Just a quick post to say my second attempt at flipping a site has failed - the auction ended without a single bid I’m going to extend the auction and lower the start price to try and off-load it.

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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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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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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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