What is Blog Flipping?
Blog Flipping or website flipping is normally defined as buying a blog, making some improvements, and then selling it for a profit. Think of it like buying a house that needs work, doing the improvements, and selling it later. This concept has been around for a while but it has grown in popularity lately. One of the advantages of this form of making money online is that you are not risking as much of your capital resources, but mainly your time and effort. Obviously, you can also start your own blog from scratch, thus reducing further your risk of loosing money.
The Advantages of Buying A Website
Given the time it takes to get a new blog off the ground and the amount of work and effort it takes to create one, adding content, building backlinks, etc., the prospect of buying an established blog is very appealing. Another big advantage of buying a blog is that you don't have to establish an audience and wait for the site to be indexed within search engines. Most webmasters, will understand that even the most poorly managed sites should have some form of backlink network developed and return a result in the major search engines (unless of course it has been banned). While, it may not be on the first pages on the SERP's, there will be some sort of result and therefore ready for you to optimize and improve.
This is where the opportunity of making money on blog flipping comes in. If you have a sound understanding of search engine optimization and basic blogging concepts, you should have no problem making improvements and optimizing it. By adding content, fixing title tags, building links, promoting it, placing some advertisements up, and all the other good internet marketing practices you have learned, you can very quickly start reaping rewards. There are a lot of people who want to have their own blogs and don't know where to start. Therefore, this is where you should capitalize your efforts on.
What are the steps towards blog flipping?
The following are the necessary steps to start your flipping journey. If you are thinking of creating your own from scratch, then the first two will not be of much interest, although I highly recommend for you to read it anyway as there is always something to be learned. The steps:
1. Search for a blog you want to buy.
2. Research, evaluate, negotiate, and complete the acquisition.
3. Improve the blog's value by feeding it with the necessary vitamins.
4. Putting it up for sale.
Search for a blog you want to buy (or creating it if you prefer).
Before you start to look at specific blogs, it's is recommended that you narrow down your choices, based on your specialization. Is there a particular type of topic that you know best? For example, if you are not an expert musician, you will most likely stay away from blogs that teaches people how to play the guitar. Remember, that the idea is to improve the blog you are buying and therefore you should have a pretty good understanding on how to optimize and improve it later. You must create value to the blog so it becomes appealing for potential investors.
Other factors you should consider when looking for a blog is their hidden value. For example, a blog might already have good traffic. Look at its Alexa rank -- is it in the top hundred thousand? Perhaps the site has good traffic, but it doesn't look like the owner has monetized the site very well. Maybe the site offers some really unique and valuable content, but hasn't been promoted sufficiently enough and isn't attracting the kind of traffic you think it potentially could attract.
Every blog has some positive and negative factors. Ensure that there are positive factors and most importantly, formulate a plan to improve the negative aspects of the blog. If you can not formulate a plan to increase a value of a specific blog, then why would you buy it? For example: Say that one of the negative factors is fixing the blogs design and it's navigational structure. If you do not have the technical knowledge, you will most certainly have problems creating value for it. There is of course the matter of hiring someone to do it for you, but that will increase your cost and consequently have to boost your price in order to make profit from it. We all know what happens when the price is higher, right?
Research, evaluate, negotiate, and complete the acquisition.
There are numerous places where you can find good web sites to flip. Places such as eBay, SitePoint, DigitalPoint, BizBuySell, WebsiteBroker, and WebHostingTalk are places where you can start. Googling "blog for sale" is also an option. In some cases, an owner of a blog has the for sale sign right on their front page. Forums, classified ads, etc are also good places to look around. Searching for blogs that are for sale is not that difficult. The difficult part is evaluating, negotiating and ultimately completing the acquisition.
One of the most traditional mechanism for evaluating a deal to buy a blog is to use a multiple of the monthly revenues the site is generating (12 - 24 times). This may make great sense to you, but most of the time it is not applicable. If the blog is not making any revenues, for example, one form of finding a suitable figure is by using some online tools, such as WebsiteValued and MyWebSiteWorth. Remember that these are just estimates and should not be considered as 100% reliable. The good thing is that at a minimum you can have an idea where to start.
Once you have found a blog and established more or less what it is worth, do your own due diligence to find as much information as you can. Look for statistics, rankings (test it on Google), PR, any reviews the blog might have, etc. Do this quickly and act on it as soon as possible. Send the owner an email if you can to find out more information (e.g. documentation, revenues, traffic stats, etc). Make sure that they are verifiable numbers and remember not to insult the owner. If the owner thinks that the blog is worth hundreds on thousands and you believe that it is only worth by the hundreds, maybe you should back off right away. If the owner is honest, then it is certain that no deal will be made. Now, if both of you have a reasonable figure in mind, then the dancing begins.
Good luck!
Francisco Perez (aka DiTesco) an Internet Business Entrepreneur, provides Information and resources on Making Money Online, Internet Marketing, Twitter Tips and Tools, Social Media, Internet Technology and more.
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