More on Flipping
Since coming up with the plan to make a few blogs and flip them after 3 months, I slightly changed the plan.
As regular readers will know, I decided to make a blog a day during January; to this end I purchased a new hosting account and started with a bang…as of now (11 Jan) I have 10 blogs ready to flip (this includes the 3 blogs I made last year). They are all set up and auto-posting articles for the first 90 days or so of their lives.
I re-evaluated my plans to build a blog a day. I'll probably end up with about 20 by the end of January - I decided not to pressurise myself to build 1 per day.
Market Research
I conducted some Market Research over the past few days, asking how much people would be willing to pay for a flipped site (to include domain, hosting, wordpress, articles ready to be posted, a report on how to monetise and a source of quality free articles for ongoing use).
The answers ranged from an astonishingly low £25 ($50) up to £400 ($800). The median figure was about £180 ($360).
This small amount of market research re-inforces my belief that flipping sites can be a viable way to create an income.
Potential Problems
Once a site is sold, a lump sum of cash is made. The problem is that this is a one-off occurence. To create an income stream would mean constantly setting up sites or blogs ready for flipping at some point down the line.
If each blog/site needs a post a day, that's 90 articles per flip. Although I have many thousands of usable articles, finding 90 or so on one subject is quite hard work.
As an example, I found I have 75 articles on the theme of `cycling`, out of a total of nearly 11,000 articles on my Hard Drive. Whilst 75 articles is great, it's not really enough.
Possible Solution
Perhaps a post every other day would suffice? This would cut the number of articles required by half at a stroke. I'm unsure - I'll probably try it for the next 5 flippers and see how they sell at the end of the term.
At best, this couls be a very nice source of income. At worst, it's an interesting experiment and will cost me a few hundred dollars. He Who Dares, Wins.
Comment by Article Directories — January 11, 2007 @ 4:26 pm
Hewy,
Good luck with the flipping and be sure to keep us uptodate on your progress (as I'm sure you will).
Re: posting a new article every day or making it two - I doubt the SE bots will visit your new sites EVERY day, so I'd be willing to bet every two days would be fine for posting new articles, and may make it incrementally better in ensuring each page gets noticed by the SE bots when they do show up on their regular visits.
I think the number of articles posted will be more influential on the perceived value of the site than anything else. ie. 30 articles vs a site with 90 articles. But either way the selling price will still be very profitable.
One (albeit pain in the butt) way to mitigate the fact you're earning only a 1-time profit by selling these sites, is to instead think about perhaps offering 'partnerships' for each site you do.. Maybe enter 1 yr partnership 'contract' where they pay you a set amount of money and receive 75% of profits while you pay for hosting etc for 25% of profits (or whatever ratio you want - 80/20 maybe - but easy to take a low amount since hosting et al can be incredibly cheap). Think of it along the lines of franchising the site, like someone opening a MacDonalds restaurant franchise (or some other analogy, depending on the conditions you want to have with the other person)
That way you still own the sites AND will have a continual and increasing income stream as you build more and more. And after the contract expires, you can either renew or find a new person to 'rent' the site, or you can sell it off at that time (depending on how much money it made for that year).
Obviously that system would require more effort, but sharing profits has been done on other forums (including actual website forums) via adsense ads. An easy way might be to have your 'partner' sign up for their own AdSense account, if they don't already have one, and divide the site up so their ads appear on some pages and yours on another, or a script that rotates them at a predetermined ratio (ie 4:1 or 5:1/ partner:you). Similarly affiliate products could be added with both your affiliate codes implemented.
Just a thought.
BTW, re: your statement "(provide them with) a source of quality free articles for ongoing use"…
Feel free to consider informing them about my 'Directory of Article Directories' website (The link is in my "name" here) that's updated every month or so with a wide variety of free article directories broken down by a few categories and ranked by Google PR. A good place to find well ranked and SE spidered sites for both adding free niche articles and to post their own articles promoting the site they're renting off you… something that'd increase the site's worth too… which you still own. *grin*
That's my 2 cents. Keep up the great postings as I've subscribed to your RSS Feed and am enjoying your progress reports.
-Steve
Comment by Oli Allen — January 11, 2007 @ 10:21 pm
Who's to say you have to sell 100% of the sites? If it gets close to sale time, why not try putting some affiliate links/ebooks for sale on a site - if they sell, it might be better to simply keep the site…
For a profitable site, simply buy some more articles on the subject and add them to the drip feed…
Comment by burt — January 18, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
That's true.
Comment by Paul Forcey — January 24, 2007 @ 5:18 am
I like the idea, but do you think you would run out of customers at some point?
If you are selling them in the same place all the time, will it be the same people looking at the sales pages.
Or will you filter them into the sales flow gradually?