Site flipping, or simply the buying and selling of websites, has become a profitable way of earning from the Internet. Similar in many ways to real estate buy-and-sell businesses, flipping sites basically involves the same processes and methods: finding a site (house) to purchase; negotiating and completing the sale; adding value to the site (house); and finding a buyer and sell for a profit. Of course, in addition to business acumen, one needs to be Internet-savvy to go into the business of flipping websites.

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I. Buying and Selling Websites

1. The Problem

   So. . . you’ve worked hard at building a web site from scratch. You started back in 1995 in the web’s “early days”. You built content, built the databases, designed graphics, and wrote software. You promoted your site every chance you got and added e-commerce to generate revenue. The last years seem a blur of staying up late nights, midnight snacks, working odd hours, tweaking code. However, now all the hard work has paid off and you are getting 50,000 visitors every day viewing about 15,000,000 pages the month. One day you get a strange e-mail. It is a well known publicly traded company that wants to see if you are interested in selling your web site. They ask you to name your price. You smile. Wow. Someone wants to buy your web site. Then the smile disappears as you realize that you have no clue as how to value a web site. After all, this is not just like any other business. What do you compare it to? It isn’t like real estate where you can easily check to see what the market is like or what comparable properties sell for. How do you measure your hours or hard work, sweat, frustration, and money that you have poured into the web site?

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With more and more people wanting to sell their existing websites, we have decided to put together a list of helpful tips to make the process simpler for those who are considering selling their website: (more…)

A few months ago I came across a website for sale on WebSiteBroker.com. According to the information in the listing, the site was getting about 1000 visitors a day and was making about $250 a month selling a downloadable e-book. The seller wanted $7500 for the site. I took a look around and got excited.

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When entering into any transaction you need to be very careful, even more so when you are buying a website. There are several things to watch out for and a little bit of work can save you many headaches later. Here are our tips:

• Do your due diligence. In simple terms it means “Do your homework!”. Verify as much as reasonably possible about the website you are buying. Verify traffic information and cross-check them with third party information such as Alexa.
• Find out information about the seller and make sure that he/she owns the website and domain they are selling. Run simple background checks on the seller. You can use an outside service or use some of the free tools available on the Net - including something as basic as Google to look up his/her name.

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