What is Website Flipping?

Website flipping is the activity of buying website, increasing their value, and then selling them for a profit.

Why Do It? Benefits of Site Flipping

There are so many great reasons to flip websites! Let’s go over them:

  1. It’s a low-cost investment opportunity – You can buy websites to flip for as low as $300. The cost to improve them is only your own labor or the cost of hiring people to do the work for you. At this compared to other investment opportunities (like house flipping) you only need to invest small amounts and stand to gain large returns.
  2. You can create passive income – While you are building up your websites to sell later you will be earning income, sometimes passive. So you earn while you are turning this investment into a more profitable asset. Win-win!
  3. It’s easier than you think – You might think updating a website, making it look great and adding quality content is hard. Well, it’s easier than you think! Learning WordPress will be a great value to you. There are so many ways to get images and graphics that are high quality. And writing – either you can DIY or find quality writers to do it for you.
  4. Scaleable – Once you get this process down you can do it again and again. Growing your income larger the more experience you gain. The potential to scale with a team or by being more aware of the best sites to flip make this a great business to get into!
  5. Huge Profit Margins – As mentioned it’s low cost to get into. Not only that, once you figure out how to make a site profitable you can make a lot of money on each website flipping project.
  6. You can Make Money Quickly – Some websites can be bought, fixed up to look better, and flipped quickly. This gives you a way to make money quickly.

As you can tell website flipping is a very attractive online business model for creating lifestyle freedom!

Perhaps one of the BEST reasons to website flip, though, is how flexible the work is:

Work from Anywhere – You can work on your websites from anywhere. You can work on them anytime. Choose the sites you want to work on and the kind of niches you want to work with. This allows for great lifestyle freedom flexibility!

Where to Find Websites to Flip

Sites like Flippa, Empire Builders and Niche Investor have websites and blogs for sale.

One of my favorite ways to find sites, though, is to look for a site that isn’t active anymore and ask the owner if they are selling. I’ve managed to grab some great deals this way!

Another way to find sites is to join blogger or website owner Facebook groups. There are also groups for people who are selling sites but beware a lot of those are just scammer type sites they throw up to make a quick buck.

What is a Website Worth? Valuation

When you are buying or selling a website the typical valuation of a site for sale is 2 – 3 years worth of income.

This also depends on the type of site. The more work and training a website takes for someone to take over, the lower that number shrinks down.

So it’s important to choose and build sites that can easily be taken over by someone else so they can keep the income going.

Missed Website Flipping Opportunity

Since websites are typically valued a 2-3 times their annual income it is often thought that websites not making money are worthless.

Not so!

You can sell starter sites or sites that just haven’t been monetized yet. I’ve done it many times myself!

The key to selling this type of site is to show the value if that site were to be hired out to build.

For example a website designer charges $3-$5k for a good website design.
A graphic designer charges hundreds per graphic.
Good stock images are not free.
Blog posts also cost $100 or $100’s per post.

Adding up the value in these and showing your buyers they can get all this at a deal is how you sell these sites. If the site has courses and salespages – even better – because those cost thousands to build. Has it been building an email list? Even more value added!

Methods of Monetizing Your Website

Here are some of the ways you can monetize your website flipping efforts!

Ads – Mediavine is one of the most popular companies to work with to put ads on your site.

Digital Downloads & Printables – Checklists, Workbooks, Printable Coloring sheets and more can be easy purchases for your website visitors.

Courses – You can create full courses to sell on your site. These may require more effort to sell and so you’ll be best to setup an email list (always best) to make those visitors part of your business community!

Affiliate Marketing – Not to be confused with MLM. You sign up for an affiliate program with companies that offer them. Use your affiliate link and earn commissions anytime someone buys through your link. It’s a low-effort way to earn great income! Learn more about affiliate marketing here.

How to Increase a Websites Value

Monetization – Of course you’ll want to increase the income of a website when you buy it. This is always the goal. The section above gives you some starting ideas but there are many ways to monetize a website and streams of income you could create!

Automation – There are so many incredible tools out there to automate the processes of a website. From sending emails to following up with potential customers to delivering a course – these and more can be automated. This increases the sites value because the cost and time requirements go down when a person doesn’t need to manually do the work.

Clean up the site – If you can find a website that has good potential but it’s basically a MESS then you’re in luck! You could clean this site up and do a quick flip. Or keep it and build up the income even more.

Improve design – Some sites are great but just ugly. A quick clean up of the design makes it more desirable to buyers and potential customers. It’s an instant boost in value!

Email List – As an email marketer myself it blows my mind how many websites with a ton of traffic don’t even have an email list! Or worse, a huge list that they never email. There’s gold in the list. Build one and email them and increase the website’s value.

SEO / Pinterest / etc – A website with traffic is a good website. Whether the site is making money or not it’s value is going to increase if you do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to get a growing flow of traffic. Or if we’re in one of the “everyone hates Google” phases you could work on the Pinterest traffic, etc. Any steady, stable flow of traffic will increase the website value.

How to Sell Your Website

There are many ways to sell a website:

  • Through a website broker.
  • On websites like Flippa.
  • To your own audience.
  • In website for sale Facebook groups.

The key to selling your site is figuring out where best to list it. Start simply and test the space that works for you.

Website Flipping Mistakes to Avoid

Warnings for buying and selling…

Website Buying:

When buying a site be careful. Make sure you do your “due diligence”. Due diligence means to fully check out the site.

Confirm everything you can. Get detailed data on the site from the owner. Check that they are telling the truth. That they have the traffic they say, the email list they say. Make sure they haven’t faked anything or lied (as best you can).

Beware there is risk in buying here so the better the source for sale the more likely you won’t get scammed.

Selling a Website:

I don’t recommend taking payment plans. This is, however, often common practice for larger sites so if you do offer it be sure to vet the buyer as much as possible. Will they be able to actually make the payments?

Get everything in order for the sale. Have a great host is going to make this 10X easier! I recommend WPX hosting as they have a free move-in service. You can have them move the site to the same hosting and put the buyer on as the owner. Easy!

Website Flipping Case Studies

Here are some of my favorite website flipping examples that I did myself:

Article Writing Agency:

I purchased this small article writing agency site for $500. By the time I sold it the monthly income was about $1000/month. I sold it for only $3000, which seemed great at the time, but I could have got at LEAST $12k for it!

Case study for website flipping.

Virtual Assistant Training Site:

I built this site up to making about $500/month with a growing email list and customer based. It sold for $10,000.

Party Plan Blog

I bought this party plan blog which had a big email list, a ton of content and products and 10 years of blog posts. It was a heck of a deal at $1000! I earned money from it for over a year, getting the site income up to $1200/month and then sold it for many multiples of what I paid.

How to Flip Your First Website With Almost No Money (Less than $50)!

It might not be the most commonly thought of but you can also build websites to flip.

Now this will require the cost of a domain and hosting. But this can be VERY affordable.

So you build your site. Make it nice. Create a great design. Add 25 posts. Do keyword research. Add an email list opt-in. Sell it for $1000 as a starter site and repeat!

Get enough money going so that you can buy sites (to save you some work) and then you can get into buying and selling bigger and bigger sites. I did see this post on Reddit from a lady who said she’s been making sites and flipping them for years. Over S100k in sites sold and she’s been doing it ten years.

You Can Flip Websites, Too 🙂

On that same Reddit post above someone asked where you can acquire the skills to flip sites. I offer this kind of training here at Living Lifestyle Freedom. Depending on what you need here are the courses I offer to help:

All the best on your website flipping adventures!

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