The Ultimate Guide To Flipping Websites (With Recommended Marketplaces)

The Ultimate Guide To Flipping Websites (With Recommended Marketplaces)

Making legitimate income online through flipping websites is a growing trend for online entrepreneurs.

The average valuation of websites in the last two years has gone up nearly 25-30% making the flipping of websites even more rewarding.

For example, Fiesta Pinata is an eCommerce website that sells custom pinatas for any occasion and services its customers quite well. 

This website was bought for $6,000 and sold on Flippa for $20,000 to a man in the army.

The sale did not just get concluded that way, the new buyer got long-term post-acquisition guidance after the purchase which make it a win-win for both parties.

Flippa is a very liquid marketplace with over $400 million worth of sales done to date. Flippa is an ideal platform for beginners, you can flip content websites(blogs), eCommerce stores, SaaS businesses, and Mobile apps.

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Flipping websites has unlimited income potential and is quite similar to any other type of asset flipping.

Website flipping these days goes beyond purchasing an undervalued website, revamping it with a set of new content (articles or products), and waiting for Google to index the new keywords for more opportunities to rank.

Website flipping is the art of knowing the right undervalued website(s) to buy and knowing what to improve on a specific budget with a defined exit timeline.

Mastering website flipping also entails understanding niche peculiarities. Not all niches are easy to flip.  While some specialized niches could be a bit challenging to flip, some are easy, yet very profitable.

Let me explain this…

For example, niches like legal, engineering, medical may be challenging to flip, these niches will do well in the hands of experts.  This is not to say that an entrepreneur cannot venture into it, but he will need experts in the field to keep up with its editorial standards.

Investors that are knowledgeable in these specialized niches will best know how to run them to keep them sustainable and profitable.  

To get started with this income model, you need to know how to build and grow a website to make it profitable. With a 35x to 40x profit rate, you could be preparing for a major exit.

It’s also important to note that website flipping takes a lot of work, skill, patience, and the right strategies. Website flipping is not a passive income model because it entails upfront hard work and financial resources.

This article will explain all you need to know about flipping websites. What is website flipping, how it works, where to buy and sell websites, and how much money you can make flipping websites online?

Let’s get on with the article.

Key Highlights

 🎯 Website flipping is not a passive income model.

 🎯 Not all website niches are ideal for flipping.

 🎯 Website flipping is the art of knowing the right asset to buy and how to turn it around.

 🎯 Profitable website flipping should be done on a budget

SEE ALSO: How to Make Money Flipping Domains on Bluehost

SEE ALSO: How to Set up and Drive Traffic to Your Dropshipping Store In 30 Days

SEE ALSO: How To Start A Logo Design Business With No Experience

Jenn Leach Website Flipping Story

Before getting on with what website flipping is, let’s take a look at how Jenn Leach made over $30,000 from selling her first website.

How it Started

Jenn started website flipping when she sold her boutique business several years ago.

After leaving eCommerce temporarily, She started her first blog, after her first year, she decided she wanted to move in a new direction and started another blog in a different niche.

So, she sold that first blog and it fetched over $30,000 in income with lots of awesome opportunities tied to the sale.

From there, she flipped 10+ more websites and it turned into a business.

Jenn revealed in an interview with Virginia Nakitari of earnsmartonlineclass.com that she loves building websites and it’s very rewarding to create something from nothing, make it valuable, then sell it for a nice profit. 

It makes a great small business idea for women.

How Much Jenn Makes From Flipping Websites

Jenn has earned over six figures flipping websites.

Each website sale is different and the price can vary a lot, depending on the age of the site, if it is income-producing or not, the amount of traffic it receives, etc.

Jenn also revealed that website flipping can be started from $100. The initial cost is the price of domain and hosting for your website.  She usually pays under $25 when starting a new website.

The cost of hosting a website varies depending on the domain provider and host selected. Bluehost offers fair pricing of $2.95/month as hosting fees.

You can invest in extras like outsourcing tasks, paid marketing, etc. but Jenn typically manages business herself which minimizes the cost.

Key Lessons

From Jenn’s success story…

1. It’s reassuring that as a beginner, you can start earning up to four or five figures per month from flipping websites.

2. You should be ready to invest some initial purchase capital for a website with great potential that the current owner is not seeing (you need to be good at spotting such assets).

3. Anyone can start a website flipping business with low capital. But a higher capital allows you to buy much more valuable assets.

4.  You must not own all the websites you flip, you can become a website broker.

Now, let’s get into the secrets of website flipping is.

What Is Website Flipping?

There are several ways website flipping is done.

Website flipping can be seen as an investment, risking capital on an asset (digital) with potential.

The downside is that there are no guarantees that your investment will pay off.

Veteran website flippers rely on purchase and sale patterns (trends) over time to know what assets to buy and at the right price. It’s like mastering the market from repeated trades.

Requirement for Websites Flipping

To flip websites fast and profitably, you’ll need to determine the following.

1. Upfront capital out for the purchase of buying a website.

2. Additional running costs in terms of content, products, SEO tools & premium plugins, marketing, virtual assistants. etc.

3. Technical know-how on your part in the areas of SEO, content development, Ads in other to efficiently manage your team.

4. Sign up to a marketplace like Motion Invest, Flippa, and Empireflippers to buy and sell your website.

Similarly, as with any investment, time is a huge factor to consider while building and growing a website. The additional time you have, the more you can build your website, the more money you get to make.

If you want a passive income model that is less risky and time-consuming, you can have a go at flipping domain names instead.

Rather than growing a website, you can make money picking up less valued domain names and selling them for a profit.

Check this post to see how to flip domains on Bluehost.

How Does Website Flipping Work?

Initially, just like any new business, there will be lots of uncertainties because you are still learning the trade.

Knowing the right digital assets (websites) to buy or sell is usually another tasking process.  Some platforms like Motion Invest and Empireflippers vet websites before that are onboarded and listed onto their platform.

Flippa does not vet websites but verifies ownership of assets listed on its website.

Flippa also adopts the auction listing model which means websites could be bought fair less than they are truly worth.

 selling, this could mean that individuals need to apply extra caution when deciding to buy a website on Flippa.

Flipping a website is not rocket science, and over the years numerous entrepreneurs have successfully flipped a lot of websites and made a lot of money. Here is a step-by-step process you can use in flipping a website.

Step 1. How to Acquire Your First Website

To get a website, you can either purchase a website or develop one from scratch.

Acquiring a website through any of these means has its pros and cons.

A. Purchase a Website

Purchasing an existing website allows you to reduce the waiting time by increasing your ability to turn around your websites for a quick exit.

For example: If you purchase a website with a solid backlink profile, and a decent amount of quality content, you can prepare the website and get it ready for an exit sale a lot quicker than creating another from the scratch.

The con of buying an existing website is that it can cost a lot of money.

Now, depending on the size of the website, you can spend thousands of dollars to acquire a quality website.

For instance, low-end websites for sale on Empire Flippers cost nothing less than $30k.

If buying on Empire Flippers is above your budget, I recommend going to Motion Invest.

Motion Invest vets all website listings and you can get quality websites from $2,500 upwards depending on the income the website generates monthly.

The pros of buying a website on platforms like Motion Invest and Empire Flippers is that all assets on its platform have been vetted by experts.

So, you are most likely buying a good asset, unlike Flippa where you need to do your due diligence and take responsibility for the outcome of every purchase or sale you make.

Here are a few tips for vetting a website before you purchase.

1. To begin, ask the seller to grant you access to the website’s Google Analytics account.

2. Check the website’s Google Search Console for its Performance & Core Web Vitals to ensure it has no error or penalty from Google.

3. Check that the traffic pattern is on an upward steady trend, not zig-zag.

Let’s see this example below.

The total impression, clicks, and traffic, in general, look healthy and is on an upward trend in the last 3 months. Its average click-through ratio is 2.4%.

A website like this should cost more to acquire because the website’s traffic looks healthy and most likely will be profitable if it were to be monetized through Ads or Affiliates.

Let’s see another example.

The website above reveals a traffic trend with a zig-zag pattern. This shows that the daily visits to the website are inconsistent. The website above needs a lot of SEO improvements to improve its traffic.

This may be cheaper to acquire but requires more work to bring it up to a profitable position for an exit sale.

B. Building a Website

The second option is to build a website on a fresh domain or an aged domain.

The best places to get a domain and self-hosting packages are Bluehost and Siteground.

If you want to speed things up, you could build your website on an aged domain, check Odys Global for aged domains.

This acquisition route will be a lot less expensive than buying a website from a marketplace, yet it can take a significantly longer time to develop to full profitability.

The type of website you want to create will determine how long is required for development before becoming profitable for sale. It could take from six months to a year to get the desired result.

Efforts Required

You’ll have to invest money, time, and energy, in building relationships with different webmasters to acquire backlinks or grow an online media following to drive traffic to your website.

The advantage of creating your website is that you get to be in control of the whole process. You get total control of your domain name, the content on the website, strategies to get traffic, and ultimately the deciding the avenues for monetization.

Step 2. Improving Your Website Fast

So you have either purchased a website or created your own. The next step is to decide your traffic generation strategies.

1. What are the best methods to drive sustainable traffic fast to your website?
2. How much capital are you willing to invest in content, SEO, Social Media?
3. Are you setting up a team to help you or are you running it alone?
4. What is your estimated exit profit margin after deducting costs?

When deciding your traffic generation strategies, place a huge emphasis on generating Google Organic Search traffic, because it is the best quality of traffic and it is sustainable in the long term.

Google Organic traffic can also be acquired effectively from Pinterest, see this post on how to drive Pinterest traffic.

Tips for Website Improvement

• Continue to create great content, compete for more competitive keywords.
• Improve older posts on the website and optimize them further.
• Collaborate and guest post on other high domain authority websites and get a do-follow backlink to your website.
• Promote consistently to the right audience on social media pages and groups.
• Include Ads and affiliate offers to increase monetization opportunities.
• Reach out to brands for sponsorship even if you are not in a specialized field.
• Continue to add valuable content to the website.

Managing Expectations

It is almost quite impossible to make any serious amount of money in the first few months of creating a new website.

For websites built on an aged domain or purchasing an aged website, it could be different with income coming in from the first month.

You’ll have to invest energy in producing top-notch content and driving more website traffic before you can begin making money.

Income that you generate in the initial few months or years ought to be reinvested into the website to increase its potential.

Like putting resources into stocks, your Website will develop dramatically with time and effort.

You, therefore need to be consistent in doing what is right for the new blog.

Creating unique content, getting links for traffic, optimizing for search engines, building a social media following, and adding more monetizing sources.

Step 3. Prepare Your Website for Exit

At this point, you’ve successfully purchased or created a website and you have begun to see improvement on Google Analytics, you are also seeing the traffic converting somehow.

At this point, your website has had time to age and its traffic numbers are a lot better than when you first purchased it.

If it is a new website, you perhaps are recording progressive traffic growth. Ideally, this happens between 10 – 18 months depending on the niche.

For an aged website, impressive results could as well start coming in from 3 – 4^th months.

To value your website to know what it is truly worth, the value of a website Is often based on the amount of money made by the website monthly.

To make this easy, most marketplace have a valuation tool.

For example, if want to sell your website on Motion Invest, you can use the Motion Invest Valuation Tool.

If you want to sell on Flippa Valuation Tool.

If you want to sell on Empire Flipper Valuation Tool

And so you can value the website to be about 30x the profit it currently makes. It’s that simple.

For instance, if the website currently makes $400 each month, you can sell for $12,000 to $15,000. You, therefore, get to make 30x or more of the current profits earned.

Now, let’s take a look at the best markets to find websites for flipping.

Best Places to Flip Websites

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of flipping sites is finding the right place to get them and sell them. Be that as it may, there are a few choices to assist you with tracking down a website to purchase and flip.

Therefore you can choose to either purchase or sell your website on the platform listed below.

Motion Invest

This is another great option to choose from. Motion Invest sells top-notch sites with proven incomes, which accompanies an expense, be that as it may. You’ll observe sites listed on Motion Invest have mid-high price tags.

This is because the platform makes sure the websites have proven income information. You will therefore be getting only the best but at a high cost.

Pros

• Easy to join with a valuable website, assets are of high quality.
• Website verification is done by Motion Invest
• Websites are vetted with traffic screenshots.
• Very responsive customer support.

Cons

• The platform is relatively new and may not have the desired liquidity.
• Asset choices are a bit limited.

Flippa

The name already explains all the site is about – flipping website. With Flippa, you can go through many listings of different online businesses such as blogs, affiliate sites, and e-commerce stores.

Each listing will incorporate insights concerning the business including how long the site has been registered, how much money the site makes every month, the expenses of running the site, and how much traffic the site gets.

Pros

• Very broad and liquid marketplace with diverse digital assets (websites, mobile apps, SaaS).
• Low barrier of entry.
• Digital asset ownership is verified by Flippa
• Pricing of assets is flexible with an auction listing option, private placement, or outright sale.
• Escrow is available and the customer support is responsive.

Cons

• Buyers and sellers take responsibility for the outcome of their transactions.
• Digital assets are not vetted by Flippa which makes a scammy asset listed on its platform.

Empire Flippers

If you want to get more established websites, then Empire Flippers is a perfect choice. The websites on this platform usually sell for more than $15,000 so you’ll have to have some money to get a perfect website for your business.

Like Flippa, you can track down sites to purchase with a lot of info about their registration, monthly profit, traffic, and expenses.

Pros

• Only high-quality websites with proven track records are listed.
• Top-notch personal manager assistance through the purchase and sale process.
• Exits on Empire Flippers are most times very profitable.

Cons

• The barrier of entry is high owning the stringent asset qualification process.
• Websites may take longer to sell owing to their high price tags.

Private Sale

Selling on the above-listed platforms will require a sale commission to be deducted.

If you, therefore, want to cut out the cost of trading through a third party, then you should sell your website privately.

About 10% or more would be deducted as fees to these third-party sites. You could therefore be making a lot more money when you sell privately.

Tips for Flipping Websites

The following are a few hints to assist you with making money by flipping websites online.

• Understand the requirements in growing and developing a profitable website for sale.

• Diversify your website portfolio by starting with a cheap website or creating yours before aiming for expensive sites. This way you get to reduce the risks involved in website flipping.

• Explore multiple traffic sources to your website. Organic search, email list, and social media.

• Know your website niche and the required time and resources to make it profitable.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking to invest in “digital real estate”, then website flipping Is a great way to make a life-changing income. That being said, you will need to invest a lot of time and resources in making this successful.

Website flipping is easy when you master all aspects of the business. Understanding what is required from the point of acquisition to the point of sale is paramount.

The process can take as long as 6 months to 5+ years. And so just like investments of home flipping, there are no guarantees for success.

Many entreprenuers are succeeding in flipping websites, you too can.