My First Site Flip
Aug 31, 2006 Business & Marketing
Since I handle many many websites already, I decided that I might as well jump in the site flip business. I found an undervalued property and I’m hoping to make a nice ROI on it. I have every intention of selling this site in the near future and won’t hang on to it for too long.
What is a site flip?
Basically its the same as a real estate flip. Someone finds a site that badly needs a makeover, is undervalued, or needs more monetizatin or community implemented, and then “flips” it to another interested buyer for more than it was originally purchased for. It is the goal of the reseller, or “flipper” if that doesn’t sound too much like a gay dolphin, to create value and show that undiscovered value to potential buyers.
So what is my first site flip?
I came across a beuty of a domain with a pagerank of 2 and only 3 pages: index, and two articles. There were a few dozen backlinks, but nothing noteworthy.
The domain I purchased was bachelordegrees.us. As an education portal, it has a lot of potential to make a stable income off of advertising and affiliates. It also had 2 decent unique pages on it, so it was already indexed in the popular search engines and ready to go.
The first thing I set out to do is redesign the site. As you can see by this BEFORE shot, the site was dead fugly:
I added a nice template, some graphics, and tweaked the CSS around. Nothing too fancy, I don’t want to spend a lot of money hiring a professional graphic designer. I opted for a free template to maximize my ROI. I found some royalty free stock images and uploaded them to the site (when I’m done, each page will have a unique image). I also rearranged to URL structure a little bit to offer enhanced navigation. So now, the site may not be the most beautiful thing in the world but it is A LOT nicer and more professional looking.
Here’s the AFTER shot of the site:
Next I decided to place Adsense in the site so that I could eyeball the placement within the template. I’m still working on this to optimize the implementation. But as you can see on the two article pages, the implementation turned out quite nice:
Page 1: Online Degree Tips
Page 2: Expand Your Horizons
Those were just the two articles provided with the site. I am contracting independent copywriters to come up with a few more, and I will also write a couple of articles myself. I’m aiming for about 20-30 articles total for this site.
Outside of the article pages is where it gets juicy. I’m not to this stage yet, but I plan on having an individual page for each affiliate product that I’ve hooked up with. This is more content for me, and highly focused copy for them that sells their product. It’s a win-win relationship with the Affiliate company.
On the index pages of each content category there is now a navigation submenu on the left, and I will also break down and give a brief summary of each page in the main content area.
I’m also planning on exchanging links with other webmasters of similar related sites and creating a “Education Sites” content area. Each webmaster will get a full page review of their site. I feel this is necessary to get quality links from quality sites. They might just link to Online Bachelor Degrees on an existing page of their site, but I’m giving them a dedicated page with 2 or 3 links back to their site. Users who read the site review and click through will be targeted users, and search engines will place a stronger value on an individual page linking out than if I were to put a link on an article.
This site is still in its infancy as I haven’t even completed the on-page optimization efforts. But I am already realizing what a gem this site will be. I’m hoping to flip it for a $200 to $300 net profit and not invest more than an additional $70 on top of my purchase price or more than 10 hours of my time.
Not bad for an original investment of $20 to purchase the site and domain. 
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