In previous side hustles, we’ve talked about purchasing an item and then cleaning it up and restoring it to turn it for a profit. This is the same process! Website flipping is when you see potential in a website and purchase it to bring out its fullest potential and then sell it.
An upside to this side hustle is that unlike furniture flipping, you don’t physically store them, and you can sell to anyone across the world. Some people prefer to scope out sites to fix up while others prefer to build them from scratch.
This might sound like an easy process, but it requires plenty of work. You will need to spend time learning how to increase traffic to the website, improving SEO, and even adding more ways for the website to earn revenue.
Flipping websites can be a fun hobby for a lot of people. It is usually done for fun and the money made can be invested right back into buying more websites. If you get good and love doing it, you can make a good amount of money after a few years!
It’s hard to gauge how much you will make as each website and project is different, but you can usually flip a website for a few hundred dollars of profit as a beginner. If you buy two websites one month for $50 and sell them for $250, you will have a profit of $400! Do this each month for a year and you can make an extra $4800 a year from the comfort of your own home.
Step one: Decide on whether to buy a website or build it from scratch. When building a website from the ground up, you will have to pick a niche, start a website (wordpress is a popular option), pick a traffic generation strategy, have good SEO practices in place, and then finally monetize the website. This takes a lot of groundwork, and brand new websites very hardly get any traction on google. It can take up to 18 months to begin seeing results of a website.
When buying a website, the work is usually mostly done. Someone has already spent plenty of time writing blogs, putting in links, and has a proven way of earning money. As this website isn’t fresh to the internet, you can get right to work optimizing the SEO and improving revenue. You can usually buy and sell websites on an online marketplace, but be sure to do research before purchasing.
Step two: If you decide to buy a website, you want to make sure that the site has potential to earn you money. The first way to do this is to consider the topic. Websites about Funko Pop Figures might not be popular in ten years, but a website that talks about sports will likely always be relevant.
You can then do a traditional SEO audit. This can reveal foundational issues that could hinder organic traffic to the website. You should also look for topics that have not been addressed yet on the website that can be written in blogs to help bring in more readers.
Lastly, the website should have a functional and reliable way to bring in revenue! If they don’t already use it, affiliate links are a great way for websites to earn money.
Step three: Improve it. You’ve bought the website, and now it’s time to make it your own (for now). Your main goal is to increase the traffic to your site and bring more money in. This can be done through sponsorships, affiliate links (amazon is a big one), and creating engagement. Engagement is anything that pushes your users to interact with your website such as quizzes, forums, and videos.
Step four: Put your website up for sale. The general rule-of-thumb is to list your website for sale at 36x the amount of revenue that it brings in monthly. Be sure to include each stream of income for the total amount. When you are preparing to sell your site, you will want to make sure everything is ready to go for the buyer. Some of the things you should have prepared are:
- Access to the website and domain name
- Access to any and all inboxes
- Original content and photos with the correct licenses
- Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for content creation, link building, maintenance, and social media
- Ownership of Google Analytics
- Ownership of social media profiles
- Original copies of logos and any branding
You can list your website for sale on online marketplaces, but you can also list “for sale” in the footer of your website. If you aren’t in a rush to sell, you can keep your price firm at a set price. If you need the cash fast or want to move on to your next project, you can auction it off.
Tips
Create an email list. This will allow you to send emails to your subscribers of items that they may find useful and use your affiliate links.
You can create digital products for your readers to purchase. This could be a course or an e-book.
Build a tiered membership. Doing so can give you extra cash throughout the month and in return you can provide your readers with exclusive content.