Website Adbritage

Website Arbitrage Check out www.imgrind.com/bonus.html for a bonus report on how to make $50 - $300/day outsourcing. Jason Pereira / Swastik Agrawal IMGrind I’ll bet when you saw this offer you thought one thing... DAMN, not another website selling report! Isn’t that whole field saturated as hell? Isn’t it impossible to make any kind of worthwhile profit in that niche? Why are these schmuks trying to sell us yet more information about this? Your concerns would be valid. However, let me tell you a little more about us... Both of us at some point in time have made upwards of US $10,000 per month flipping websites. Basic websites, developed websites, blog websites, product websites, script websites, all kinds. We’ve done website selling products in the past – some making hundreds of sales; run coaching classes costing hundreds of dollars for a few hours worth of consultation, and helped hundreds if not thousands of people successfully sell websites for profit. I tell you this not to boast (alright, maybe a little... ;) ) but to increase your initial confidence that your purchase was a brilliant one. Of course, you’ll only know how good when you read the content. So enough of the filler! The website selling marketing took a MAJOR dive a few months ago... however it has just started to recover. And that means it’s ripe for you to make some serious bank! Luckily for you, most of the marketplace doesn’t have the information you have now. Meaning that 99% of them are struggling with the same old formulas that were outdated months... if not years ago. Now that those formulas are outdated, it’s time for you to take advantage... and make some money! Let’s talk a little bit about the model... the model that cuts down the work you have to do to as little as possible and makes you the most money for the least amount of time. You see, building a website from the domain up is difficult. Trust me, having created hundreds of websites... it’s damn tiring! Yes, you can outsource, but why not save time and money on the startup... and spend the same amount on an already developed website instead of building a new one? What we’ll be doing is picking up ready, neglected websites... websites whose owners haven’t taken full advantage of their quality or potential. We’ll then be using one of three different models to make money from the website. This will work best to generate some initial startup income ($1,000 $10,000) for your other internet marketing activities however this can also be developed into a full time business. More than $180,000 was spent on websites in the last seven days at Flippa.com, and over $28,000,000 over its lifetime as a website marketplace (including its spell at sitepoint.com) there’s no reason why you can’t pocket a small percentage of that. Let’s get started  Where to Find Opportunities Opportunities are basically websites that haven’t taken full advantage of their potential... either due to the owner not working on them in the correct way or them simply not being placed in front of enough eyeballs. There are hundreds of website buying and selling marketplaces all over the Internet. Most of them are dead. Of the ones that are active, most of them have little to no traffic. Of course, for you the important traffic is buying traffic – that is the amount of competition you’ll have when buying sites and the number of potential customers when selling websites. The more buying traffic there is to a marketplace, the harder it will be for you to find under developed opportunities as the good ones will tend to get snapped up quickly. However, the more buying traffic there is to a marketplace, the easier it will be to sell any opportunities you’ve picked up. Thus, the golden rule is  buy low, sell high! A rule that has existed for centuries now.  Let’s go through some of the marketplaces you’ll be making profits from, ranking them in order of buying traffic. The combined total of all listings on these marketplaces should give you at least 50-400 opportunities each and every day. Those opportunities added together have the potential to make you upwards of $100 - $1,000 per day. Of those opportunities, 30% will be utter garbage; 20% might be sites correctly valued, not the type of stuff you’re looking for. The rest, though... that’s where you make your money. Marketplaces ranked 1. Flippa.com Originally hosted at sitepoint.com, Flippa.com is the premier marketplace for selling websites, although perhaps not for buying them. Flippa has the largest amount of clued in buyers all in one location on the Internet. You need to pay $19 to list and a 5% success fee, but it’s worth it. A quick look at the homepage at www.flippa.com shows you recent statistics... As you can see, there are 1,267 listings open now. Even taking away 50% as rubbish, that’s still over 600 potential websites you could purchase. Now, there are different models in this method which I like to call website arbitrage... Flippa.com will probably not be much use in the first model however you can definitely find potential for the second and third models. The models will be explained further ahead in this product, however for now let’s examine the marketplace a little closer. Most sites sold tend to be in the low / mid range, although obviously high end sales fetch most of the money. Your goal is to start at the lowest (or mid depending on how much start up capital you have) level and slowly move upwards. Buy for $20, sell for $50, buy for $50, sell for $100, buy for $100 sell for $200... you get the idea. Quick links for you: Low end entrylevel sites: http://flippa.com/buy-websites?filterby=listings- Mid range sites: http://flippa.com/buy-websites?filterby=listingsmidrange High end sites: http://flippa.com/buy-websites?filterby=listingshighend Websites search: http://flippa.com/search You can sort depending on various things (price, activity, end time etc) using their search function. As an example, here’s results sorted in the lower range of sites, sorted by price (from lowest to highest) http://flippa.com/buy-websites?filterby=listingsentrylevel&sortby=_price&sortdir=asc&page=1 One of the things that may have worried you when you looked at the Flippa homepage stats is that only 35% of websites sell. For you, that is a good thing. Why? Firstly, most website sales are done wrongly. Firstly, sellers thinking garbage websites are worth anything. We can’t do much with them, sadly. However, a lot of good sites aren’t selling simply because a) they aren’t promoted enough b) the auction listing is complete rubbish. People are tired of seeing startup sites so often now, so they sell for less. You can use this to your advantage (see models 2 and 3). Create an account at Flippa.com, verify whatever you can – it’ll come in handy later. We’ll talk about what exactly to look for as opportunities further down, but for now get used to the marketplace, its feel, how to use it etc. 2. Warrior Forum Sites For Sale section Now the WF’s section is featured at number two in this list because its buyer traffic is of a higher quality than the below two, even though both of them may have higher quantity of buying traffic, the WF has a higher quality of buying traffic. Members of the WF tend to value of unique content and hard work higher than the below two sections, which is why unique content websites tend to sell easily on there. However, although WF has quality buyers, they don’t have the level of quantity that Flippa does... so only list there if your website doesn’t sell on Flippa (unlikely if you follow our tips). The WF complete websites for sale section can be found here: http://www.warriorforum.com/complete-web-sites-sale/ Despite being 2nd in this list, you won’t find too many opportunities here, although it’s always worth a browse for ideas. What you will find when you’re looking to purchase is a lot of high quality non-unique websites (private label products, high quality design niche blogs etc). Once you get a bit of experience you will be able to make money with these, however ignore most of them for now. It costs $20 to list at the WF. 3. Digital Point Number one rule: NEVER sell a website on Digital Point. Even though it’s free, you’ll get a lot less for it than you would listing on Flippa, and there’s a lot of time wasters on there. Why? For one reason – buyers on DP tend to be of a cheaper mindset than those on Flippa and the Warrior Forum. Although this sucks when selling websites, this is pretty much awesome when buying them. You’ll find quite a few opportunities on Digital Point. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52 Digital Point has around five pages of open threads containing websites either for sale or websites wanted. Each page has 50 threads, so even given a 50/50 split between selling / buying threads (it’s actually around 70/30) that’s over 100 opportunities for you. You’ll find at least 20 – 30 potential opportunities you can take advantage of, however an easier way to get a lot of sites offered to you... is to start a WTB (Want to Buy) thread asking to buy sites. You can specify what type of site you want (with traffic, with revenue, blogs, proxies, script sites... up to you) however for your first go just start a general thread. You’ll get at least 30 – 50 offerings sent directly to your inbox... a lot of them will be rubbish but there will be a few good ones in there. Initially, it will take you some time to analyse sites to see whether they’re worth your time; once you get a bit of experience it will become a lot easier. It takes me around 30 seconds (up to a minute max) to check out whether a site would be worth my time nowadays. Spend around 30 minutes to 1 hour every morning going through various marketplaces and looking at what’s there to offer. You’ll gradually get better at finding good opportunities which you’ll be able to make at least $100/day from. On Digital Point you will find a lot of opportunities in the $20 – $100 range that are worth looking more at. These sites can be sold – either flipped quickly or more long term for anywhere between $100 – $5,000. If that gets you excited, just read the next site buying marketplace... 4. Ebay Ebay is amazing. NO WHERE ELSE on the Internet can you find completely brilliant looking websites, well setup and optimized ready to go... available for less than ten dollars. Don’t believe me? Go to Ebay.com and check out the websites for sale section... you’ll find a nice surprise. Quick link: http://business.shop.ebay.com/Internet-BusinessesWebsites-/46689/i.html?_catref=1&_fln=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m282 On the first page alone, there are about a dozen websites going into their last hour of bidding available for sale... with not a single bid for them and priced at less than $5 (usually at their starting price of $0.99). The .COM domain alone is generally worth more than that. Unfortunately, like all marketplaces there is a lot of garbage. What Ebay is famed for (at least the website auction section) is turnkey websites, which although still good enough for the few dollars charged, are not what you’re really looking for when doing a quick flip. For longer term websites though, turnkey is fine (as long as the domain is good). However you can find a few bargains, if just the domain name is available for $1 and you know it’s worth $10... that’s an easy profit right there. The good sites on Ebay tend to be around $20~ however you will need to do a bit of searching. Just browse through the listings and you’ll find something decent. 5. Other Website Marketplaces There are about a half dozen other website marketplaces that get anywhere between decent to next to no traffic. Below some of the better ones are listed (in order of where to find decent opportunities): Talk Freelance: http://www.talkfreelance.com/forumdisplay.php?f=79 (also has a budget websites section) V7N http://www.v7n.com/forums/websites/ DN Forum http://www.dnforum.com/f48/ Namepros http://www.namepros.com/turnkey-websites-for-sale/ NetBuilders.org http://www.netbuilders.org/sites/ DealASite http://www.dealasite.com/buy-websites/ Webmaster Forums http://www.webmasterforums.com/buy-sell-domains-developedsites/ Young Entrepreneur Forums http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/forum/f40-websites-for-sale I personally recommend TalkFreelance, V7N, Namepros and DN Forum. These are some of the smaller website buying and selling marketplaces out there... some of them see around five sites listed per day, the lower ones might be lucky to see one website listed per week. TalkFreelance is great for high quality designs – you can often find a website that looks sensational for less than a couple hundred bucks. Developed, that website could sell for $1,000+ easily... as good looking designs are quite hard to come by online. You now have a list of say 5-6 marketplaces you can browse daily. But what are you supposed to look for? Scroll down... Rules For Taking Advantage The basic goal here is to take advantage of the discrepancies between different site marketplaces (or the lack of effort put in by website owners) to make yourself some money. However, there are specific types of sites and opportunities you should take advantage of... and specific types of sites and opportunities you should avoid. Firstly, make sure you analyse all the listings you can – Flippa and Digital Point both have search / sort functions that make this easier. See, a website seller might not know how to promote his/her listing – meaning that the listing gets less eyeballs, and lower bids. You can sweep in and buy a website for a much lower price than it’s actually worth. Example: Seller has a website making $50/month in Adsense, been around for 2 years. Instead of a decent listing title (mentioning the most important facts in the title), the seller lists his website with a title of something like FreshGreenPlants.org. Immediately he gets a lot less interest. A site like that is worth around $500 – 600. However, due to less people checking out the listing, he might get few or no offers at all. What you could do is pick up the website on the cheap (I’ve bought websites like this for less than $150 – $300, which is a massive saving!), relist it with a proper title, example: 2 Years Old Website, Steady Adsense Income of $50.00/month | Environmental Niche And you’d get the $500 - $600 for it that it’s worth. Or you can sit on it and let it make its money back quicker than it would had you paid the actual 10-12x evaluation. There are many different types of websites, some more worthy of your time than others. Let’s go through some of the sites that you should be interested: 1. Custom script sites “Rate that Hottie” (you’ve probably seen this before but an example of that is at http://www.pickthehottie.com/rate.asp). That’s a script. Proxies, image hosts, arcades, quiz sites, dictionary sites, directories, search engines... those are all scripts and you’ll come across a few “custom script sites” on various forums, generally costing $20 - $100. If you come across one where the design is decent, the domain is decent, and you like the idea of the script... snap it up! Custom script sites are awesome because no one else out there has the exact same site, which makes them valuable. So if you can get them cheap... The best thing about having something custom is that it gives you so many opportunities. Example: custom arcade script You could build an gaming resource site with the arcade itself and 10-20 articles giving gaming advice. With a decent enough design, that’s easily worth $200-$300+ You could sell copies of the script with a short report on how to set it up. Imagine buying rights to a script at $100 and selling copies at $19 each? I’ve done it in the past with different kinds of scripts – a URL shortening script that cost that cost $200 to buy made over $700 in sales at $29 apiece (and then the rights to the script with revenue were sold for over $1,500...). If it looks good enough others will want to buy it. You could promote the script site, get a little revenue/traffic and flip it for 2-3x what you paid simply because it has some metrics to it. Once you get an idea of what sells and what doesn’t (remember, you can do this without spending any money of your own – just browse the marketplace to see what’s happening) you can hire programmers to create these scripts for you themselves at low prices and do the same. 2. Blog/HTML sites with traffic/revenue Due to the differences in buying traffic between different marketplaces or poor seller decisions (see the Adsense example above) you’ll find websites which are actually worth a bit of money selling for little or next to nothing (<$500). What kind of features/metrics should you look for? Unique content Good design Traffic (anything upward of 50/day) Revenue (anything upward of $10 per month) Subscribers (either RSS or email – latter more valuable) Google ranking for competitive terms Pagerank Good domain Size of niche (is there room for growth?) You’ll find that you can do quite a lot with websites that have all of the above. As an example, websites with a lot of unique content and traffic but little revenue tend to sell for lower than they’re worth because most buyers care about the money a developed website is making. So you could purchase a content site with 50-200 articles and some traffic at less than $400, optimize it or promote it a little bit and keep the steady income stream going or sell it. Or you could take that content (if you buy a website for $200 and it has 100 articles, you’re paying $2 per article, not even taking anything else into account – assuming the articles are reasonable, it’s a great deal. You could spin them and promote to a lot of article directories to get this (and other sites of yours) ranked, stick them together in an eBook to sell, sell PLR to packs of 10 articles at a time... you get the idea. If the site has revenue, look for anything under the “standard” 10x monthly revenue model. For example, if you find an Adsense site making $20 a month going for anything less than $200, you’d be interested. If there’s traffic, look at the website to see if it has potential to make some money (or has enough traffic to make up for it). Some website owners generate traffic but simply don’t know how to monetize – a simple change in ad placement or colour can turn your $20/month website to a $40/month one, effectively doubling the end sale price. Traffic – some niches are extremely easy to get traffic to (for example, celebrity images) however they’re hard to monetize as the audience tends to not pay money (if your main traffic is teenagers, they don’t tend to buy much online comparatively). However, if a website has enough traffic it’s still worth looking at – see if a free CPA offer that doesn’t require any payment or credit card could be implemented on the site to generate some revenue, or look at selling advertising to companies that might be interested in that niche (if you have a movie review blog, you’d look at movie ticket advertisers etc). Last example on the traffic – sometimes immense non buying traffic can be converted into a onetime source of income and then dropped. For example, I bought a proxy website once for $50 that was getting 2,000 visitors a day, but very little income (around $0.5/day – the website was banned from Adsense and other networks weren’t as good). I was tempted by the 2,000 uniques a day, however after my bandwidth started getting killed I decided to park the domain. Parking the domain brought in a steady $10-15 per day for two weeks, making me around $170 – yes, traffic pretty much died after that but I was happy enough with the $120 or so profit. One thing you should be wary of is websites like proxies, product websites and image hosts – the standard 10x revenue model doesn’t apply to them. For proxies, promoting them generally requires regular maintenance work, while schools may block them after a week – a regular income of $5/day may drop to $1/day or less if this happens. Image hosts need to be regularly promoted by posting on forums et cetera until they become big, and should you not do this revenue can almost die off completely. These kinds of websites generally sell for less than six months of full revenue (I’ve picked up websites in the past for a month’s revenue, so a $5/day proxy website for $150). If you’re smart, you can take advantage of the traffic / earning power and use it for your other projects. In the example of the $5/day website I bought, it was 2 weeks old and I thought it would get blocked soon, so I redirected it to another proxy + did some promotion for that – revenue jumped to $10/day which I then sold after another two weeks for $400. Product websites tend to go for 1-4x monthly revenue maximum, unless they have search engine traffic and a history of steady revenue. Why? Simply because what generally happens is a product is promoted heavily at its launch – in fact, 80% of the monthly revenue claimed by the product may have been generated in the first week. After that the product owner may not have the time and inclination to seek other means of promotion so sells it. You can still make money off this though – sometimes I’ve seen internet marketing products go for less than a month’s revenue (you’ll have seen them on Flippa – they’d have made $500 in revenue and listed with a BIN of $300 - $800). After analysing the product (has it been only promoted in one place? Is there room for easy further promotion?). For example, I picked up the rights to a blackhat product sold only on Digital Point for $500 (it had $800 in revenue). Since I didn’t want to list it on the Warrior Forum because it was a bit shady, and didn’t have the time to play around with a large scale launch, I only promoted it to my list – making $660 selling it at $30 and then a further $400 by listing it on DealDotCom with resale rights. Doubling my investment in a matter of days. You may not find these so easily to start with, but once you get more and more experienced and a better eye for valuing websites + their potential, you’ll be able to pull off similar sales. 3. Custom Product Websites Custom product websites are available quite often on the likes of Flippa, the Warrior Forum etc – the standard sales page with a 40-60 page product and graphics available for $200 – $1,300. You don’t want to look at the higher end products for now, but the lower end ones you can profit with. Example: http://flippa.com/auctions/74301/Womens-Weight-LossPlan-Website-Sure-to-make-a-SMASH-on-CLICKBANK These used to sell for quite a bit (the absolute lowest you could get one for was $597, and usually it was around $997) but due to the recession etc and people getting tired of them prices have come down. Only pick up products you believe you’d have a successful chance of turning a net profit on. Personally, I prefer to create my own products or buy someone’s already promoted one with revenue (the blackhat product example I gave above)... but if you can get one that’s decent and cheap go wild. One of the things that smart people have done when buying these products is to purchase and immediately list anything in the internet marketing niche (make money online, blogging, stat tracking, affiliate marketing, how to setup X etc) on the Warrior Forum and Digital Point. So what would happen is you’d purchase a product for $200 – $300 is immediately promote to those two sections, generate $300 in sales and flip for $500-$1,000. Making yourself a few hundred dollars profit. If you follow our tips in the how to sell section, you’ll make sure your product website sells for at least 1.5-4x revenue generated and not less than that. 4. Sites that can be improved Sites under this bracket may fall under the above categories but this deserved a mention... look for sites that can be improved. For example, you may find a website that has a decent domain name, a lot of unique content but looks like it was designed by a third grader using Paint... you could pick it up for cheap (since ugly websites unless they’re making revenue tend not to get a lot of interest), outsource a design for $50 and list it getting a lot more bids. There are three different models mentioned below, play around with the basic one before you advance. But keep this in mind – if a site could be improved for cheap, it might be worth taking a chance on as the improvement could cost you $20 and net you an extra $2-300. This isn’t just the website itself – sometimes just improving the auction listing copy could add a few hundred dollars on top of the website end sale price. You could do this on the same marketplace that you picked the site up, however obviously a different one would be better. What you could do if you don’t want to risk your own money is (for example); say you see a website that you believe to be worth $500 that isn’t getting any bids because of a crap listing. What you’d do is contact the seller and offer to help him rewrite the listing – (visit the how to sell section for some tips) in exchange for a cut. So if he’s listing for $500 with no luck, maybe you rewrite the listing and it sells for $700 – you could take 50% of any increase in price + a percentage of the original. So the buyer wants $500 for his site – you could say you’d take 15% of that only if the site sells and 50% of any revenue gained on top of his expected price. We’ll revisit a theoretical example used before – the environmental website earning $50/month through Adsense with the rubbish title FreshGreenPlants.org (see page 12 if you’ve forgotten). If you didn’t want to put down the money yourself to buy it, you could fix up his listing – sometimes all that may be needed is a change in title – and if it sold for $700 after you helped him out you’d net $175 with the above percentages as a cut. Fixing up the listing may take less than 30 minutes of your time, less if you have a template of important things to mention in mind. The important thing here is to make sure your seller seems genuine and won’t just run off with the extra cash – look at things like rating, WHOIS details etc (see next section). Next, we’ll talk about how to make sure you get these websites for the cheapest price possible and how to avoid any drama when buying them. Buying Opportunities at the Best Price and Staying Safe There are two things you want to make sure of when you’re putting down your hard earned cash for a website. 1. That you’re not over paying and 2. That you’re not going to get scammed Here’s how to do that. In terms of 1., for this model you want to make sure you’re paying less than 10x monthly revenue for an Adsense site, less than a few hundred dollars for a custom script site and less than 1-4x monthly revenue for a proxy, image host or product site (or others similar to that). This could vary, but your valuations of sites will get better once you browse the marketplaces a bit. See what’s selling, what’s not and you’ll avoid wasting time and money. There is a way to get these sites cheaper, although generally you’d be looking for websites with no or low bids. This has happened to me and I was pretty happy as a seller; here’s what happened: I’d been trying to sell my entrepreneur blog unsuccessfully for around a month or so, having wanted $5,000 for it but without much luck. Bids were ranging between $1-2,000, a price I was unable to accept as I felt that was too low. One of my friends offered $3,000 for the site – now as I preferred not continually wasting my time trying to sell it, I accepted and the deal was done quickly. Meaning that he got the blog at 60% of the amount I originally wanted – cheap, no? This works when we’re buying sites too – sometimes sellers don’t have the time to work on / keep sites so not selling them would mean they’re getting $0 as those websites will just die. So although they wouldn’t accept pennies, sometimes you can see a massive discount on the public sale price offered simply by contacting the seller privately and negotiating. As another example, I once saw a custom search engine script website for sale at $100 – a price I was willing to pay as it was quality. However, the seller hadn’t gotten any (public) bids so I contacted him and offered $60 privately – which was accepted. I saved 40% on the price I was willing to pay – quite a decent bonus.  So for site sales that don’t have a lot of activity near the wanted price, contact the seller privately and offer between 50-75% of the wanted price depending on the size, quality and how much you actually want the site. As for not getting scammed... I hate scammers, absolutely despise them. At the beginning of my IM ‘career’ I was scammed out of $650 for a website – a huge amount for me at the time. A month or two later I was scammed on a smaller amount - $120 when buying a site which was a dud. However, since after that I have not been scammed on buying or selling a website – here’s some tips. For websites over $1,000 (when buying or selling) make sure you use Escrow.com. I’m lazy so tend to stick to Paypal, however Escrow is the safest way. If you can’t / don’t want to do Escrow and Paypal is your only option, here’s what you can do... 1. Check user feedback – most marketplaces will have something like this. The higher the rating, the better. Flippa has different levels based on successful transactions, confirmation of a phone number, Facebook account and so on. 2. Check WHOIS data of the domain using http://ajaxutils.com/ does it match with the details (name, location etc) that the seller is showing you? 3. Note the attitude of the seller – does s/he seem anxious to get a deal done, does s/he keep pressing you to hurry up? Be wary if this is the case. 4. If you’re buying a website with revenue, ask them to video record them logging into their account to show you this – this is almost impossible for them to fake. 5. Check how old, how many successful transactions the Paypal account has done, whether it matches the details (name, location etc) that the seller is giving you 6. Google the name of the buyer (both his/her actual name and their marketplace username) to see if they’ve screwed over anyone in the past. The above tips should see you avoid getting scammed. Next we’ll talk about three different models you can use once you have the website you decided to buy in your possession. Three Different Models For Website Arbitrage You may need quick cash. You may prefer to set up long term revenue streams. You may see yourself as a wizard... putting together valuable packages that people will pay a lot of money for. Depending on what you want to achieve you may choose different models. 1. The Quick Flip Self explanatory, really. The quick flip is where you pick up an opportunity and immediately relist it. You might make small changes (for example, to the auction copy) but the bulk of the website stays the same. The most common reason for doing this is you finding a website you know is worth more but don’t really want/feel like working on it yourself. An example of when you’d use this is say you see a website listed on a lower traffic forum, for a price less than it’s worth. Depending on whether you feel it would be worth the profit (aim for at least $100 $200 profit – remember you have to pay listing fees etc), you buy it and list it at one of the higher traffic marketplaces. You should generally get at least 20-50% more listing on the likes of Flippa than someone would listing on Digital Point, so that’s a decent profit for you. When trying out website arbitrage, start out with quick flips that cost $20 – $50 to purchase and would sell for at least $100. Partly to decrease your risk, but also for you to learn hands on about what to do, and what you could improve. 2. Edit it then sell This may take a few days up to a couple of weeks to get together. An example would be a site that’s reasonably high quality in terms of metrics but with a poor design. Another example would be a site getting 50 uniques a day situated at a number 9 Google ranking. If you make it into the top 3 traffic will treble and the site will be worth more. It could take you a week or two to rank it though. You may even find a website on a .info domain at $20 that would be worth $60 on a .com domain. Basically, same concept as above; buy low, sell high, but a little work in between. Of course, you’ll get a lot more money than you generally would for an undeveloped quick flip with no work put into it. Another (shucks, you must be getting tired of these examples) example would be the product example – buy product site, spend 12 weeks promoting then flip. 3. Sit on it This is the most advanced model in this business plan. This is a long term thing – you may not end up even selling the site. For example you pick up an Adsense site for 5x monthly revenue. If you keep it for five months you make your purchase price back... and it’ll keep bringing in revenue after that. Or you find a product that you feel has long term ability and rank it for search terms. If you can get a product ranked and get one sale a day of a $37 product, that’s a monthly income of $1,110 or a yearly / site sale income value of over $13,000. The option for passive income remains and you could sell it if you needed cash for any emergency. Generally you will do some development work on these kinds of websites, and whether you sell or not depends on what you want – passive income or the big payday. I like the latter but a little bit of the former is nice too. This may take anywhere from a month to a year for you to develop up to a high enough level. However, buying the initial site ‘second hand’ will save you the time and money (mainly the former) setting up something in the beginning. As an example, if it costs you $50 to set up a brand new website, and you could buy a 6 month old website for $60 that is at a slightly higher level, why wouldn’t you go with the latter? 4. The throw different things together model I mentioned three models but I thought this one needed to be added in. It’s not strictly website arbitrage but is probably one of the most “fun” parts of website flipping. Here’s where you put site packages together yourself based on others’ offerings. Think of it as building your own CPU or car using ready made parts. For example, you see a decent, glossy sports themed design available on TalkFreelance. You see a sports domain on DN forum. They cost you $70, but after you throw them together and add some content (from a Warrior Special Offer costing you $30 for the articles) you have a site worth $250. Or... you see a Wordpress theme available for $50 unique. You ask the designer to make a couple changes to theme it for an arts site, and pick up an arts related domain. You see a scripts store website available for $20. You ask someone to mod the design to make it more Web 2.0 friendly and you have a unique store which you can sell for $100+ You can either purchase designs, domains, services, scripts already created or get them custom done. There’s nothing cooler than putting together your own package and selling it for hundreds or thousands of dollars. Here’s some places where you can pick up stuff... Domains http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=59 http://www.dnforum.com/f12/ http://flippa.com/buy-websites?filterby=domains-featured Services: http://www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hire/ http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=60 http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/categories/advertise-your-services http://www.talkfreelance.com/forumdisplay.php?f=82 Templates: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=81 http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/categories/template-classifieds http://www.talkfreelance.com/forumdisplay.php?f=59 Selling Your Site Last step, but probably the most important – selling your site. You should look to sell your site at Flippa.com or WF’s sites for sale section. We’ll keep it simple but walk through some of the important parts of your auction. 1. Title For the title, mention your two best metrics Example: 120 Unique Visitors Per Day; Website Making $70 Per Month Also add in a superlative and your niche. Final Version: Amazing Fitness Blog – 120 Uniques/day – $70.00 Per Month Revenue 2. Auction copy This is the section where sales are made and lost. You want your auction copy to be two things – short and detailed. That may sound oxymoronic, but you don’t want to ramble on for pages and pages – no buyer’s going to waste their valuable time reading that. You also don’t want to keep it too short and miss out on something important that could add a couple hundred to the sale price of your website. You want to mention the below things in your auction: Traffic Revenue Domain quality Design quality Unique content (if any) Potential (room for growth) After sale help Contact details Most of these are fairly simple. For traffic, mention unique visitors per month as well as pageviews. For revenue, mention how much it’s earning per month, for how long it’s been earning it (if it’s a long term thing) and where the revenue is coming from (Adsense, product sales etc) Domain – mention its quality (if it’s a decent domain – any non terrible domain is fine), where it’s registered and when it expires. If the website looks good, make sure you mention this (ex – visitors love the fresh look of this website!). If the website is optimized for Adsense, mention this (ex – we’ve made sure that our ads are in positions that will get the most clicks, making you more money!) If your website has unique content, put a valuation on it (ex – the website has 10 articles. At a minimum price of $5 per high quality article, that’s a value of $50 right there). If it’s a product, mention the value of the sales copy (ex – the website has a high quality sales letter ready for you to throw some traffic at it (or conversion percentage if you’ve already promoted it) – a high quality sales letter like this would cost you at least $100 – $500, maybe even more!) Potential – just mention that the niche is hot with a lot of room for growth, if promoted the buyer can make more money / see more uniques... things like that. After sale support – if you’re willing to do this (recommended) offer a month free hosting / advice on where to get hosting (use your affiliate link!) and offer a month support over a client like Skype should they need light help. Contact details – always mention your name, email address and at least one IM platform (MSN, Yahoo, Skype, GTalk etc). Buyers feel more assured this way. 3. Proof etc Add screenshots of all kinds of proof you can – traffic and revenue proof; if proof is available online link to it (for example, RSS feed count). Make sure you confirm the website (if listing on Flippa) and add the Google Analytics option if it’s a longer term site sale. 4. Listing details Your listing should run for a maximum of seven days. Your listing auction should start at $1, and keep the reserve at around 50-75% of the price you eventually want to sell it for. Don’t add a BIN (buy it now) immediately for longer term site sales but add one after a day or so. On quick flips, you can add the BIN immediately, depending on what you paid make it 20-50% more than that. Reply to every single comment you get as more replies = more views to your auction (people like to look at auctions with high activity, and comments are a measure of this). Add the buyer of every site you sell to some kind of instant messenger platform – you can then contact them in the future when you sell similar sites that they might be interested in. Having site buyers on your list will also generate income for you – site buyers tend to want to know about hosting, ad management etc, all of which you can help them out with... using your affiliate link.  That’s it for this product. If you bought it early enough you got access to the webinar provided as a bonus, where two website pros will answer any questions you might have. The webinar date/time is: Date: 17th November, 2009 Time: 8:00 GMT at www.imgrind.com/chat (there’s nothing there at the moment but something will be put up at the time of the webinar  ) (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ to check out what time it is where you’re based) Good luck with website arbitrage! PS: if you missed our free bonus to all buyers of this product – go below to learn how you can make an additional $50-$300 a day with another type of arbitrage... that costs nothing up front to set up!  http://www.imgrind.com/bonus.html