UPDATE: Flipping Paradise and Flipping Maverick Are No Longer Available

My current recommended domain flipping courses are DomainFlipping and Flipp Me.

Most of my income is derived from revenue from my websites. That’s a mix of Adsense and other passive income streams like Infolinks, Chitika, Viglink, Skimlinks and some others, along with sales of products through the sites. I also sell my own software products for additional income.

Something I’ve come across several times over the years is the idea of selling on websites ot other people (domain/website flipping). Websites are simply virtual real estate and, like their physical counterparts, have value and that means someone else might be interested in buying them.

My question about this was always “Why would I want to sell a website that’s making me money and should do well into the future?”

Naturally, not all websites I build make money. You can’t hit a home run every time. So my next question was “Why would anyone bother paying for a site that doesn’t make money?”

And then there was the issue of auction fees. If a site didn’t sell, then I’d be out of pocket for the listing fees.

Domain flipping seemed to be more risk than it was worth.

Looking Into Domain Flipping

But then came along Flipping Paradise, a course in ebook format that taught techniques on how to sell websites, particularly on Flippa. I was intrigued. Intrigued enough to then buy the Flipping Paradise All Access video tutorial course that the author released some weeks after the eBook due to popular demand.

There’s lots of case studies looking at why certain sites sell and others don’t and how to pick the right kinds of sites to sell yourself by looking at what made other sites sell so well and replicating that.

Two issues still concerned me though:

  • You still need to build the sites you want to sell yourself and that involves costs such as domain registration, hosting, outsourcing content, building backlinks and time. You also need to wait a couple of months for the site to gain traction in the search engines before putting it up for sale. I figured I’d need to sell a site for a few hundred dollars just to cover the site setup and running costs.
  • You could still lose the listing fee if a site doesn’t sell.

So there’s still a risk. Not much of a risk for some but risk enough for others.

Flipping Domains That Don’t Earn Money

The Flipping Paradise author came up with a new course: Quick Flipping Paradise. This addresses the issue with a site needing to be earning at least some income and having some traffic from the search engines before you could sell it. So, instead of having to wait a couple of months before attempting to sell a site, a site could be put up for sale on the day it’s built.

I’d still need to put the time into building the site and outsourcing content when I wasn’t able to write knowledgeably enough about the site topic, but once a few articles were added, the site could be put up for auction.  That cuts months out of the equation.

Why The Domain Flipping Model Is Appealing

Google is the main reason for me. Google have been targeting affiliate websites over the last couple of years with the Panda, Penguin and other updates to their search engine algorithms.

How backlinks were built 2 to 5 years ago is radically different to how they should be built today. Many webmasters are now issuing link take-down notices to other webmasters as they try to clean up their backlink profile so they can try to get their sites to climb back up in the rankings. All because Google changed the rules.

And who’s to say that Google won’t change the algorithms radically again on a whim?

The latest upcoming change I’ve heard about, is that Google will treat any link to another site that does not use rel=”nofollow” as a paid link. And Google hates paid links. It demotes sites that it thinks uses paid links.

If you’re a webmaster, do you routinely add rel=”nofollow” to links you add to your site? No, me neither; some of the sites I link to deserve to have some link juice passed to them. Think of all the work webmasters will have to do to retrofit their links with a rel=”nofollow” attribute if this change does get rolled out. And Google doesn’t care that you have to spend hours, days or weeks upgrading aged sites to conform to their new rules.

It’s not just affiliate marketers who are worried about Google changing its algorithms again; it’s also a huge concern among business owners of all sizes who promote their products and services online. Many of these were very badly hit by the recent Google updates. And, guess what? Google doesn’t care if people’s livelihoods get damaged by their updates. It’s acceptable collateral damage for their own goals.

Building backlinks has always been a pain in the backside. And now, it’s more difficult than ever. It’s also more costly as there’s only so much you can do yourself and outsourcing link building becomes ever-more necessary.

So the idea of building websites that don’t also require building backlinks is very appealing. I like the idea of building sites (that part’s easy) and then selling them on to someone else who can worry about building backlinks.

I think this business model is now becoming economically viable (like fracking is to the oil industry).

An Even Quicker Flipping Strategy

Websites are built on domain names. So while a website may have value, the domain name itself also has value. The strategy taught by Flipping Maverick (not from the Flipping Paradise author) is to identify, buy and then resell domain names. No website building. The only investment is in the domain name itself and the auction listing fee.

This is another course I bought and will be evaluating. It sits very well with Flipping Paradise.

Conclusion

From here on out, I’ll be building more and more websites with a view to flipping them to someone else. I’ll therefore be spending less time building backlinks (or paying for them to be built). The money I save here, I can redirect into buying content to populate new websites with, allowing me to build sites more quickly and therefore sell more of them in a set time period and earn more that way.

Building sites for flipping also means I don’t have to spend time testing out which ads and ad networks work best with a site. That responsibility will again lie with the new owner.

It just seems that there’ll be a lot more bang for my buck following this strategy.

Watch this space for news of how I get on…

BTW, feel free to leave your thoughts and comments on this post below, especially if you’ve had any experience with domain flipping (good or bad).

All the best,

Gary Nugent

P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:

 

  

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