While that’s understandable, what’s not understandable is having any more trepidation going forward. In fact, we here at WebsiteBroker.com are so ardent about the fact that you need to try it out for yourself that we’ll tell you exactly how to do it without the major commitment of buying a huge domain. Here’s a guide to dipping your feet in the pool of domain names and hopefully warming up to the idea of buying and selling.

First, Sign Up

The first thing to do to make yourself feel like a part of the world of buying and selling domain names it so sign up to WebsiteBroker.com. Our accounts are free to sign up, which means you don’t have to make any major commitment simply to be a part of our website. You’ll be able to change your settings and explore the site without even having put any money on the table - not one red cent.

We suggest that you sign up and register as soon as possible and then come back to this article for some further tips on getting your feet wet. Our hope is that you’ll find the functionality of the site so enticing that you’ll wonder why you ever hesitated in the first place - and that can lead to good things.

Second, Set a Budget

If you know that you want to buy domain names but you’re afraid that you’ll get hosed on your first deal, it’s important that you set a budget for yourself - one that you will not in any circumstances exceed - for buying a domain name. If you’re selling a domain, you can set a “minimum amount” that you’re willing to sell for, as well. These limits on yourself will help you feel in control even when you’re out of your element in terms of negotiations.

If you find deals that exceed your maximum or minimum budgets, simply ignore them and move on. Sure, you might feel like you’ve missed out on an opportunity, but at least you won’t have made any major commitments that will turn you off to the whole idea of buying and selling domain names in the first place.

Third, Have Fun!

This is something that even experienced domain buyers and sellers forget - the entire process can be fun and something for you to enjoy. It’s exciting to get involved in new projects or to collect a profit on a website you’ve turned around. It’s not only a great skill to practice, but as you practice it and get better at it, you’ll be better able to make money in the future. In these tough economic times, the idea of making some extra money is almost always fun.

Here at WebsiteBroker.com, we certainly subscribe to that philosophy - which is why we’re not going to tell you just one way to evaluate a website’s value, but five. Remember it’s not about any one particular tip, but a combination of the best tips. Here they are.

1. Determine the market price.

In the housing market, the price of a house is dependent on the market around it. Sure, bigger houses will tend to be more valuable than smaller houses (everything else being equal), but if the housing market is fluctuating so is the price of an individual house.

It’s the same way with websites. If a certain niche isn’t selling well, then the top domain in that niche might take a hit. And if the niche is prospering, the individual domains will see an increase in price as well. If you don’t know what the market is like, you shouldn’t be buying domains just yet.

2. Use online evaluation tools.

Yes, you can certainly use these tools - and with great effectiveness - as long as you know their place in your overall strategy. We recommend our own free website valuation tool, of course, but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention that there are other tools online to consider as well. As with any tool, the quality of the tool itself is just one variable that plays a factor in your success. The question is: how are you going to use it?

3. Other offers.

The quickest way for a domain name to suddenly become more valuable - at least to the potential buyers - is if there’s rabid competition for it. Think about an item on eBay that is receiving bid after bid: eventually, the price of the item goes way out of control. If you’re willing to pay a lot to get your website, that’s one thing. But you should be able to also see through this inflated price and know when to back off of a domain as well.

4. Negotiation.

Unless you’re dealing with a retail outlet, there’s an old saying that everything in life is negotiable. Your negotiation skills should not only help you understand what you might be able to pay for a website, but what you might only be willing to pay for it as well. If the website owner is a negotiator, the price of their site is going to be higher than usual.

5. Traffic and Sales.

Yeah, we know that these are big issues and that it’s unfair to lump them together in one tip. But a good evaluation tool (like the one we suggested) will be able to factor in these variables quite easily.

Even so, you’ll want to pay special attention to this factor because it has the most direct impact on what kind of money you can make off the domain once purchased.

The question we like to ask here at WebsiteBroker.com is simple: have you begun strengthening your website’s weaknesses? The question is moot, however, if you simply overlook certain areas of your site and don’t think they’ll factor in to the overall value of what you’re trying to build. So before you sell your site for a fraction of what you might be able to achieve on the market, try looking at these three areas and see if you can’t optimize them first.

1. Stickability. Sure, you’ve got traffic. You’ve got sales. You’ve got conversions. But how optimized is your site really if you keep losing a lot of potential because of the fact that your site lacks stickability?

Well, to answer that, we’ve first got to define stickability. In simple terms, your site’s “stickability” is how addictive your site is to your users. There are a couple of variables you can use to measure this factor: how long your visitors stay at the site, how many pages new users will visit before leaving your site, and how many of your users return on a regular basis. The stickability of your site will help generate more revenue, more sales, more clicks, more everything - and most people can’t even be bothered with that sort of data.

2. International hits. In looking at your analytics, it’s tempting to simply place an emphasis on your performance in North America. So how many people with websites based in the United States will pay attention to how their site is performing globally? You’d be surprised at just how few. And this is a shame, because most of the people in the world don’t live in North America. Making your site more mobile (as we’ll get to later), more translatable, and more flexible will help you improve your hits with international users and therefore accelerate your overall success.

3. Your mobile presence. When you spend all day on the computer building your site, it’s easy to forget that many people will come across it not on their own computer, but on their iPad or Galaxy - in other words, in some sort of mobile fashion that you might not have anticipated. Is your site mobile-ready? Is its layout simple enough to translate to a cell phone? How does it look when you access it with your iPhone? You’d be surprised at just how much traffic and, therefore, sales you’re missing out on simply because many people view the Web through their phones these days. You can’t afford to miss out on that kind of action - and neither can your website. Create a mobile version that will make your site readable no matter where you are.

But there’s just one problem. Where do you start? After all, no one just comes out and tells you where to start researching. That’s why it’s research: it’s your own fact-finding adventure. But to get you off on the right foot, let’s offer a few suggestions.

Start with Search Engines

Today’s research - no matter what the topic - always seems to start with a Google search. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s important that you remember that this is just a starting point.

After all, what do you enter into a search engine that will yield you specific information about the domains you’re interested in? First, of course, you want to know the domain’s performance on Google. Where does it rank for its own keyword? Other keywords? What happens when you type it in - do you see enhanced results for sub-pages?

There’s more. Each search engine will have advanced features that you’ll want to familiarize yourself with in order to get a comprehensive understanding of all there is to find out about a domain name.

Key Tip: Don’t just rely on one search engine - even if that search engine is Google. Cross-reference your research across a few search engines to confirm your findings and then move on.

Mastering “WhoIs”?

In perhaps the most basic and essential point of research in domain names, visiting WhoIs.com and entering in the domain name you’re researching will give you a little more information about said domain than search engines. It’s not that the information is necessarily better than that of search engines, but it is different - and that difference is something you’ll want to understand right way.

At WhoIs, you’ll find not only who owns the domain name but where it’s registered. WhoIs is also a great resource for finding out whether or not certain domain names have been registered or are available for registration yourself.

Key Tip: Remember that WhoIs can be a great tool - but it’s also just a starting point. It will provide some essential information and should be a part of your regular search arsenal, but don’t forget to cross-reference your information with the research you do further down the line.

Once you’ve gotten this type of head start to your research, you’ll find yourself exploring new roads and avenues that hadn’t previously occurred to you. That’s great news, because it doesn’t only mean your research is off to a great start, but you’ve started learning how to handle it yourself. It’s a skill that can make you a lot of money.

Generally, using business documents in order to execute a process applies only to major things like tracking expenses or authorizing a major purchase. But if you’re in the business of buying and selling domain names for yourself, it might be hard to see how in-house business documents could help make things easier. After all, the advantage of being in business for yourself is that there’s absolutely no bureaucracy in your way.

But you should try out a few business documents if you want to buy and sell domain names; at the very least, they’ll help you track your activity on the web. And it doesn’t hurt that we’ve already put together this short list of potential documents to use to make things easier.

Expense Reports

Yes, we know - the expense report is the bane of the traveling salesman and just about anybody who has to deal with a business’ expenses on a regular basis. But there’s a reason the expense report exists: it’s quite necessary. If you’re going to keep track of all of your tax-deductible expenditures, the only way to do it is to keep track of it yourself.

In some cases, this will be easy. If you operate on just one website, you’ll often be able to view and export all of your business activity quickly and easily - the records were kept on your behalf automatically. But if your business is more ambitious than that, you might have to take things into your own hands.

Purchase Agreements

For the larger domain names you buy or sell, it’s important that you sign a purchase agreement that explains the details of the transaction. This will help prevent fraud, which is especially important as you deal with people who you haven’t met before.

It’s easy to download a template purchase agreement form that you can then use to fax or email the people you’re buying from and selling to - just turn to this template and fill in the details whenever you need to make a new transaction. Once the purchase is complete, simply put the purchase agreement in your files and you’ll be squared away.

Formal Offers

This might not be necessary for all of your domain name purchases, but it’s important that if you’re making a large purchase, you formalize the offer in some way. It doesn’t even have to be more than one page with your business letterhead on it - but if you want to keep it for your records, you’ll want to make sure that you have a copy as well. Formalizing your offers is a great way to make sure that no one tries to raise the price on you unfairly, potentially cementing a great deal you’ve found on a domain.

The problem, of course, is that your website isn’t selling as much as you want it to.

What’s going on? Isn’t selling on the Internet the latest craze? Don’t millions of people use search engines to find products like yours on a daily basis? Shouldn’t it be a lot easier than it’s been?

Here at WebsiteBroker.com, we know that your website won’t always sell - that’s why a lot of people part with their websites. But if you’re recently bought on here or simply want to start your own, it pays to know exactly why this is happening.

First Things First: Traffic Volume

The most obvious answer to the “website-not-selling” conundrum is that your site simply doesn’t generate enough traffic to actually make any sales.

Consider a retail store in a shopping mall. Even though these stores are in prime locations to attract a lot of foot traffic, they don’t always make the sale. The success comes in the high volume of foot traffic they go through each day.

If your site isn’t converting a lot of visitors into customers, it’s easy to forget that you might simply not have a big enough sample group to accurately assess your site’s problem. That, in and of itself, is a major problem.

If you attracted 50 visitors to your site yesterday and only made one sale, that’s actually a very successful day - a conversion rate of 2%. Imagine if you applied that same rate to 1,000 visitors a day.

So don’t get disheartened if no one is buying your product at first - you may simply not have enough people who are aware your product even exists.

Converting Visitors to Customers

Once you understand the points made above, you’ll be able to grow your traffic. This will help you analyze your own data with a larger sample group, making it easier to diagnose your site’s particular problem.

So what do you do if you have a lot of visitors, but your site still isn’t selling?

Now, it’s a problem of conversion.

Put simply, your site is not converting your visitors into customers - which means it’s doing a poor job of making the sale. The reasons it might not be doing this can vary widely; it’s up to you to start testing new sales techniques, new advertising methods, and even new products and services to try and find which ones work the best.

We can’t diagnose exactly why your site might not be making a lot of sales, but we can tell you that measuring your results and trying different strategies - including different headlines, copywriting, and even graphic design - will help you maximize your site’s convertibility. In short, the more you put into your website, the more you’ll get out of it.

Finding this profit margin and making it essentially come out of thin air is not always an easy proposition. But there is a way you can learn to flip websites quickly and relatively easily - and it doesn’t have to be so complicated that it’s difficult to understand.

So what’s the secret?

Keep reading.

Understanding the Concept of Perceived Value

If you’ve ever tried to flip a website before, you know that it’s not as simple as improving a site. You have to convince other people that you’ve improved the site if you’re going to sell it for a higher price than the price at which you paid for it. How do you do that? You have to work on increasing not only the value of your site, but the perceived value of that site.

This means, essentially, that you’ll have to become a good salesman. In essence, you have to sell your site as a new product every time you flip a website.

If you were going to flip a house for profit, you would do things like invest money in it: revamping a run-down kitchen or replacing the piping systems can add tremendously to the value of the house. But if you’re going to spend $20,000 fixing a house up, you’d better get at least $20,000 more from the sale of the house than you spent in purchasing it.

The same basic math works with flipping websites, which is why it’s so important that you know how to find buyers that will give you a profit.

And that brings us to our secret.

It’s All About Knowing What Your Website Can Fetch

Spend enough time here at WebsiteBroker.com and you’ll eventually figure out what websites are able to fetch; you’ll know that if a site’s asking price is already the market rate, then there’s not a whole lot of room for profit if you were to flip that website. That’s the key knowledge that separates you from mediocre website flippers: the inherent understanding of the marketplace.

If you know, from the outset, what your website will be able to sell for once you’ve sunk some effort into it, you should have no problem flipping websites in the future. In fact, you’ll be able to spot good deals from miles away.

That’s how you become a good website flipper, and it’s how you’ll be able to make a profit consistently no matter what the market looks like. As long as you know what you can sell a site for (and experience should reveal this to you in time), you’ll know what a good deal looks like.