9 Steps to Earning Money by Flipping Websites

by Vincent King · 6 comments

Making money flipping websites has massive potential for entrepreneurs who know what they’re doing.

Get it wrong, though, and you’ll waste your money and your time.

With this checklist, you’ll be able to start flipping websites for cash — without wasting either of those precious resources.

How to Make Money Flipping Websites

1. Find the perfect niche.

A niche is any topic that people are looking for information about. For example, DIY home repair is a niche because people are constantly looking for ways to improve or fix things around their homes on their own.

Be careful with your choice. You may love knitting, but if most knitters are blue-haired old ladies that aren’t online and can’t afford to pay for info on knitting, you’re opening up in the wrong industry. Your niche must be one where the target audience is willing to pay for what you have to offer.

2. Choose your keywords.

Use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to choose keywords in your niche. Ideally, your main keyword phrase should have less than 100,000 competing websites; otherwise, your new site will get lost in the noise.

3. Add supporting keywords.

Your site, once conceived, will need to be populated with meaty content based on these supporting keywords. (In a perfect world, you’ll want 50-70 articles on the site to draw the highest dollar value.) Choose a minimum of 15 keywords related to your main keyword — though, of course, more is better.

4. Buy a keyword-rich domain name.

If you can get a domain name that’s an exact match to your keyword, you’ll rank higher, and faster, with Google. Research this fairly early to make sure you’re good to go with your niche and chosen keywords. Check for all extensions: .com (which should always be a first choice), .net (a good second choice), or .org if the site isn’t too commercialized. Only use .info if you have no other option.

Register with NameCheap.com; as the name implies, they’re inexpensive, and they’ll let you transfer sites to other NameCheap.com registrants for free. Once you find what’s available, snag it. And if there’s nothing available with any of the extensions plus your keyword-rich domain name, go back to the drawing board.

5. Create the content for your site.

No need to put up a WordPress blog or use complicated Java Script graphics, etc. Simply use a free template from OSWD.org. There are over 2,000 free templates, and in many cases, you don’t have to credit the creator. Choose something simple and clean that you can tweak fairly quickly and easily. Just make sure your template has places for Adsense ads.

Now it’s time to write the content. Publish articles based on the supporting keywords you chose in step 3. You should have 50-70 articles of at least 500 words that list your keyword three times or more (once in the title, plus the first and last paragraph). You should stick to one keyword per article — no mixing. Make sure your articles have the keyword listed in the title when you name the files, then upload them from your computer to your HTML template.

6. Submit your site to all the search engines.

Google, of course. But there’s also Bing, Yahoo!, and MSN. Be sure you do it through their submission site: don’t just wait for the Google Crawlers to find you, as it may take them a long time.

7. Promote your site.

Check sites like Big-Boards.com to find people that are interested in your site’s topic. Start answering questions and helping people with their problems. Try getting backlinks to your site to help your ranking. You may even want to submit a few guest posts to credible sites in your niche (don’t forget to link back to your site in the author bio or the article itself).

8. Generate revenue.

Using Google Adsense, get your site to the point where it’s generating $15 – $30 per month in revenue. If you do this, you’ll be able to bring in upwards of $800 for it. But be sure you’re in the top 10 for your keyword on Google and MSN first.

9. Sell it!

Once you’ve met those two criteria, you can sell it on Sitepoint.com. Rich content + high Google ranking + automated income = moolah for you!

You have your work cut out for you. All you need now is to get busy choosing a niche, cranking out quality articles, and promoting your domain — then you’ll be on your way to a high-earning site. Good luck!

Have you ever tried to flip a website? Do you have any other tips to add?

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{ read the comments below or add one }

  • Issa says:

    Flipping websites is a great way to earn money. Personally, I think it’s risky but I tried Safe Site Buying dot com to get a professional assessment of the sites I am looking to buy. I also found a coupon code online (ssb20), which gave me 20% discount off Flippa’s products so I was able to save a few thousand dollars as well.

  • pediatric dentist in brighton co says:

    Great post. I was checking constantly this blog and I’m impressed!

    Extremely helpful info specially the last part 🙂 I care for such information a lot.
    I was looking for this certain info for a
    long time. Thank you and good luck.

  • Tamal says:

    Hey Vincent those were great points and a great reminder of how careful you have to be when it comes to flipping websites for profit.

    According to me, it is very important to choose the most suitable niche for you. Because this is the only one thing that will make you successful in website flipping.

    Of course, you may choose other niche about which you don’t have much knowledge. But if you choose a niche about which you have good knowledge, definitely it would not take long time for you to create contents to promote your sites. Otherwise, it might take a long time to learn everything from the beginning.

  • Levi Blackman says:

    Great checklist to work through. I am going to give this a go and see if I can pull in some extra side income. If I could sell a site every 2 months it would be worth it just to have that extra vacation money.

  • webdoyenne says:

    “You may love knitting, but if most knitters are blue-haired old ladies that aren’t online and can’t afford to pay for info on knitting, you’re opening up in the wrong industry.”

    Stereotype much?

    Have you looked at http://www.ravelry.com/ ?

  • Anne says:

    I really love the checklist you posted here. I have never tried flipping a website but then I guess I need to try. I also think that finding a perfect niche is very important. Glad that I have found this post. I will definitely share this to my friends.

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