Walkthrough: The Anatomy Of A Siteflip

To all the great guys, gurus and non-gurus, who share their knowledge and help everyone where they can. You inspired me. Thank you.

This is material that could be an Ebook if i designed it a bit better. I explain you how to create a niche authority site and how to sell it after. You don't need to spend a dime besides the domain, hosting and the listing fee. You can use an autoresponder if you want, though.

And i use in this walkthrough the Revolution Lifestyle theme (the same as Church, basically, so you can apply it there too). These themes are open source under the GPL, do a google search for downloads.



First of all: chose a niche. Look in the pinned thread on top of this board for a list of hot niches.
In this example i chose to use the VERY popular „Work From Home" Niche because it booms during hard times like these.

I looked up some keywords with the SeoBook keyword tool to get some ideas for domain names. My imagination failed me, all domains i could think of were already registered. I finally came up with Work From Home Careers - quite usable for a flip. It contains a mega popular long tail keyword and is brandable.
I registered with Namecheap because they have always 20% off coupons and a killer service (free user-to-user push and a very nice configuration-system).

For hosting i use my Hostgator reseller hosting account. The deal is that i tell the buyer that he has one month of free hosting, and i can simply delete that useraccount when the month is over. Just hand him over all the log-ins (Cpanel, Database-User, Blog-Admin - Cpanel log-in is the log-in for the FTP).

When setting up the hosting package in my WHM i chose the option to use the registrars nameserver - THIS IS IMPORTANT! With that option enabled the domain is immediately known in the web. You get an IP adress from your hosting. Go over to your registrar and forward the www-adress to the IP you got and chose A (Adress). Then set the @ redirect (that is the domain without www) to www.YOURDOMAIN.com.

I have a prepared blog folder on my harddrive. It contains some VERY old version of Wordpress as well as a basic set of plugins. In another folder i store all plugins i have and in another folder all layouts.
The plugins are: All-In-One-SEO-Pack, GoCodes for link cloaking, privacy-policy because i add capture forms, wordpress-automatic-upgrade to bring the old version up to date, and wp-spamfree to prevent comment spam.

Login to your webspace using the FTP tool of your choice and upload your blog. After that is done i added the lifestyle theme folder.

NOTE: I dont use the featured-content-gallery in this flip, because i had some troubles with it and wait until i can figure out how to get this working again. Another option would be to use an old version, but i dont do this in this flip.

Now you need to go to the Cpanel. Create a database „blog" (in my example that results in a db called workfrom_blog) and a user for it. Chose a very good password! Then assign the user to the database and mark the „ALL" checkbox to give that useraccount admin rights in that database.

Now browse to the domain. You will be greeted with the installation screen. Follow the instructions and fill out the database-info form. When you are finished you can lean back for a while, because you have finished the hardest part

While i am writing this i am doing the exact steps described here btw! I have just catched up to the point where i am in realtime (during writing).

Now lets configure some stuff. First of all update everything that can be updated including the blog using the auto-update plugin. Then activate all the other plugins.
Lets get going with the configs.

Settings - General: Set your correct timezone. I also like set the time-display to the 24h option with digits (the one above custom).
Reading: 2 posts per page, 5 in RSS and only a summary in the feed.
Permalinks: Custom Structure: /%postname%/
Privacy-Policy: just hit create page!
WP-Spamfree: activate the checkbox with „Use two methods to set cookies." and update the settings.

Now create your categories: I use „Businesses", „Preparations" and „Work From Home".
I personally like to change the „Blogroll" link category to the name i later enter into the layout. In my case „Recommended".
Oh and you should either remove the „About" page or write something there. I tend to remove it.

If you use the lifestyle theme like me you should open up appearance and „null" every field in the theme options (where you enter the adsense code and such) because the text in that fields shows up on the page else.

Now to the really juicy part... code editing.

I chose to sell it without a header, so i have to remove the default header. Luckily there is the option to replace it with the „standard" wordpress header with your blog headline and motto.

So, Appearance - Editor! Open the header.php and look for this:

Replace that text above with this:

and you are done with your header. Save it.
Now we want to get rid of that ugly „admin" section on the frontpage, as well as the youtube box! And while we are at it, we want to rename the „blogroll".

Open up „sidebar_left.php". Search for „blogroll" and replace that string with „Recommended".
Then delete this part:

from the file and save it. Now on to the „sidebar.php"! Open it and delete this part

Now, if you don't want to use your autoresponder you are finished in that file. However, if you want to use it, remove this and replace it with your autoresponder code...

If you use your autoresponder use the HTML-code of the optin box. Then go to the stylesheet.css, search for „newsletter" and delete this:

ALMOST DONE with the edits.

You have to decide where which category shall appear. I chose „Businesses" top left, „Preparations" top right and „Work From Home" at the bottom. Now you have to get the IDs of the categories. You find them when you hover your mouse over the category name. You will „cat_ID=3" for example. We need the number.

Open the „home.php" in that editor. You need the sections that have the IDs „homepageleft" „homepageright" and „homepagebottom". You replace the respective title between the <h3>-tags with the real category name, and replace the number with the real category number in each section in the following line (replace the number behind cat= )

Now we are ready. Awesome huh?

No lets delete that Hello World posting and get moving.

So we want to make 10 articles. Go to this page
ImageBase, free images, public domain, free photos
and look for nice pictures to use that fit your topic.

Save them and upload them to your blog.
Now think about fitting articles for your pictures. I purchased a small PLR package for $1.25 to speed things up.

When you add your articles, add a custom field named „thumbnail" with the URL to your picture to make it appear on the homepage. For the bottom categorie its „hpbottom".

Now the blog itself is almost finished. Now its time to go over to ClickBank to find around 10 affiliate offers we can plug in! They just end up in the Links section. You can add AdSense to the page, but since i dont have an AdSense account i can't do it. DON'T FORGET TO TELL in the sales pitch that it is easy as hell do add AdSense!!!

Now, the page is ready after finding and plugging in all those clickbank affiliate links. Make sure to take the neutral clickbank id, though. You dont want people to know your real ID...

No on to the Sitepoint auction! For this purpose i will take a sales pitch that has proven to sell from another marketer and modify it to meet my needs.

After you enter everything in the listing-creation-process, you are ready to go! Now you just have to wait for someone to buy this gem.


The Website created through this walkthrough: Work From Home Careers
The Auction: ??For Sale : Money Making Site In Red Hot Work From Home Niche!!!??