How To Flip Websites For Profit

Beautiful, you have some experience blogging, and now you are wondering how to flip websites for profit. Great! You are certainly in the right place.

Last year alone, I sold over $2,000,000 dollars worth of websites.

I’m a website investor who flips websites for profit as a career, as well as founded the Niche Investor marketplace.

It’s the best job, ever. I’ve been featured in Business Insider, Niche Pursuits, Flippa, Niche Website Builders, and more, about my niche site flipping adventures.

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In this guide, I will share some tips to help you get started on your first successful website flip.

How To Flip Websites For Profit

Are you feeling the urge to follow the great resignation, to work for yourself?

Learning how to flip websites for profit is the lifeboat that will take you there, to the lifestyle freedom you desire.

There are many ways to make money from websites, depending on the website you are running.

You could be…

• Selling your products or services through an eCommerce website
• Selling other people’s products or services and getting a cut of the profit through affiliate partnerships
• Selling digital products for 100% of the sale
• Making money passively by allowing different companies to advertise on your website

But there is another way to make money from a website, and it’s my FAVORITE way to make money blogging.

What is it? I flip websites for profit, of course! 

What Does It Mean To Flip Websites For Profit?

Website investors buy and sell websites for profit.

Meaning that we buy a website, improve the website and products, and grow traffic and revenue, and then resell it for much higher than we paid for it.

You can buy a starter website that isn’t earning revenue or traffic currently, or you can buy an established website that is earning revenue and ranking on search engines.

Either way, you will need:

• Knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization) to increase the traffic to the website
• Knowledge of different monetization techniques to help the website run a profit
• Time to put in the effort to see results
• Optional: a budget to put into advertising, writers and/or a blog flipping coach to speed up your road to success

When your website is making more money than it was when you bought it, the price of the website increases.

This allows you to sell the website for more money than you bought it, making a profit.

It can be a big job to flip a website for profit.

But it also has the potential to give you lifestyle freedom and financial gain, as well as personal enjoyment. What could be better than that?

However, this article guides you through the dos and don’ts of buying and flipping websites to make sure you always come out on top.

Buying and Selling a Website

Before you get onto flipping a website, you need to know how to buy and sell websites.

As, this will be the starting point and end goal of your niche blog investing business.

When buying and selling a website, you have two options.

The first option is to use a marketplace or broker to sell your website. This is the easiest and safest option.

When you use a marketplace or a broker the majority of the work will be done by them, including all of the logistics of the sale.

The second option is to buy and sell your websites independently.

Both of these options have their advantages and disadvantages.

The best option is definitely using a marketplace or a broker to buy and sell websites.

If you use a marketplace to buy your website then you have access to all of the details you need to know about the website before you purchase it.

For example, when looking at sites to buy, you can see exactly how much the website is earning.

As well as all the details you need to know about how the website is monetized and where the website traffic is coming from.

There are also many benefits to selling your website using a marketplace or broker.

When selling your site you can use this free website valuation tool to see exactly how much your website is worth before you even start the selling process

This is available to use free of charge, and we really recommend you use it.

Your broker will also take care of all the sales logistics for you, so you don’t have to worry about the transfer of finances, assets or domains.

These services help you increase the likelihood of selling (as you get to have your listing in front of the broker’s network of buyers) as well as support you through each step in the sale process.

The cost for this protection is minimal, typically less than 20% for sites sold under $100,000, and less than 10% for sites sold under $1,000,000.

That being said, because of this partnership with your broker, it is in their best interest to find the best possible price to sell your website for. Meaning that you often get a better deal and higher sale price than if you were to sell independently.

If you do decide to buy and sell your website independently then you won’t have to pay a percentage of your sale, but you will be on your own for the entire process.

And without a professional to guide you if any problems arise.

Also, it is a very time-consuming process of vetting buyers, replying to buyer questions/emails and having to meet interested parties live over ZOOM for due diligence meetings.

…All things that your broker would take care of for you.

There are loads of forums and Facebook groups that specialize in buying and selling websites.

The downsides with buying and selling your websites independently is that you will have to:

• go through all of the logistics yourself
• spend a lot of time
• miss important details
• you could get taken advantage of if the buyer/seller you are negotiating with knows you don’t have a broker or any legal protection on your side

Although you could save a bit of money by selling privately, you will be paying for this with your time, and potentially wasting money in the long run.

Don’t have the full purchase price in hand? Not to worry! You may be able to acquire it now and pay the seller over this type of payment plan.

How To Know If A Website is Good For Flipping

Now you have decided how you want to buy your website, you need to find the right website to buy.

When you buy a website, a lot of the information should be readily available for you to look at and make your decision.

The first thing you want to look at and the way to find the rough value of the website is the amount it earns on average each month.

You will want to see the seller’s P&L sheet (profit and loss sheet).

When you know this information, you can take the average earnings of a website over six to twelve months and work out the price range in which you should be paying for it.

This is normally between a multiple of 24 and a multiple of 40.

For instance, if a website makes, on average, around $100 a month, you can use these two multiples to work out the minimum price of the website and the maximum price.

In this case, the lowest possible price the website will go for would be $2400, and the highest is $4000. The website will be worth anywhere in that price range.

However, the price statistics don’t give you that much of an indication on whether the website you are looking at will be good for flipping!

There are actually many other factors that can determine if its value is higher. And personally, if it would actually be worth it to YOU to pay more.

So here’s a handy guide on what you should be looking out for when buying a website with the intention of flipping.

Audience and Visitors

Internet traffic is one of the most important things you need to consider when making money off a website in any way.

When buying a website you want to flip, you need to look at how many visitors the website gets per month, and it is also crucial to know where those visitors come from.

Let’s say you want to aim to buy a website that has around 10,000 visits per month.

This means that you know it is an established website for sale with good enough SEO to have visitors consistently.

Sure, it is easy to build a website from scratch and get it to around 3,000 visitors per month. But it is a lot harder to build that number of visitors from 3,000 to 10,000.

Having a website with a good visitor base will mean that there is more range of monetization as you have more people looking through your website.

Another thing you need to know is where these visitors come from.

You want to buy a website that has at least half of its visitors coming from search engines such as Google because it shows you that the blog has good SEO and is getting a good amount of new traffic passively.

If your visitors are coming from search engines it means that they are actively looking for something such as information or a product.

Therefore, they are more likely to interact with your website by clicking affiliate links or buying the goods or services that you provide.

This won’t happen if your visitor base largely comes from social media, as they are not actively looking for anything and will likely leave your site and not interact with it as much as those from search engines.

Having visitors on a website, and the website having an established audience are two very different things, and you ideally would want both when buying a website to make a profit.

But know that Pinterest traffic is very desirable.

Although Google Analytics classifies Pinterest in the social channel, Pinterest is not a social media platform. Pinterest is actually a search engine.

If you can find a blog for sale that has traffic from Pinterest, that is organic traffic and that is a WIN!

So it pays to look carefully at the analytics and understand what you are seeing.

This is something I teach inside The Blog Flipping Society as well. 

As well, have a look to see if the website you are buying has an email newsletter that you can subscribe to for free.

A lot of websites have these as a way to establish a community and have regular visitors to the website.

These email newsletters are especially useful when selling goods or services.

If the website you are looking to buy has one of these, look for the number of people who are currently subscribed.

If it is over or around 1,000 then you know the website has a good audience as well as a good visitor base.

For example, in the chart above, we see the email list stats for a website that I am currently selling. It has had very healthy list growth and open rates of 32%!

Monetization

As well as blog traffic, you also need to know how much money the blog is making.

And, how you can increase that revenue post-sale to make a profit later when you sell the website.

The seller will make it clear how much the website is making per month and have some documents to back that up.

The website will be making its money through some sort of monetization.

This could be from affiliate marketing, eCommerce, advertising, selling digital products, etc.

But what’s more important is, do you personally understand the revenue streams? Are you willing to learn?

It also helps to look for websites that are under-monetized.

This could include websites that are only using one type of monetization on their website, meaning you can add other types of monetization to drive those profit margins up.

This is called looking for monetization gaps, and I teach a workshop on this strategy.

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Established Websites

Knowing if the website you are buying is established isn’t as simple as the website has a lot of visitors or even a good established audience.

The website needs to be established as a business.

This means factoring in the age of the website, its domain authority, and how long it has been making money.

As well as exactly how the website already ranks on Google searches.

Every website that will come up in a Google search has a page rank, this is a number that determines where exactly the website will rank when you search for it on Google.

Normally, page rank isn’t important when buying a website to flip, as this is going to change depending on how you revamp the website.

However, as a rule of thumb, it is recommended to avoid websites with a page rank of 0.

If a page rank for a website is 0 it normally means that the website just isn’t liked by Google and it will be almost impossible to get the page rank higher as the website will be constantly penalized by the search engine.

You will also have to factor in the age of the website you are buying. You will likely need to buy a website that has been up for at least 12 months.

Ideally, the website should have been making a profit for 12 months before you think about purchasing it.

If a website is less than a year old it could be difficult to assess its financial and traffic trends and they are very unlikely to have an established community.

If you are using a marketplace or broker to buy your website this shouldn’t be much of a problem, as most marketplaces require established sites to have 12 months of revenue data to be listed.

==> View all currently available established listings here

Selling The Website

Alright, now you’ve bought your ideal website, following the parameters above and now you are on your journey to making this website make as much of a profit as possible.

Whether that is through increased monetization or increased traffic, the end goal is to make a lot of money.

The great thing about flipping a website is that you will be making money before you even sell the website.

Hopefully, the profits of the website will rise, and it is a good idea to wait at least six months before selling the website.

One important thing you need to know about flipping a website is that you should set it up with an evergreen profit funnel, so that the revenue isn’t dependent on you being at the wheel manually.

Passive income, baby!

This is an important part of the framework I teach my clients inside my advanced group coaching program The Blog Flipping Society.

Inside the Blog Flipping Society, my expert coaches and I show you how to build your profit systems to rise and rise, increasing your website’s value each month.

When your site is earning money passively, we help you sell your site at the top of its valuation.

After this, you can sell it for the most money you’ll be able to get out of the website. And then use what we’ve taught you in the program to apply to your next flip!

How To Flip Websites For Profit – Final Thoughts

Flipping a website can be a daunting task when you start out, and should take a minimum of twelve months.

However, if you do this correctly then not only could you make a massive profit on the website when you sell it, but you could also make passive income while you are on the road to selling it too.

Making your overall profit way bigger than just buying and selling!

As long as you research the website you want to buy and look for the factors we have set out for you, you are sure to find a profitable website for sale, that you can make a profit on.

Keep Reading:

• 12 Clever Ways To Promote Your Blog
• How I flipped a site for $16,000
• How I flipped a site for $50,000
• 5 Tips To Flip Your Blog For 5 Figures, Fast