Time to Find a Fixer Upper Website to Flip
September 25, 2008 by Pablo Palatnik
As you may have read in the New York Times a coupe of months ago in the article titled,
“Find an Undervalued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. (Now It’s Web Sites, Not Houses),” website flipping is a hot business if you know what you’re doing.
Like flipping a house, doing it with a website is pretty much the same. You need to know what needs to be “fixed” to bring more value to the website (like a house) to sell it for more money either a few months or years from the day you purchase it.
In times of financial hardship as we are encountering now, more then ever, many people are looking to make money of sites they just dont have time to either maintain anymore or just need some cash in their pocket and will take what they can get if given a decent offer.
As an online marketer, I’ve been looking around at sitepoint, forums, and other websites to see what opportunities are out there. Granted, the best deal is not easy to come by but there are good deals out there.
What I’m looking for personally is both ecommerce or content driven website that has already some traffic and is just not structured for success. What do I mean? I love seeing someone advertise a website that says they get about 50-70k visitors a month but don’t know how to make money of the site. RIGHT AWAY you know you can start monetizing the site with some contextual advertising, etc.
What to ask the owner?
-Why are you selling?
-Have you done any SEO?
-If you have done SEO, who was managing it?
-Have you done any PPC Marketing?
-Does it currently generate income? How much?
-What is the current traffic?
You can check some of the site stats such as domain age, PR at DNScoop.com
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Comments (4)
Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..
Matt Hanson
Flipping seems to be one of those things where you don’t really make the big bucks until you’ve done it a few times. Once you’ve done it enough you’ll probably hit that jackpot website.
I think you’re probably right but it may be the same thing as saying you wont make big bucks until you’ve flipped a few houses.
But, I think you’re right, I think its somethign you need to have a good idea of what you’re doing, hence why I put some questions that are essential to ask and if you don’t know much about online marketing, you may be in big trouble in trying to flip a website.
@ Matt-
I appreciate that! Thanks for taking the time to read what I write.