Most of last year saw spurts in popularity of the idea of making money on the internet by buying websites, changing them slightly and selling them again for a profit.
Unknown to most of my subscribers, this is something I made a brief foray into myself in 2008 and with some results that were interesting to say the least…
Basically here’s what happened…
Randomly analyzing certain search engine results for a site in a particular niche we were in, I came across a site that had a for sale sign on it.
This interested me immediately because I’d found it while searching for a term I thought was quite competitive, so I knew the site was indexed and getting traffic.
So I contacted the seller for more information.
One thing lead to the next and because I was in the enviable position of not really caring whether I got the site or not, (AND that I happened to encounter a motivated seller) I ended up picking it up for a steal relative to the amount of traffic it got.
The owner was judging it’s value by the amount of Adsense income he was earning, and not really taking into consideration that the Adsense earnings weren’t JUST a reflection on the level of traffic (something many website owners still don’t understand).
So I was fortunate AGAIN in the fact that it had untapped potential.
Anyway, cut a long story short, we made a few small changes to this site and stuck it back up online.
We tripled the site’s earnings in the first month it was live!
Now the site still ticks over with minimal work, earning about 5 times per month that the original owner earned, and generating an ROI on our purchase of many thousands of percentage points.
If Chubbs Peterson from Happy Gilmore heard all this he’d be inclined to say…
“You know alot of that out there was luck”
To which I’d reply…
“Some might call it luck. I like to call it… well, luck I guess. So what??”
And yes, the above is a rare situation that probably won’t befall many of you.
But what this told me is that there is some serious money to be made in the area of buying old websites and either improving them or selling them for a profit and NOT JUST for people with big money to invest.
A little course came out late last year that I had meant to write about a LOT earlier than this but it was a crazy time of the year for me.
The course was by a guy I’ve known for a long time and someone who’s been very successful at doing similarly to what I described above.
Rather than the fluffed up, hard to follow and act upon crap I normally get sent for review, this report had some clean concise training on how to build a business around capitalizing on site flipping opportunities.
I wrote the guy a great testimonial and now I’m recommending it here too.
NOTE: DON’T let this distract your focus if it’s not something you hadn’t been already thinking of getting into.
If you ARE still searching for the right business model however, you might find this one interesting.
Check out the course here and let me know what you think.
I think site flipping is something we’re going to hear a lot more about in 2009.
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Andrew,
Could you please share what changes you made to the site, and was the tripling of income on the adsense, or was it because you added a product or affiliate product?
I have a nasty feeling a lot of my sites are in the category of the site you bought, rather than the site as you sold it!
Lyn,
Actually they were really simple things.
I turned it from a static site to a blog first.
Then I changed the Adsense positioning from some crappy tiny ads in the sidebar and header to a 250×250 square in the top of the post content of the first and third post on the page.
I also kept some of the old static html pages they had but spiced them right up and used some pictures to draw more attention to the Ads.
And I’ve continued adding content to it as the niche is very “news” focused. But the main changes were the blog and the Adsense and that was it.
The goal is to get one that is so poorly monetized but getting traffic.
Hope that helps.
Andrew
Yes, great, thank you.
One thing I’ve never figured out how to do – how do you put adsense in posts, hopefully on automatic?. I use Adsense Deluxe, but still don’t get it.