the flipping researchBefore 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:

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.