forgotten they even had the site. These are the ones that are likely to sell and will usually give you a really good deal because they have no idea what their site is worth. This method can take a bit of work and patience, but when you hit the jackpot and are able to buy a really nice site for way less than it is worth it s sweet!

15 There are a few other ways to purchase sites, but I won t get into them much here. Believe it or not, E-bay can be a place to purchase a site sometimes, but I have never done it myself at E-bay. Also, any internet marketing forums you may be a member of may have an area for people to sell their sites. If you want to get on the fast track and have some money to invest, this can definitely be a lucrative way to go, but you have to be very careful that you know exactly what you are buying. If you end up buying a dud because you did not check that everything was kosher, then that will not only hurt the ol bank account but it will seriously hurt your motivation to keep going in this profitable business. Outsource Your Site Building The last method that I recommend is to outsource your site building so that you can focus more on the niche research and flipping of your sites. This is more of an advanced method so if you are new I would not recommend doing it right away. But if you have built sites before and know the process, then this might be a really good way for you to go. In order to outsource your Site Building, the most important thing is that your outsource worker knows exactly what you want and how you want it. Many people will create screencast videos of themselves doing the work and sending that to their worker as training. I think this works very well. Doing this will also make sure that YOU know how you want it. This method takes a bit of up-front money to get going, so I would recommend doing a couple of flips by building your own sites first and then start reinvesting that money into streamlining the process by outsourcing. There are a lot of good outsourcing guides out there and I would recommend checking out Rachel Rofe s guide, Happy Outsourcing. She has outsourced a ton and knows how to deal with it. I hope that gives you a good idea of what to flip. As you can see there are several options in how you acquire your properties to flip. The choice of which one you use is up to you. Just be smart about it and don t go chasing one method without knowing how to go about it. Do a little Googling if you feel you need more information and you will find a lot of great information. But the key is to pick a method and go with it, take action and kick some butt. Don t just THINK about what you would or should do, actually do it and make something happen.

16 Now we are going to get into one of the more underrated aspects of site flipping, but possibly one of the most important and that is your listing. Screw this part up and you may only get half of what you could have.

17 Chapter 4: The Successful Flip The site listing is one of the most important parts of a site-flip. Industry standard is to get anywhere from 12 to 18 times the monthly income for a site. However, in my experience you can get a lot more than that if you do this part right. The number one most important thing that you have to be able to show and prove is the income of your site. The number two most important thing is the traffic and ideally it will be mostly organic traffic from a number of keywords. If the site you are flipping has been built correctly and had some decent SEO done to it, then you should be able to provide both of these things. If you build your own niche sites and you just can t get them making money, then you need to look at what you are doing and possibly consider using a different method such as acquiring sites that are already making money and flipping them for a higher price after you have done some maintenance to improve them. So once you have a site that you are ready to flip and it is making a consistent income and getting some decent traffic, you can get ready to do your flip. To get ready, you need to gather all of the pertinent information to include in your site listing on Flippa. Here is a list of the most important things to gather. 1) Income and tracking stats. Screenshots for proof and video walkthroughs showing the proof as well if you decide to include that in your listing. 2) Any and all logins associated with your site. Wordpress logins, Google account login (sidenote: when creating a site to flip, always create a new Google account for it to use for analytics and anything else associated with the site), etc 3) Backlinking report or just a short list of some of the highest authority backlinks coming to your site. Use or another backlink checking tool to see what backlinks you can mention. 4) Domain and hosting information for when you transfer the site to the new owner Those are the most important things to gather before creating your listing. Once you have these gathered, you can use the tips and formats from the listings in the Case Study section of chapter 2 to help you put your listing together. Be mindful of what time you do your posting as well as what day of the week your auction will end on. Start your auction at $1 with no reserve and do not post your Google Analytics proof until it is either requested or has been 24 hours as I mentioned above. Make sure that you use a descriptive Title for your auction that gives the strongest features of your site, whether that be a large amount of traffic, awesome income, and

18 old domain, high Pagerank, low maintenance, low cost to run, etc Also, it is important to add relevant tags to your auction listing in the tags field. I recommend looking at other auctions for ideas of what kinds of tags to use. As soon as you have posted your auction, your goal is now to bring as much attention to it as possible, so you will want to monitor comments, reply to all of them and generally just be as up front and helpful as possible so that potential buyers know that you are a legitimate seller. There are a few ninja tricks you can use to get more attention to your auction, but I will save those for the next chapter. Chapter 2 really is a good supplement to this chapter for how your listing should look, so make sure you look at those past auctions and take the ideas from them to make your listing as attractive and successful as possible.

19 Chapter 5: Take it up a notch! Ok, so I promised you that I had a couple of ninja tricks for you to help get more attention and traffic to your listings, so let me share those with you first thing. 1) As soon as your auction is listed, if you have ever sold a website before, then contact any and all of your past buyers letting them know that you have another great site up for auction. Chances are that if they were happy with their previous purchase, they would love to buy from you again. 2) Post that you have a site for sale in any forums you are a member of. Make sure that you do it in the appropriate section of the forum and that it is allowed to do. But most forums will not mind. 3) If you don t already know who the competing sites to yours are, search them out and contact the site owners letting them know your site is for sale. Your competitors will often jump at the chance to corner another piece of their market, especially if your site was beating theirs. 4) Mention that you are selling a site on your Facebook/Twitter/Google+ accounts. Maybe most of your friends are not interested in online marketing, but there just might be a couple and that is all you might need to help get some more attention and more bids to your auction. I hope you like these little tips to help get more exposure for your site flipping auctions. The one about contacting your competitors is a powerful one, so if nothing else at least try using that tip. Final Words Now that you have read this quick education on site flipping and how easily you can do it yourself, there is only one thing left to do. Go out and DO IT. You might be thinking to yourself, I suck at Wordpress, or I don t know any SEO or I don t have any money to invest in site flipping. These are all just crap excuses and if you keep using them, you will never have any success. Just take a look at the number of sites being sold every day on Flippa. Do you really believe that all of those other people selling sites are better than you at this? That they are one of a chosen few that know some secret that allows them to make thousands of dollars for a simple website? That couldn t be further from the truth. You now know as much if not more than 95% of the people selling sites on Flippa. If you look through all of the listings on Flippa, you will see all kinds of shoddy listings. No proof of income, crappy sites, etc Take this knowledge and get out there and make it happen.

20 I know that you can do this successfully, because I have seen even the greenest internet marketer do it. I look forward to hearing of your success and as always, feel free to contact me at any time if you ever have any questions about anything covered in this guide. Thank you, Jonathan Heusman