I should have done this sooner, but I finally got around to setting up my next attemp at a site to flip. This one is a site selling an e-book.

Again my costs are minimal - $8.41 for the domain and $10 for the Sitepoint auction. The product is again one I received full resale and PLR rights to through my membership at NicheRockets [aff] and hosting is on my existing reseller account. Time spent is again minimal - about 1 hour all in all.

Starting price is $40 with a higher BIN than last time of $150.

You can see how the auction goes here.

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When I was doing some research at work yesterday, I suddenly had an idea for a site. Now, this was good in some ways, because the idea immediately seemed a go-er but also very frustrating because I had to wait 4 hours until I was home to investigate it more. It also meant I didn’t get much done this afternoon as I was brainstorming ideas for it!

Anyway, now I’ve done some research and there doesn’t seem to be any competition for it - always a good start. It’s a simple but useful web-based service for internet marketers that I think will appeal to them. So far so good. The current idea is to offer a free version and a paid version. The idea is to use the free version to build a list while making some income from monthly subscriptions to the paid version.

It’s going to take a fair bit of coding to get the site to do what I want - unfortunately there’s no free or paid scripts that fit my needs. I could probably code it myself but it would be stretching my PHP abilities and I really don’t have the time.

Therefore, I’ve written up a spec for the script and will be placed it for auction on Rent-A-Coder. It should be bread and butter for a good PHP coder so I should be able to get it done fairly cheaply I hope.

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Don’t get me wrong, I love Text Link Ads (TLA), how easy they are to use, the money I make from them each month and their excellent support. It’s a great way to monetize a website. BUT! It still irks me that they take a whopping 50% of every sale. It also annoys me that you have no say over what price your links sell for.

This got me thinking that maybe I could sell links directly off my websites…so I tried doing just that!

Read the rest of this entry »

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My first attempt at flipping a website has gone rather better than expected! The site I created and put up for sale yesterday has been sold already - somebody paid the Buy It Now price ($100) less than 24 hours after putting the site up for sale.

Remember my total costs were $18.41, it took about one hour of work and I sold for $100 - a nice profit of $81.59!

After this success, I will be putting another site up for sale later on today

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My first attempt at making a site to flip is ready. I used a product received through my NicheRockets [aff] membership to set up a basic one page salesletter type website selling the product (which is a pack of adsense ready wordpress themes).

Time 

It took about an hour to set up including registering the domain, setting up hosting, creating some new header/footer graphics, changing the colours slightly, setting up the delivery mechanism and creating the auction. I didn’t bother re-writting any of the sales letter as I figured this had been professionally done already.

Costs

Domain - $8.41
Sitepoint listing - $10
Product - FREE (through my NR [aff] membership)
Hosting - FREE (on my existing reseller account)

Total costs: $18.41

The Auction

I’ve set up the auction on sitepoint. You can see the listing here. I set the minimum bid to $40 with a buy it now of $100 and to run for 7 days.

Notice in the description, I have explained fully how the site works, what is included in the auction and offered to be as helpful as possible (1 month free hosting, help transferring and setting up the site). I’ve also included the up-sell of continued hosting for $5 per month.

I’ve really no idea if this will sell or not and, if it does, for what price. But that’s the point of an experiment, so wish me luck…!

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I released my first new site for some time today. It’s for a niche adult product (ooo err!) with a ticket price of £70 (~$140). I will receive 25% commission for any sales through the affiliate scheme I have chosen.

The plan is to initially drive traffic through an AdWords campaign - the good news being a CPC of 2p gets me on the first page of Google results so, if I can convert even a small percentage of traffic, I should see a nice return. Looking at it another way, I will only need 1 visitor per 875 to make a purchase to break even!

One other thing about the site is that I am only targeting the UK market, so using a .co.uk domain name and AdWords campaign to only target UK searchers on a very tight group of keywords in order to keep advertising costs as low as possible.

In time, I hope to get this site up near the top of Google, so the next stage will be search engine submissions and links from my high PR sites in order to get in indexed quickly, followed by trying to get some good back-links.

Phew! It’s good to be back in the game!

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Before I dived in to setting up some sites to flip, I thought it might be a good idea to do some research.

I spent a bit of time in the Turnkey Sites section of the SitePoint Marketplace. After trawling through 10 pages of ads and looking at the sites that have sold, I reached a few conclusions about sites that seem to be selling:

• Many offer a digital product (usually an ebook or software script)
• They have unique content
• They have a good, keyword rich or catchy, domain name
• Quite often they add a little bonus such as free installation or hosting for a month

Up-sells - I noticed a number of auctions up-sell hosting e.g. 1 month free hosting then transfer to your servers or continue with my hosting for $5 per month.

I also noticed that there are a number of sellers selling what is basically the same site but customised with graphics and content for a particular niche. For example, check out these listings and the sites being sold:

• http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/20161
• http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/20126
• http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/20078
• http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/20024
• http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/19916

This person has sold 4 sites in the past week for $125 and currently has a 5th site listed. Each is a WordPress based site with graphics and colours changed. Each has an articles page (feed from ezinearticles), a blog (with 2 blog posts, probably PLR material), auctions page (eBay feed), videos page (5 videos embedded from YouTube) a books section (2 amazon blocks) a chat room and some clickbank links down the side. The only unique content appears to be the front page of each site. These are low quality, templated sites, with virtually no unique content that can’t take more than 1-2 hours to set up, probably less and are selling for $125! Even the auction listings are a template!

This little bit of research has provided some interesting food for thought, so I’m going off to digest it before I start on my first flipping site.

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One of the things I wanted to do when re-starting this blog was to experiment more - to find out what actually works and what doesn’t when it comes to making money online rather than just reading ebooks/forums and taking the word of other people (who just happen to be selling you a related product!).

To that end, experiment no.1 is going to be in website flipping.

What is website flipping?

Flipping basically refers to creating/buying a website and then selling it for a profit. In this case, I will be creating niche websites and then selling them on.

Why flipping?

1. Easy - it uses my existing skill set of web and graphic design
2. Cheap - the only anticipated costs will be a domain name, possibly some PLR material
3. Quick(ish) - I should be able to create a site fairly quickly. The only problem here is it may take some time to establish the site in order to sell for a nice profit (up to 3 months say).
4. Profit - the margin on flipping should be a nice high percentage

Has anybody had any luck with website flipping or have any tips to offer?

Next post…the flipping plan!

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After a year or so having a bit of a break from the whole niche/internet marketing world, I’m back and trying to catch up on developments in that time.

What’s new?

• Keyword Avalanche has become Niche Rockets and the monthly membership is a massive $147.77 per month. Wow! Now, I do recommend this site but not at this price. It is the only monthly membership I currently hold though and I’m keeping my membership though because the forum is useful and they do provide a decent amount of content each month. Fortunately for you guys, you can try before you buy, plus get a discount on the monthly membership:

Niche Rockets $1 7-day trial & $50 off the monthly price thereafter [aff]

• There seems to have been some kind of storm about selling links on web sites which I’ve totally missed. From what I can gather, nobody really knows if it’s ok to sell links using TLA anymore or what effect it has on your rankings/pagerank? Can anyone update me on this?!
• “Web 2.0 properties” seems to be the current buzz phrase
• Videos are all the rage

What’s the same?

• Good one-way links are still important
• Content is still king
• Article marketing still works to some extent
• “Gurus” still don’t actually tell you how to make money
• Stupid prices are still fashionable (see $147.77 above)

Anyone have anything to add to these lists?

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