Website Flipping

[benjaminrhys]

Can somebody let me know how people are making vast sums of money doing this? I read an article in the times about a young guy with no experience had started out with a couple of £100 and is now buying sites one day for £5k and selling them the same month for £20k+, what on earth do they do to them to increase the value so quickly?

 

[MancunianCreative]

Not sure, never heard of it as an exclusive way of making cash. Is he doing any work to the sites prior to selling? If he is it's a bit like a mechanic buying a banger and servicing it, and selling at a profit.

I wouldn't know where the market would be in selling websites.

 

[TommyGG]

There are marketplaces to sell websites, but like everything online you have to be very wary of scams. If you want to buy sell websites, you need to be very expert on the particular metrics used to gauge websites.

If the story is true he will be an exception, most people wont have an edge in this game.

 

[SpringerWebsiteDesign]

People sell on places such as https://flippa.com/

Be very careful when buying domains though as it isn't hard to get a website to report an incorrect pagerank for example you could buy a site because they are telling you it is a PR5 and you check it with your favourite PR checker and all checks out but when you get your site on your own hosts with your own site on you have 0 PR, basically there is some code you can put in somewhere that makes a site appear to be better than it is...... there are checkers you can use to check for this though.

The main reason people buy used domains are for a high PR to start with and inclusion on the DMOZ and Yahoo directories, maybe he is buying domains like this putting a website up, setting up some sort of affiliate scheme maybe through Amazon or Google Adsense, a bit of SEO they start to bring in an income so he can sell them on as a site bringing in a profit - if he has found a technique that works he can just keep doing the same thing over and over.

Mike.

 

[Anjam]

Do you have a link to the article ?

 

[awebapart.com]

Can somebody let me know how people are making vast sums of money doing this? I read an article in the times about a young guy with no experience had started out with a couple of £100 and is now buying sites one day for £5k and selling them the same month for £20k+, what on earth do they do to them to increase the value so quickly?

Perhaps they are conning their buyers? Perhaps they own an authority site which they can short term link to the site they are selling, in order to short term boost its rankings and value, only to remove those links and replace them with links to the next site once the previous site has been sold?

 

[benhuntltd]

1. Improve the site's rankings with good, up-to-date keyword positioning. If a site has plenty of inbound links, but has poor on-page optimisation, it's not hard to change the on-site factors to get the site to rank in the top 3 for a different keyword that will get more traffic.

2. Simply identifying sites that haven't been updated for a while, that happen to have good numbers of inbound links and/or good traffic, and which can be snapped up for a low price.

Then, there are lots of things that could be done. The site could be used to host outbound links to boost other properties. It could be smartened up and turned around, or simply sold on.

 

[benjaminrhys]

I suppose you have to do the research, not as easy as it sounds, I would also imagine that there are lots of unscrupulous website sellers out there

 

[PeterG]

In a word? Lies.

Sites on Flippa tend to lie about earnings, traffic and more.
The buyers from Flippa are very rarely happy with the end product.

I have sold several websites on Flippa until I felt guilty...
Yes, it's easy money.
Yes, it's just like stealing.

There are far easier ways to make profitable websites