Make money flipping websites or make money flipping burgers, the choice is all yours.
Flipping websites is a great way to make money. If you already have some experience in website design and development, flipping websites is an excellent opportunity for you to learn how to make money online. With the proper knowledge, tricks, and skills, it doesn’t take much time or effort to flip a website, either.
In this article, I’ll go over how to make money flipping websites. But first…
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What does flipping websites mean?
Flipping websites is basically buying and then reselling websites for profit. This is possible because of the internet and the existence of a vast and ever-growing market. A good number of website owners are looking to sell their current website for profit. You can make it happen by providing them with an attractive offer and closing the deal.
You can also build a site from the ground up and sell it
If you aren’t in the mood to buy an established site, you can start one from scratch to flip. Just keep in mind that this is much more work and it will require time. People usually want to buy established sites that have revenue.
If you don’t plan on spending much time on it, starting from scratch is probably a bad idea. Your best bet is to buy an existing site and improve the traffic, profits, and everything else associated with the site.
Best places to buy sites to flip
Flippa
Flippa is the most popular site where you can buy websites to flip. Unfortunately, this is also the most competitive place to purchase sites. You can get great deals if you are willing to spend some time there looking for the right site and negotiating a better price.
Empire Flippers
Empire Flippers is another site where you can buy and flip websites. This site isn’t as popular as Flippa, but it does seem to have higher quality sites for sale. You’ll also pay more for the sites at Empire Flippers.
Digital Point forums
Digital Point and just about any other webmaster-related forum usually have a buy and sell section. You can sell your sites there but be warned that sometimes scammers lurk in forums. You never know if the person you’re selling a site to will try to do something fishy.
Craigslist
Craigslist is a little like forums, but sometimes you can buy and sell sites there. Just be careful; you never know who you’re dealing with on the other side of the screen. If the person seems out of the ordinary in any way, put the money in escrow or do something else to protect yourself.
Facebook groups
Facebook is a popular place to buy websites to flip. Many flock to Facebook groups to sell their site since you don’t have to pay any commissions. Since it’s completely unregulated, you’ll need to do extra due diligence when buying websites from Facebook, though.
The most active Facebook groups for flipping sites include: Flipping Websites, Website Flipping Community, Domain names selling/buying, and Website/Domain Buy/Sell.
How to spot a site that is worthy of buying to flip
One thing you need to do before buying a site is to make sure it’s worthy of spending your money on. There are thousands of sites for sale at sites like Flippa, and many of them aren’t worth the time you’ll spend negotiating with their owners.
You can check the Alexa rankings and compare them to other sites that compete with what you’re looking at. You’ll want the site you’re looking at to have a better ranking than other sites in its niche. The number of pages viewed per visitor is also something you should look into.
Check out the site’s Google Analytics
If the site owner doesn’t show you their Google Analytics, you already know something is wrong. However, if you see that the traffic to their site is going down, you don’t want to buy the site. There’s something wrong with the site if the traffic is going down.
There’s nothing wrong with the site if the traffic is flatlining. Depending on the site’s age, it’s normal for a site to peak and then flatlines. If the traffic is on a downward trend, that tells you something is wrong, and you need to avoid buying the site unless you can get it for dirt cheap.
Ask the owner to show you the monthly revenue of the site
When you’re researching a site, be sure to look at the monthly revenue of the site. Look at the average revenue per visitor, then look at the top monthly revenue the site has ever had. If it isn’t growing, there’s a reason for that. You want to make sure that the site’s monthly revenue will stay the same or go up after you buy it.
You do want to buy a site with revenue. If a site is making at least a little bit of money, it shows that the owner is doing something right. A site that’s full of content and has been aged and doesn’t make money is very suspicious.
Check to make sure the site has no spammy blackhat backlinks
When you buy a site, make sure that the site has no spammy backlinks. Because if it has been built up to have thousands of spam backlinks, then you’ll have to do some work to get rid of them.
You have to be suspicious right off the bat if you see a site that has a ton of low-quality backlinks pointing to it. If you find one, you have to ask yourself: what is the site trying to get away with?
After all, most of these spammy backlinks pointing to your site are going to be given by shady (or novice) webmasters. At the very best, they have no idea what they’re doing; at the very worst, the site owner is trying to scam you into thinking that the site is more popular than it is.
Check to see how the content on the site is ranking in Google
You can get this information from Google Search Console, or you can use a tool like Ahrefs. What you’re trying to do here is to see how many pages are ranking in Google and their position. The hope is that the webmaster did everything right, and each page ranks at least in the top three positions or hopefully on the first page. If you see content far back in the rankings, you have to wonder why the webmaster didn’t take the time out to get their pages to rank.
Be prepared to pay 25 to 40 times the monthly revenue for the site
The price you pay should be between 25 to 40 times the monthly revenue. How do you determine how much to pay? Usually, it’s done based on negotiations and not much else. The seller will start with a high number, and you’ll counter it with something lower.
Sometimes you might get lucky and find a seller willing to part ways with their site for less than what you would expect. That might be the case if they are in a situation where they need money fast. Don’t count on this because most site sellers aren’t hurrying to make some fast cash.
Okay, now how do you flip the site?
There are several things that you can do to flip the site. You can add content to it and let it age for a while. The hope here is that you’ll get more traffic from Google and more money.
Sometimes you’ll find sites that aren’t performing at their very best because there’s a mechanical error. Maybe Google can’t crawl all the pages, or the site is on an incredibly slow server, and that’s what’s holding it back. There are times when you can make a few minor adjustments and see significant results quickly.
Usually, you’re going to have to sit on a site for a year or two before you flip it
Why? It will take Google that long to notice the changes you’ve made to the site. You need the content you add to the site to age and hopefully get some natural backlinks from people who find it useful.
Flipping sites isn’t about making fast cash
It’s about taking the money you have and investing it wisely. You make improvements to the site and then wait for the revenue to increase. After the revenue goes up, then you’re ready to sell. You can’t sell the site unless it’s making more money than when you bought it. After you see a sizeable increase in revenue, that’s when you can flip the site for a profit.
Can you make money flipping websites?
Flipping sites is all about being patient. You have to be willing to wait months and even years before seeing a good return on your investment. The longer you wait, the more money you’ll make when you sell your site.
If you decide to improve the site and see many backlinks coming in, you can sell the site for more than what you paid for it because Google will notice changes.
To make money flipping websites, the “buy low and sell high” strategy definitely applies. Scour the net for the best buys you can find, and then do your best to increase their value. At the end of the day, what you’re doing more than anything is buying something that you can improve to make it more valuable.
Site flipping is not much different than house flipping. You find an undervalued property, fix it up, and sell it for a profit. The entire process is pretty straightforward, and once you get the hang of it, you can repeat it for even bigger success.
