Don't miss the latest posts, tools, freelance writing jobs, and more from the All Freelance Writing team. Subscribe today!
Here’s a quick update for those who were following any of the past site flipping posts, where I’ve been trying to teach you about a potential new revenue stream for you as a writer.
eWritingJobs.com has been sold.
You may remember this site wasn’t one of the quick-flips. I put a few posts up there quite a while ago, and it sat for some time. In the end, it contained three unique posts, and had a pagerank of 2 (brand new sites to flip won’t have any pagerank). There wasn’t a large amount of traffic, and there was little to no verifiable income.
With primary selling points being the unique content, existing link-building efforts (remember several ezinearticles were linked here and talked about in past posts), a keyword-rich domain name, and modest pagerank, the site sold for $250.
I’m sharing this information to show that even with minimal content, you really can earn by flipping small websites (it can be a good way to spend time you haven’t been able to book with clients, or it can even be a step up over your normal article rate depending on what you charge).
The two quick-flip sites that are finished and ready to be sold have been listed for sale at $150 as starter sites with professional content (weight loss and thrifty / budget living niches). A few things could happen:
1. They’ll sell at the asking price in the next week or two, and that will become the price point for the other 9 or so quick flip sites to be built.
2. They won’t sell and I’ll decide to lower the asking price.
3. They won’t sell, and I’ll let them age a few more months (picking up pagerank, maybe adding some content, doing some link-building and marketing, reworking ads,e tc.), at which point the price will actually go up rather than down, as they won’t be sold as the quick-flip variety.
Either way, when those decisions are made, I’ll update you on the process moving forward for the other quick-flips, and I’ll detail my process in creating those more fully.
Related posts:
- Flipping Websites – eWritingJobs – Week 2
- Flipping Websites – eWritingJobs – Week 1
- Find Writing Jobs at eWritingJobs.com
- eWritingJobs.com Officially for Sale!
- Flipping Websites
About the Author: Jennifer Mattern
Browse all posts from this author.
TAGS: flip websites, flipping sites, site flipping
An interesting article. I’ll be interested to hear how that goes. How much of an investment has it required of you both in time and money?
Domain flipping has become a real revenue generator for some. It requires a knack at spotting potential trends.
Between $1 and $10 in cash depending on the site – probably $7 or 8 for that domain (I don’t pay extra for hosting b/c I have an account I can toss add-on domains onto), and maybe 4 – 6 hours in time to get it setup, content up, design changes, ads added, etc. (would take more if you’re not familiar with Wordpress and editing your themes or if you wrote unique content for the article marketing – I chose not to). Beyond that, the site sat there without much done to it. Much less on an hourly basis than I generally earn, but that’s why I do them as demonstrations for people who can earn more that way rather than making it a part of my own business model (I test and report back on several things here to help writers choose options that would work best for them). The quick flip sites I usually can setup in about 3-4 hours depending on the theme. To save time, writers can choose to use the themes exactly as-is. Some even have the ads in there for you, where you just change you ad publisher ID if you don’t want to be bothered with such things.
Ed – It depends on the type of flipping you want to do.
For example, if you want to sell a quick flipped starter site (like the future walkthrough here is going to be once I get a final price point set), people seem to be looking for “popular” niches. For instance medical, insurance, legal, weight loss, etc. would do well (known for decent-paying keywords so people are already looking for that starter content). At the same time, they’ll rarely look for something like a music site (a niche where ad payouts are notoriously low).
For those who want to invest more time into fully developing, aging, and monetizing a site before flipping it, it’s a bit different. There you need to not only know the ads can pay well, but you’ll have to make the site reasonably competitive (which is difficult in some of those popular niches). This is where buyers would kill for a gem of a niche – great paying ads, but not oversaturated. It’s one part research and one part luck in finding those. I’ve been lucky in stumbling across two excellent paying, under-saturated niches where I earn several dollars per click on average. I’ve had a five-figure offer on the older one (but I won’t ever sell it b/c of the personal branding efforts I put into it – I’ve had that for 2 – 3 years). If I built it and tried to flip it immediately, I would have been lucky to get mid-$xxx, because no one was really aware of the niche’s potential (and fortunately they’re still not, as it remains fairly difficult to build the recurring audience there to see those long-term benefits). One of the two sites I mentioned is actually one I developed as the third quick flip site recently for this post series. It was completely dumb luck that it monetized extremely well (while I won’t shout it from the rooftops, if you look back through related posts here you’ll find it fairly easily – niche isn’t a big secret).
The real money will almost always be in keeping the sites for residual earnings yourself. But if flipping them can earn some freelance writers more than the $5 – 10 they might be offered from clients, there’s no reason they shouldn’t consider it as a new income stream option.
Congrats… I’m still mulling all this over… not willing to add another project at the moment, but I’m keeping an eye on this topic.