Luckily, I had the day off today… and will have all Wednesdays off for the rest of the semester, as I don’t have any classes on this day. Just relaxed a little bit, worked on setting up the new computer (will put up a picture soon if I can find my camera…) and had the time to write this post for you guys.

Many people ask what they should do when they want to start getting into website flipping… although there are plenty of people that recommend it, few say get started and do X to make money. Of course, newbies generally have a tonne of questions - what kind of sites do they flip, where do they host them, how do they transfer domains, where to sell, how to build up a positive reputation, how to decrease the risks… you get the idea.

Anyways, this is how I started out, and I’d recommend you do this too… flip BASIC websites. Websites that you can put together in less than five minutes.

Don’t worry about promoting, customizing, developing your websites… just buy domains, setup a fresh install of your website and try to sell it. Of course, blogs don’t work for this (no one is going to buy a base blog with no traffic / revenue / content) but people will definitely be willing to buy other types of turnkey websites.

You will make very little amounts on these (maybe ten dollars or less profit) however I recommend it when you start out. Why?

Build reputation. The problem in public forums is that people don’t tend to trust new users. By building up a reputation (be it reputation or iTrader ratings) you make sure people will be more likely to deal with you.

Gain experience. When I started out selling websites, I didn’t even know what the term ‘hosting’ related to… yes, I asked friends questions, but the best way to learn is by experience. By selling simple turnkey sites, you’ll learn the basics - transferring, how to best conduct a sale and things like that.

Low risk. You start out with (for example) trying to flip a niche content website with ten articles that took you five hours to write or $50 to outsource… if you get scammed (which is definitely possible when starting out, as you are inexperienced / naive), you lose a lot of time / money (for a newbie, $50 is a lot of money!). When flipping $5 - $10 sites, you get scammed, fine - you won’t be happy about it, but all you lose is five minutes or so which is worth it for the experience (and having that experience, it’s less likely you’ll be scammed in the future).

Potential further sales. Sell a simple site, but the buyer doesn’t have hosting for it? Point him / her to a great host that you know, for example Hostgator… and collect $100 in affiliate commission. Should the buyer like your website that you sold to him at $15, ask him if he’d like 5 more at a discounted rate of $12 apiece… finding buyers can be difficult, and if you can get repeat buyers that is the easiest way to make money out there.

Of course, experience is the biggest benefit out of all the above.

What type of turnkey sites can you flip?

PLR EBook Sites. I had a period a few months ago when I was making around $1,000 per week flipping standard PLR Ebook sites… all I did was upload the files to a related domain and it used to sell for $50 - $150. They sell for less now, but considering you have to do less than a minute and a half of work after buying the domain, well… it’s worth trying to sell them. If it looks good, it’ll sell.

Proxies. Choose a decent domain (nothing wrong with .INFOs for proxies), put up a slick looking free design and list it. At worst, it doesn’t sell and you promote it yourself, at best it sells and you make a profit (even if you make only a $1.2 profit, you can reinvest it in a .INFO domain! ).

Image hosts. Likewise, upload the script, and list it. On these fresh websites, you really have to convince the buyer… you could talk about how popular image hosting websites are, mention some recent big sales and find some blog posts talking about how to promote them and link the buyer to them after a purchase.

Simple script sites. You can make a decent amount of money flipping simple script websites… a person that I helped get started out site flipping, who is also a contestant of the site flip contest was able to flip 2-3 of them (flip word sites) at $30 each less than a day after putting them up on a new domain. Considering that the script costs $5 or so for multi use and .INFO domains cost $1.19, it’s not that big of a loss to try it out. You could try flip word sites, PR checker sites, WHOIS checker sites, joke sites, quote sites… you get the idea.

Try, try, try and soon you’ll feel confident enough in your abilities to move onto bigger and better things. Without those early, low level attempts though, I probably would never have been motivated to move into site flipping, or even start this blog… so make sure that if you haven’t entered the site flipping game, this is how you should start out.

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I finally had a day to just chill out so can resume with the normal posting, unfortunately my laptop has almost died so cannot use instant messenger or email very well for the moment. There’s still time to put in questions - I’m not sure whether I’ll answer them in one post or use each as individual posts as there have been very good ones asked.

Anyways, continuing on the site flipping theme… let’s get started. Those of you that are entering the contest can register your domains - I’ll have a full post with all rules soon. At the moment, the only sponsored prize is $100 in listing credits by Sitepoint themselves (which is pretty cool ), but I’m looking at contacting some people that run site flip courses to see what happens.

In website flipping, custom is key. You CAN sell a brand new website for $1,000 - do not listen to the idiots that say it isn’t possible as they have never tried it. However, of course attaining that kind of money will not be easy, and will involve a fair deal of work as well as some luck - it is possible though, and I know this because I have done it.

The thing with ‘common’ websites - that is, the websites people start out with - is that they will eventually get saturated. When I started out with proxies, you could sell a proxy making a little amount of money daily - a few dollars - for $500 or more, as long as it had traffic; now this is pretty difficult, and it’s hard to see many proxies going for more than $100 these days.

I’m talking about flips - that is, 1-2 month or less old websites, not longer term ones.

Similarly, with eBook websites - you could sell a product, get around $100 in sales and the flip the whole thing at Sitepoint for $1,000 or more - however, of late this too has become saturated, and new eBook sites are selling for 1-3x a month’s revenue, usually at the lower end of the scale.

This will be the case with blogs too. Flipping blogs setup with a customized version of the Revolution Theme and a few articles may net you a few hundred now, but over the course of the next month and a half this too will get saturated. Now that people have seen it is possible - mainly due to Bryan at SFU and his amazing $1,000 in 24 hours flipping frenzy - more and more people will start doing this. That very same day, I had more than ten online friends tell me that they would be trying it out - can you see how this can get saturated real quick? Too many people doing the same thing, and profits reduce as buyers start paying less.

This is why you have to go custom.

Let’s talk about blogs… those of you with blogs of your own will probably have thought about selling them at one point or another (unless it’s say - your name).

A lot of you will be on free themes.

Adding a custom done Wordpress theme to your blog - which can cost $100 or less - can raise the value of your blog by more than $500, especially if the theme looks kick ass.

Similarly, adding a script to a niche website of yours, one that performs a simple function but one that would be extremely helpful to your users, can add another zero to the end of the price you’ll get for your website.

Of course, some of you can’t code or design (so you won’t be able to create a custom script or theme).

However, you can always outsource. You’ll find pretty cheap coders on webmaster forums, so just pick someone with a good history and you’re ready to dominate.

This doesn’t have to be complicated… you can even add to the value of your website by creating a short report. Either to give away (to build an opt in / subscriber list) or to sell, even. This is a strategy I’ve used to double, or treble the end sale price of a niche blog - remember, you can outsource EVERYTHING in this business.

If something is custom done, the likelyhood of saturation is minimal at best. By offering your buyers something that sets your website different, better than the hundreds of other websites sold daily, you’re not just more likely to sell your website but also more likely to get a higher price for it.

Too many people just create a website with custom content, maybe a header, earn $1-200 and stop because they’re happy with that. Remember, the more you make per flip, the less flips you have to make; the less time you spend and the more time you have to sit on your ass! Something that all of us would like more time to do

As always, if you have a question about what kind of improvements you can make to your sites, or what would be custom enough to boost your sale price, feel free to leave a comment

Over the next few weeks (to coincide with the two site flip competitions) I will be covering some more strategies to ramp up your sale price. If you haven’t subscribed already, why the hell not?

If you have subscribed, I appreciate it but don’t think you’re off the hook! As a subscriber, you have a mandatory duty to refer at least 15,000 of your friends to subscribe to this blog or else you will not be considered cool. So start with the referring now

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I could write about here on entrepreneurial topics and the like, but most people have told me that they don’t give two shits about the life of an entrepreneur and would like to know more about stuff that’s making me money. Now, as I run this blog for you guys - thought I might as well follow their advice, and I’ll bring you stuff that has made me money - not rehashed crap that has been repeated on thousands of other blogs, but stuff I’ve used successfully (and maybe theories I’ve thought up - with a disclaimer, of course) and stuff that you guys can use too.

By no means is the content on here revolutionary - it’s usually just taking simple ideas and tweaking them or putting them together to make huge profits relative to time put in.

If you want to make money online, you have to learn not to complicate things. Now for me - if things are too complicated, I can’t even be bothered to try and understand them, and if things are too difficult or involve too much work, I can’t be bothered to do them. Which is why I keep things simple and for the moment, it’s working.

This idea could be packaged up and sold, and I don’t say this about many posts on this blog. A few, but not many.

Anyways… no more fluff, let’s get started. You can make a full time income with this idea alone.

A lot of the posts on here over the last month or so have been about website flipping… I started website flipping around 2-3 months into my IM ‘career’ and till date it’s been one of my biggest earners. In few other industries can you create something in the morning and sell it in the evening for hundreds (or thousands) of dollars, and with everything being capable of being outsourced, well… when it’s so easy, you just have to try it. I’m in the middle of flipping a medium - large blog live for you guys and will break down what exactly I did.

The problem with doing this is that if you want to make a lot of money, it is far easier to do things in bulk… it’s easier to make ten small websites as opposed to one dominator one. However, to make a decent amount of money (that is a few thousand monthly), I’d say a blog (in any niche) would have to be around the similar size of TUK (500-1000 RSS) or bigger.

Buying multiple - I currently own 11 blogs with more than 500 subscribers - blogs like this would set you back at least $20,000, probably treble or quadruple that (just for comparision, CashQuests sold for $15,000 with around 1,000 subscribers).

However, I paid less than $150 for each blog I run, didn’t set them up myself and get all content on them free. I don’t spend any time updating them, and less than an hour a week maintaining them. They all bring in money too, and have people approaching them to advertise on them and have contests sponsored. This is literally easy money - and today I’m going to talk about how I’ve done it.

This is similar to offline marketing, the concept at least.

A lot of you will have started out on free blogs - that is, blogs using Wordpress.com or Blogspot.com, blogs that didn’t cost a cent to run. Most will have moved on, however at the moment there are still a lot of people on them, most often because they don’t know about doing any more than what they currently are.

First off - a warning - most blogs that you can work this deal with will not be in the internet marketing niche (which includes blogging tips, making money online etc) as they tend to be more web-aware. In other niches though, you can profit.

You’ll have to find the blogs yourself - how you do this is up to you. You can Google them, use search tools like Technorati… entirely up to you. You’re looking for blogs with upwards of 200 subscribers, with a decent amount of traffic and interaction (comments on posts and the like). The best blogs you will find will be on Wordpress.com.

The two disadvantages of Wordpress.com are:

- Looks unprofessional (XYZ.Wordpress.com instead of XYZ.com)

- Can’t be monetized

This is where you come in.

What you’ll be doing is approaching bloggers you find on free hosting - bloggers that currently run a growing blog and with an active following, and push to them the benefits of moving to a ‘regular’ website - that is, their own domain, on your hosting and the ability to make money.

Remember, these are bloggers that have been blogging because they like to. Not for any other reason than that.

You’ll finance the move, of course. Depending on you, this will involve various things - a domain, hosting (you can host all your sites on a Hostgator server pretty easily). I like to throw in a custom Wordpress design as well, based on their specifications. If you want to, you can buy a developer license to something like the Revolution theme and use those for your blogs.

Each website costs me $10 (without the theme) up to $150 with the theme custom created for me. What the blogger then does is post on his current free blog that s/he is moving to a more professional platform, and their readership will follow.

You also offer them a 50% cut of all revenue the website makes. Considering (Wordpress.com bloggers) they were making $0 before, most will be ecstatic to hear about this. You take care of the monetization completely - I like to use Adsense because it works on niche blogs, but I also do banner sales, CPM etc. Most websites have paid for my initial investment by the end of the first month, even with me only taking 50% of the revenue. Everything after that is profit.

To the blogger him/herself, this is like a goldmine - getting paid to do something they were doing anyways, on a more professional look (a proper .COM domain - remember how thrilled you were when you got your first one?) with a design based on their specifications.

For you, you’re getting a blog worth a hell of a lot of money that comes with an active following and existing traffic at a fraction of the price. One where content is created at no charge whatsoever. One where you have to spend around an hour a week tweaking ads, organizing contests etc. When a blog is big enough, people will be climbing over themselves to sponsor contests.

Last week, I sold one of these blogs for $5,000. They go for more than a regular blog would because the blogger will stay on, as long as you continue the agreement. If you want to, you can give the blogger a cut of the sale - you don’t have to though.

Hope you guys use this idea, as it’s a great one and I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere else. Approach bloggers on free platforms and you can make a lot of money - just don’t be selfish, and try and let them benefit as much as you are - remember, its their content, their following. Good luck!

I love website flipping - this month is heading towards being my biggest ever income wise, and the best thing is that none of it had to do with things I don’t really like. Very little was from affiliate marketing, as I’ve cut down on that almost completely - why make others money when I can make myself money? I’m on course for over 20k, and there are still a few days left. Small money for some, but for others like me…

As always, if you have any questions let me know via the comments. Hope this post was worth waiting for, as I did take a break from here- I’m also going to talk about another variation of website flipping soon that I came across a few days ago and mentioned in an earlier post. How does 3k for an hour of work sound?

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First off - I’m going to be relaxing in the middle of the month, so need some guest posters. My birthday is coming up on August 17th, and in true TUK style I’ll be taking a break from online stuff. The contest where you can win a Nintendo Wii ends on the 15th, but for all other days from the 10th - 20th I’ll take some guest posts if you guys are up for them.

Guest posts on here can send you some traffic (a study done a while ago showed that TUK sent over 200 visitors for a paid review, and each post tends to get an average of 20 comments) and at the very least you get decently powered links / exposure. As for topics… internet marketing, make money online, entrepreneurship, blogging tips topics would be great… specifically the former three.

This is not a review of any sorts, but a post that should help you guys.

I’ve written up a few things that will make you guys money, but how about posts that will save you money? Money saved is as good as money earned, especially as you can invest it in other things.

I only found out about this recently thanks to a friend, so it’s likely at least a few of you haven’t heard about it.

If you’re looking for a cheap, reliable place to buy domain names, Name.com is the place to go.

Now personally… I buy around 5-10 domains per week, some to develop, some just to keep. The majority of these are .COMs.

Previously, I used to pay $7.15 using the coupon code OYH3 at GoDaddy or $9.29 (using no coupon code) at Namecheap… the Namecheap registration comes with private WHOIS thrown in.

Although for my public sites I couldn’t care less about privacy, for my niche websites I prefer being able to not be found out through a simple WHOIS search.

My savings increased tremendously when I found Name.com though… .COM domains not just cost only $6.00, they also come with FREE private WHOIS!

For me, that’s a savings of minimum $15, maximum around $30+ per week. At the minimum amount, that’s $60 monthly… I could rent another two virtual private servers monthly with that, or get a cheap dedicated one. There’s a whole lot of better things you could do with that monthly.

The service is legit and they’re not going to scam you… from what I’ve heard, you can also pay with unverified Paypal accounts which should help some of you that are underage and can’t get them verified.

Now you really have no excuse not trying out the whole site flipping thing… with a domain costing $6, and your first month of hosting costing $0.01 if you use the coupon code wordpress or jury at Hostgator, you have nothing to lose but time. There are plenty of posts on here that should get you started, just browse through the last few weeks.

Here’s a tip… add a product to your website, and it’s value will skyrocket.

For example, a three page niche website with three 500 word articles (total 1,500) may only sell for $30 - $50… on the other hand, a one page 500 word sales page selling a product that’s 1,000 words long can easily go for $1-200+, even more with a little revenue.

Of course, if you already have the articles, create the product and optimize the articles for SEO… buyers love websites with multiple income streams, and here you can offer them the full package (a website that earns with Adsense, affiliates and its own product sales). You can generally find writers on the various webmaster forums for $0.01/word… and this means a full fledged 4,000 word eBook will cost you $40 - $50… this can be sold for $500 or more with the right graphics, a decent sales page.

All you need is $6.01 to start out. Is that really so difficult to achieve?

A lot of you have asked how I started making money… I started writing articles at shitty rates (like… $0.004/word) off job websites. Later on, I moved to things like forum posting, and as I got more experienced I started website flipping.

You can generally make $6 (if you really don’t want to use your own money) by doing 50 paid posts on forums. Just hit up any of the webmaster forums, show your writing capabilities. It won’t take you long.

As always… if you have any questions, just let me know. Good luck.

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Another day, another way to make money for you guys. I’ve been using this method to take advantage and make a few pretty decent website sales.. I’m talking low four figure sales for about an hour of work.

You see, the problem with niche marketing is that well… it’s difficult to get a foothold in the established niches. Forex, diet pills, make money online even - there are thousands, if not millions of competitors out there, most of which have a budget that will blow yours out of the water.

What if those competitors… weren’t a problem?

What if your competition was so weak… you could rank first page for a 500+ daily search term… in a day or less?

I have, and now you can do.

I’m talking about current event annilhilation.

By taking advantage of current events, we can make sure that most of our competition isn’t established… everyone starts out on an even foothold. No more having to compete with sites that are years older, have thousands more backlinks etc.

One of the comments yesterday spoke about wanting to know how to find and act on untapped niches… about setting trends and the like.

The websites we’ll be setting up will be small, 5-10 page niche websites. Nothing too complicated. Here’s how to find our niches though.

The two best places to find what people are interested in is a) Yahoo Buzz and b) Google Trends.

Yahoo Buzz has a little chart on the right showing top ten searches (updated hourly) while Google has 10 on their homepage and up to 100 if you click through.

This is a goldmine, because we can see what exactly people are searching for at this moment. Hot search terms = profit.

Let’s take a direct example, so you guys can understand better… at the moment, one of the hot search terms in Yahoo is Miley Cyrus.

Right now, people are pretty interested to see what she’s up to. At the moment there are more than 100,000 searches daily just for her name… that’s not even including other keywords.

As soon as you see a search term that you like, what you do is enter it into SEOBook’s tool.

From SEOBook’s tool, we can see variations of the hot keyword that other people are searching for. Now the direct keyword - in this case Miley Cyrus - will usually be too hard, but there are plenty of others.

You’re looking for anything with more than 500 searches daily.

The easiest way to rank first page… is by snagging the relevant domain. If the domain is still available for a term, it’s likely that there’s less competition, and thus it’s easier to rank.

Now for the above keyword, there are around… 20 terms that get more than 500 searches daily. That’s a potential 15,000 visitors monthly (if you snag top place - this is not difficult with the exact keyword in your domain).

Use Instant Domain Search to make searching fast, and just take keywords from the SEOBook tool and enter them directly in.

A lot of the direct keywords were taken, but in this case the keywords miley cyrus shower and miley cyrus bra were both available (in .COM). Both are near the 1,000/day search range, one slightly above, one slightly below.

Now the former keyword had around 2,000,000 competing pages. The latter however, had only around 750,000 pages - ripe for domination.

Pick a simple template from OSWD and setup a 5 page website. Make sure you do simple SEO (meta tags, page titles, bolded keywords, h1 / h2) and create 3-4 articles, one picture page. Make sure you download any pictures you find and reupload them with the keyword as its title (to benefit from Google Images traffic).

Now… pages need links to get them indexed. So submit them to the top few Social Networks, using the keyword as your title when allowed (Digg, for example). You don’t care about promoting it, just the high power backlink. After you submit it, ping the Digg entry to get your site indexed within 24 - 48 hours.

You can also leave comments on dofollow blogs or build links in other ways. All you need is around 25 links total with your keyword as anchor text (if you have an account on forums with a few hundred posts, this is good enough). Use the search term as your anchor text.

As for monetization… use Adsense, or similar (PPC). For some keywords (like miley cyrus bra) Adsense may not work, so use something like Adbrite. However you can stick to ’safe’ keywords if you prefer, as Adsense pays better than any similar kind of program. The great thing is that it’ll pick up the keywords in your article and link to similar websites, and especially celebrity related topics - these kinds of users are click-whores.

You can also try out affiliate programs - no offense meant, but in this case - the people that search for celebrities tend to be not that bright and believe they can win things like a free iPod by just entering their email address. Email / zip submits are king on celebrity kind of websites. However, most of them only allow USA traffic, while Adsense allows you to monetize everyone.

Within a few days, use Shoemoney’s SERP tool to see where you’re ranking for your keyword. Depending where you are, build links - you should be first page or close to it, but if you’re not just keep on building

Once you hit the first page, keep working (won’t take long) until you’re top five. At the top five positions, it’s fairly easy to make around $20/day. As long as you have 2-4 weeks of consistant revenue, you can flip the website for $1,000 or more (just list it at the various webmaster forums).

You’ll make anywhere between $100 - $500+ of revenue and net a thousand or so for the website sale.

Don’t think. Act. All you need to spend on is the domain name and some time (hosting is available at $0.01 first month at HG) so you have nothing to lose.

Good luck, and if you have any questions let me know

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