Business Idea; Blog Flipping
Here's a business idea which I think is a goer. The recipe is as follows;
- A little time and effort each day for three months
- PLR Articles and other textual sources
- A domain name and hosting account
- Wordpress
So, the idea is to purchase a decent .com from the likes of NameCheap for $9. Then st up a hosting account for it (assuming most readers of this blog can source some cheapo hosting, as well as install Wordpress). All that is probably 30 minutes work.
Next up is to source some articles. Write these yourself or buy PLR. Whatever.
Make sure that the wordpress pings the pinger sites (google blogsearch, pingomatic and so on). Find a decentish template, or maybe even leave the wordpress default one?
Each day, for a period of 3 months, make a post about the subject that your blog is on. By the end of three months, you should have 90 or so entries, some backlinks, some PR, some Alexa Rating. For the first 90 days, I would not even bother monetising the blog at all. What's the point of that?
Simple: You can now sell the blog as a virgin site, ready for the addition of Adsense. You can also promote the fact that the virgin site is ready to be submitted to Text Link Ads and Review Me and Pay Per Post - though the seller would need to make sure that he/she does not advertise the blog as PPP ready (in case PPP etc do not accept the blog)…
Of course, this is 2 or 3 minutes work per day, but I reckon that a virgin blog with a good subject, which has been posted to every day for 90 days should sell fairly well. I reckon the seller could ask at least $2 or 300, which is a 20*roi.
My primary concern is that the Virgin Blog is not seen as a splog - for this reason it would be best not to simply scrape sites such as wikipedia for text. Of course, there is the option of subscribing to RSS feeds to get content…
Thoughts?
Comment by Adnan — November 27, 2006 @ 6:48 pm
In theory it sounds like a win-win situation. However you've got to pick a good niche to start with. Also, showing that the side is capable of pulling in a few dollars through Adsense can be useful in selling the site.
Im trying my hand of Site Flipping with Teentrepreneur.
Instead of setting up a blog, I got a simple template off OSWD.org and modded it with a custom banner. I think if you have a blog, people may get put off as they would feel that they have to keep posting to sustain the traffic. With a simple articles site that DOESNT get updated, people would see how little effort they need to do to keep the site afloat.
After 90 days, I aim to sell the site for around $200-300 which would be an awesome investment, and along with my eBook which I plan to implement - should see a huge increase.
BTW Burt, on my blog (in the post about Teentrepreneur) I asked some questions about eBook and I was wondering if you could answer them?
Thanks mate and overall site flipping can be hugely profitable if you make loads of sites at the same time.
Comment by Chance — November 27, 2006 @ 7:12 pm
You could take it one step further and post your batch of articles weekly or monthly (or even the full 90 days worth of posts) with a future post date too- wordpress makes it easy to cue up posts by editing the timestamp.
Then all you would have to do is check your email for new comments and occasionally drop comments at other sites to let people know about you.
I've read of time discrepancies of 1 or 2 hours when using the future post function, but that wouldn't matter in the case of 1 post per day.
Comment by Chance — November 27, 2006 @ 7:21 pm
Sorry for the double post, but I did forget to add that the future post ping functions don't work right in Wordpress 2.0-
There is a plugin called Pingfix that corrects the issue and makes wordpress ping on the date the post is actually live on your blog, not when you write it and publish to the future.
The daily pings are important for traffic, so Pingfix would be a must.
Comment by Oli Allen — November 28, 2006 @ 2:29 pm
I'm sure there are even applications that would take a directory of (PLR?) articles and post them to your blog every day.
If not, it would be a ~10 minute job to write a script on a cron job to post one of these every day - reusable again and again…
Comment by burt — November 28, 2006 @ 5:28 pm
I think it's a real goer. I might have a go at something along these lines starting January…
Comment by Matt — November 29, 2006 @ 12:39 am
I was thinking something along these lines, but I have been looking for good little bits of software to help use an RSS feed as the source of the articles (i.e. for aggregation) Any suggestions?
Matt
Comment by IMF-Will — November 29, 2006 @ 2:06 am
Rss to Blog will do the job of posting content to a blog automatically and it gets around the issue with future pings.
I posted a review , a while back.
Comment by burt — November 29, 2006 @ 10:03 am
I think I might give this a go, starting Dec 1st, why not? Sooner the start, sooner the flip!
I searched my HD yesterday to find a couple of subjects on which I have articles. Managed to find two fairly decent ones with over 100 articles each - not all of these will be usable, but most should be.
Next up is to purchase a couple of domains, I'll do this today.
Comment by burt — November 29, 2006 @ 3:34 pm
OK, I registered a decent domain, and will start the flipper on Dec 1st. In the meantime, I shall set up hosting and wordpress (along with a few plugins and whatnot).
I shall start a new flipper each 1st of the month, so it'll be 1st march before I actually come to sell the first one. And then each 1st of the month from their forwards I should have a virgin blog to sell…
Comment by Matt — November 29, 2006 @ 4:43 pm
serioulsy man, a couple of hundred PLR articles lying about on your hard drive? Where do all these come from? I need some PLR articles if you knoe of any good sources.
Comment by burt — November 29, 2006 @ 4:51 pm
Matt, I have well over 9,000 PLR articles on my HD.
I've been a member of a few PLR sites for well over a year, and I haven't yet used hardly any of the articles…
http://www.articlelightning.com is a good one that I recommend ( let me know if you need an affiliate link as I can come up with something interesting should you go through my link
)
Comment by Chris McLeod — December 7, 2006 @ 10:46 pm
This is quite a nice idea, Burt. I've got a couple of hundred articles lying dormant on my HDD from my brief enrolment at Article Underground. Perhaps I should give this a try!
You could really make this super-easy, if you use Dreamhost as your host for the blogs. Their one-click-install system does the wordpress install for you, along with installing 100 or so themes to choose from.
Comment by burt — December 8, 2006 @ 4:58 pm
Chris, I think most hosts offer a 1-clik install via cpanel/fantastico…I like to not use that feature though, as I believe that the version installed by the process is a slightly outdate version…have a look and let me know if the dreamhost version is outdated? Cheers!
Comment by Oli — December 8, 2006 @ 6:17 pm
Gary,
I use Dreamhost, and they are very good with this kind of thing - all their one click installs are up to date (they use their own control panel, not cpanel) - and, when a new version is released, they offer a "one click upgrade" too. Recommended