How Do I Grow My Website Flipping Business?

Site flipping isn't my main business model but I do sell quite a few sites.

The best way to scale up is to keep your sites until they're making some profit and then flip. A site making $100-$300 a month can easily be sold for $1000 within a few months.

I outsource things like content creation and SEO services such as backlinking. The higher your site is in the SERPs the more money it should make and the more you can flip it for.

Of course once your sites are making money, you may well be tempted to keep some of them rather than flip them.

How about outsourcing some of the workload, you can't grow much of you don't outsource... i have about a 100 websites if i had to update and keep track on all of them myself i would be working 100 hours a week, i don't like to work that hard but i like to pay people that work that hard for me

The only part of it I outsource is writing unique content. As for the design of the sites, I want my unique signature on that end, so it really depends on the type of sites you sell and if you can still make a good profit by outsourcing the building/design of the sites.

Remember Pareto's Principle -- 80% of your income comes from just 20% of your activities. Outsource all of the boring, repetitive, and mundane tasks you're faced with, and spend your time on the vital parts of your business that require exercising judgment and expending creative energy. How much faster could your business grow if you outsourced everything except hunting profitable domain names and negotiating sales? If you can break down your method of building turnkey sites to easy-to-follow steps, you've essentially replicated yourself.

Also, you might consider using Camstudio to record yourself building one of those sites, then selling an in-depth training course.

Hope this helps,

Jon

There's only 2 things you can do to scale up - as Hamida mentioned you can get them earning money and they will command a higher price or you can outsource the creation aspects of your turnkey sites so you can produce more sites.

There is a problem with the outsourcing though - you may find that you spend just as much time on managing your outsourcers as you did creating the sites. It might take a while until you can put a team of outsourcers together and get them up to speed but if you can find good ones that could allow you to increase production/income.

IMHO, the best way is to get them earning and flip them for more money because you will have less customer support to take up your time. If you increase selling of the turnkey sites, then you will have that many more buyers to support. Also, I have found the people that buy the sites that are earning need a lot less hand holding, thus less time spent supporting them.

Lee

I think most of you are right. I should focus on building a site with some income and traffic first before flipping it for a lump sum....That is better than just pumping out turnkey sites and sell for less than $100

Lee and Magician have both given some quality answers, especially in the fact that outsourcing will usually take more time than you imagine, in managing whatever you've outsourced (or maybe I'm just doing it wrong )

I think you've also got a strategic decision to make regarding selling starter sites vs selling more established ones. Here's a few quick points that may help you decide

Starter Sites
- Can be automated and completed outsourced if you design the system correctly

- Almost predictable sale and selling price if you sell the right kind of site

- Quick Turnover (You can realistically list and sell at least 20 - 30 per month if you're outsourcing)

however

- Can be quite time consuming, especially dealing with the aftersale side of things from people who are mostly beginners and WILL ask random questions (e.g. how do I unzip the file you sent me!)

- Market for buyers of starter sites seems to be getting smaller and more commoditised as more sellers have the same idea

- Can be repetitive and soul destroying after about 200 sites

I wrote a post reverse engineering the sellers who do upto $20K per month in starter sites (Anatomy of a $20K per month seller). What seemed to work for most of them was having a 'wireframe' (dare I say template!) across maybe two or so types of site (e.g. twitter app, directory) and automating the process of changing the look of the finished product.


Established sites
A whole different ball game, but most people find it a little more fulfilling in the long term once they make the switch.

You generally have two types of attribute that makes an established site sell. The core stuff can technicaly be 'gamed' like

- Age (buy an aged domain that hasn't hit deletion)

- Page Rank (again buy a domain with PR, or buy high PR links although that doesnt always work)

- Organic Rankings (for most low - average competition niches, you can outsource the entire linkbuilding process for a set of keywords and only pay if you hit top 5 or top 10)

- High PR links (trickier but still possible. For example, advertise a 'job vacancy' on some academic graduate boards and you'll get a high value do follow edu link)

- Traffic - a little tricker to game, but if you've done the link building the traffic should technically follow

The non core stuff isn't neccessary but makes your site sell for more

- Picking a lucrative, evergreen niche. You can either be a big player in a small niche (e.g. parrot breeding secrets) or a small - mid player in a huge niche (e.g. Care home leads) - I prefer the latter.

- A great opt in list, regardless of the niche

- Traffic from multiple sources like RSS, Email or Social, not just google

- At least six month earnings history from at least two different sources

- A documented system for everything you do, so a new owner can hand it to an outsource team and step away.

The strategy behind getting a great price is a huge subject and I feel like I've wrote an essay already, but I hope this helps.

Justin

Web sites usually sell for just a few months profit. Surely it would be better to keep the web sites and build up multiple streams of monthly income?

But if you are going to flip, then outsourcing is the way to go. Outsource everything except the project management and the actual buying and selling...so that you are concentrating your energies where you can add the most value

The key is to pick your project sites well. Buy aged domain names or domains with pagerank and develop and flip those. It will save you time and earn you more money.