How to Get Started
When you are ready to dive into the world of website flipping you will first need to have a clear goal in mind. This will help you in your search for opportunities and minimise the risk of any losses you could possibly incur. You don’t want to jump in and purchase a website to discover what you could possibly do with it later, this will likely send you broke and discouraged, shying away from a huge potential to make money.
The first aspect you will want to assess is the price. You want a price that is inline with your strategy, to avoid overpaying and to maximise your potential profit. Now the price you will pay will determine on many different factors but in this case we will use five criteria to determine the worth of a particular website, these are: Risk, Net Income, Future Potential, Time Investment and Strategic Value.
Risk Analysis
When performing your searches, avoid websites that advertise themselves as “turn key” businesses. Many of these have come off an “assembly line” of production meaning they are mass-produced, designed and developed for the purpose of resale. These offer no real business opportunities as the market is extremely saturated with a number of similar websites looking identical, just with different names.
Other issues to look out for are sellers which use bots to provide false reports into their traffic numbers deceiving potential buyers into thinking they are buying a viable business with high levels of traffic when in fact it is all fabricated. Assess reports into where this traffic has come from and asking questions such as:
Is the traffic organic (from a search engine)?
Is it targeted traffic related to the niche?
Is the analytics verified?
In most cases, sellers will be honest however you will need to ensure you do your due diligence and ask the seller the appropriate questions, such as any discrepancies in the analytics chart, why traffic is weighted towards a particular source, which countries and why do certain traffic come from and which devices attracts the most traffic.
Flippa has a number of tools at your disposal to ensure that you can accurately assess the risk of the potential asset and these can all be found on the website. You will also have access to the sellers’ history and past performance allowing you to make an informed decision.
Buying The Website
Once you have found a website which meets your criteria and performed your due diligence, chosen a strategy to move forward with it is time to move in for the purchase. Remember you will want to maintain regular contact with the owner, not just to simply answer your questions but also to get a feel for their business attitudes and ensure everything is above board.
Purchases can be made either through bidding or as a buying it now depending on what the owner had on offer as well as the kind of site. Obviously we would want to get the best deal in this situation, this is where it helps to go to auction with a clear price in mind. If you like you can also set a maximum about into the auction, allowing you to sit back and let bidding take place without needing to do anything further.
Once you have purchased the site, follow the instructions to finalise payment and have the owner send through the details for you and do the necessary process to transfer ownership.
Renovating The Site
As mentioned before there are number of ways you can improve the value of the site depending on your chosen strategy. You can either do this yourself or hire a professional freelancer to carry out the work for you if you feel like you are inexperienced in this department. The work you do to the site will be all about establishing a profitable business and depending on what you would like to do with the site can take anywhere from just a few hours to months or even years.
As example let's say you were looking to improve the design aspects of a relatively unfinished website. Now this site may be tracking well in traffic but the conversion rates leave a lot to be desired. By hiring a professional web designer/developer you can vastly improve the aspect of the site, improve SEO as well as user interface.
With an improved site you can either try your luck by placing it back on the marketplace at an inflated price or even hold it for a few weeks or months while maintaining the traffic growth, to see if you changes have improved the conversion rates on the traffic. .
Hope you learned something from this! :)