Website and Domain Name Investing and Flipping Guide

The Secrets of Website & Domain Name
Investing and Flipping
By: Chris Snow
Copyright 2015 FlipWebsite.Net LTD, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever,
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of the author as of the date of publication. Because of the rate with which conditions change, the author reserves the right to alter and update
his opinion based on the new conditions. The report is for informational purposes only. While every attempt has been made to verify the
information provided in this report, neither the author nor his affiliates/partners assume any responsibility for errors, inaccuracies or
omissions. Any slights of people or organizations are unintentional. If advice concerning legal or related matters is needed, the services of a
fully qualified professional should be sought. This report is not intended for use as a source of legal or accounting advice. You should be aware
of any laws which govern business transactions or other business practices in your country and state.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Overview, Objectives & Plan Formulation ................................................................ 5
Chapter 2. Domain Name Education........................................................................................... 7
A few quick Domain Name Terms ........................................................................................... 7
Expired Domain Names ........................................................................................................... 8
Misspelled or Typo Domain Names ....................................................................................... 16
One/Two Word and 2-4 Character Domain Names: ............................................................. 19
New TLD explosion: ............................................................................................................... 20
Country TLD names: .............................................................................................................. 20
IDN Investing.......................................................................................................................... 21
Domain-Names-With-Hyphens ............................................................................................. 22
CHAPTER 3. Setting up Transferable Hosting ............................................................................ 24
CHAPTER 4. Choosing the right software package.................................................................... 25
CHAPTER 5. Graphics, Analytics, Tracking & Webmaster Tools................................................ 38
Quickly creating Logos and Graphics ..................................................................................... 38
Stat tracking and Analytics .................................................................................................... 38
CHAPTER 6. SEO Techniques, Link Building & Directories ........................................................ 54
Meta Tags .............................................................................................................................. 55
SEO Crafted URLs ................................................................................................................... 58
Social Media Accounts ........................................................................................................... 59
Link Building ........................................................................................................................... 60
Buying One-Way DOFOLLOW Text Links ............................................................................... 61
Website Directories ............................................................................................................... 62
CHAPTER 7. Creating & Generating Content............................................................................. 65
Using Free Already Created Article Content ......................................................................... 65
Generating Content from Media Sites .................................................................................. 66
Paraphrasing, Quoting & Recreating Content ....................................................................... 70
Using Forum Software for User Generated Content ............................................................. 70
Setting up a Directory ............................................................................................................ 73
Borrowing RSS Feeds ............................................................................................................. 73
Writing Product & Service Reviews ....................................................................................... 74
CHAPTER 8. Setting up Product Based Websites ...................................................................... 76
Learning the Basics of Online Product Sales ......................................................................... 76
Finding Used Products ........................................................................................................... 78
Dropshipping & Wholesale Products..................................................................................... 79
Building and Creating Your Own Products ............................................................................ 81
Print or Create On Demand ................................................................................................... 81
CHAPTER 9. Traffic Generation ................................................................................................. 84
Natural Organic Traffic .......................................................................................................... 84
Redirecting Expired Domain Names ...................................................................................... 84
Buying Expired Domain Name & Direct Traffic ..................................................................... 85
Traffic Exchanges ................................................................................................................... 86
Manual Traffic Exchanges ...................................................................................................... 87
Social Media Exchanges ......................................................................................................... 89
Linking to your portfolio of websites..................................................................................... 93
E-mail Subscribers & Newsletters ......................................................................................... 97
Product Feeds ........................................................................................................................ 99
Using Pay-per-Click & Pay-per-Impression .......................................................................... 101
Article Publishing ................................................................................................................. 101
Guerrilla Marketing Techniques .......................................................................................... 102
CHAPTER 10. Generating Website Revenue & Value.............................................................. 105
Affiliate Programs & Promotion .......................................................................................... 105
Advertising Publisher Programs .......................................................................................... 109
Selling Digital Content & Downloads ................................................................................... 112
Choosing an Affiliate Marketplace & Merchant Account.................................................... 113
Selling Backlinks & Text Link Ads ......................................................................................... 115
Selling Products ................................................................................................................... 117
Service & Membership Sites ................................................................................................ 118
Visitor Registrations, E-mail Subscribers & Customers ....................................................... 121
CHAPTER 11. Flipping Your Website(s) ................................................................................... 122
Flipping Domain Names not developing ............................................................................. 123
Preparing to flip your website ............................................................................................. 128
Determining a sales price .................................................................................................... 136
Where to flip website properties ........................................................................................ 138
Domain Name Aftermarkets w/Website Selling Options.................................................... 138
Website Specific/Centric Marketplaces .............................................................................. 142
Forums that have website sales listings .............................................................................. 144
Website Broker Services ...................................................................................................... 144
Selling Directly, Business-to-Business ................................................................................. 145
General marketplaces that you can sell on ......................................................................... 145
Communities & Groups for Website Buying & Selling Discussions & Offers ...................... 146
Escrow services .................................................................................................................... 147
How to complete the website transfer after sale ............................................................... 150
ACCOUNTS LIST – QUICK REFERENCE ..................................................................................... 156
Chapter 1. Overview, Objectives & Plan Formulation
First, and foremost, I would like to thank you for your purchase, and I would like to
congratulate you for taking your first step toward a successful and profitable future. You are
reading this now because you were willing to invest in knowledge, and being able to invest your
hard earned money tells me that you have what it takes to make it in the business of internet
real estate.
I have been buying and selling domain names and flipping websites for over ten years now and I
have perfected a method that requires very little effort and a very high rate of return. I have
gone through ten cycles of sales, what I mean by this is that I purchase up anywhere from fifty
to a hundred domain names over a few month period. I purchase expired domain names with
lots of traffic and pagerank, I purchase domain names that are brandable and I purchase
domain names that are risky but perfect for resale or development. During the year I will sell off
around twenty domain names which completely pay for my total investment, I park the high
click through rate and traffic domain names typically earning around $1500/month in passive
income while I get my websites ready to flip. Once my websites have content I load them up
with affiliate products and links until they are finally adsense worthy. By this time my portfolio
of domain names and websites is usually earning between $1500 to $2500/month which isn’t
too bad. I individually sell half of the websites that I have been developing and the rest of the
websites I typically bulk into one big portfolio sale. During my “cycle” I usually average close to
$100,000 in profit for the year and I am left with no domain name expenses or hosting costs
and can walk away.
My system is repeatable, dynamic and very simple to follow. You may be satisfied with
$5,000/mo from your websites and you may want to just keep them and keep on building
passive income, a lot of people take this road and my process allows you to get to that point
where you can sell or keep. This is a lot like real estate investors, some investors prefer to flip
houses for quick profit and move onto the next investment, other investors want to rent out
their properties and build wealth. If your planning on keeping your websites and enjoying the
passive income I would suggest taking on a partner or two as websites need to constantly have
new content added or their search presence will drop and the revenue will decline. There is
also a concern if you keep websites on auto-pilot that they will become security risks, if they are
not being regularly updated hackers will usually get in (it has happened to at least a hundred of
my sites over the years).
Throughout this guide I will take you through the various scenarios that you can take, you will
be able to chose your own path or follow some of my simple step-by-step flipping techniques. I
have spent tens of thousands of dollars perfecting these skills and formulas for success until I
got it just right. Some of the top selling Clickbank products were my creations that I sold for
ridiculous profits. If I did not already have more money than I could ever need I would most
likely use my system to hold onto websites and build wealth but I like to be able to walk away
at the end and move onto new projects.
Some of the techniques that I teach are borderline sneaky and gorilla marketing based but
everything I do is ethical, there are a lot of website flippers out there that use unethical tactics
to pump up websites with traffic and revenue for a quick sale and right after both will disappear
giving domain name and website sellers a bad reputation. It’s time for me to reveal how I
deliver real results and real profits to buyers of my websites, I have never had an unhappy
customer or company because I provide the facts and show results. How you use this
information is up to you, I take no responsibility if you get greedy and use what I show you to
inflate prices and rip off investors.
Chapter 2. Domain Name Education
A few quick Domain Name Terms
Domain Name Parking – this is essentially like it sounds, consider this just like a parking garage,
it operates in the same fashion. A parking garage has very low overhead, typically the owner
owns the property outright and only has to pay taxes and employees to take in the cash.
Instead of an employee gathering cash that we have to pay we will be paying a company that
will do traffic monetization for us and they will take a small percentage of our earnings from
each click generated. This allows us to have a win-win situation where if our visitors do not click
on the advertisements generated by the company, than we do not pay the company anything.
Domain Name Registrar – This is the company that you register and essentially store your
domain names with. The registrar will charge you an annual fee for each domain name
typically, a few offer monthly plans. If you don’t currently have a domain name registrar here
are a few that I recommend:
·
GoDaddy – Usually the cheapest because they always have coupon codes and discounts
you can take advantage of.
·
1and1 – This site can be great for quick flipping as you can pay for domain names on a
monthly, instead of year basis.
·
DynaDot – Cheap registrar with a great aftermarket for expired domain names
The most important step in website flipping is choosing the right domain name to build
off of. For the purposes of this guide and the website flipping system, domain names are “real
estate” and because they cannot be physically touched they will be referred to as “internet real
estate”. They hold the same values, and asset value as physical real estate. You can rent out
your internet real estate and receive a monthly check, fix up internet real estate and add value
to it, take out a loan from your internet real estate equity, and buy and sell as much of it as you
wish. If you start thinking of domain names as real estate, you will have a better understanding
of how we will be profiting from them, and the different types of investment strategies. We will
discuss six different types of investment domain names that you can purchase and manipulate
in this system. We will discuss in detail three of the most important types here, and the other
three we will only go over the concepts of how they work, and how you can get started in those
fields. I will be teaching you a rock solid investment strategy, once you understand how this
model works, and you have experienced its endless supply of income and different ways to
manipulate it, you will be ready to take on some advanced strategies.
Expired Domain Names
The first type of domain name we will be focusing on and my absolute favorite type of domain
name is “expired domain names”.
Expired domain names are like a foreclosed house owned by the bank. Instead of the domain
name being owned by the bank, it now becomes property of the domain name registrar (this is
the company that they used when the owner originally purchased the domain name). Domain
names can be purchased for one year to thirty years, and at the end of each term a renewal fee
must be paid in order to keep the domain name (typically about $9.00 or so) if this fee is not
paid on time the domain name will expire. When a domain name expires it will than either be
claimed by the registrar or the registrar will delete it from their inventory, and the domain
name will return to the public market where anyone can register it again.
So now that we know expired domain names were previously owned by a company or an
individual. Over 100,000 domain names expire daily. Many of these domain names are
completely worthless, once a dream of the owner that never materialized into anything.
However, many of these domain names are extremely valuable. Webmasters have to sink
thousands of dollars, and countless hours into driving traffic to their site. This includes building
text links, paid advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and many other forms of media.
These are the types of expired domain names we will be searching for and buying.
What do expired domain names provide us with? And why are they so valuable to our system?
One expired domain name that we pay $10 for can return us passive income of over $500 a
month for the rest of our lives. Now, let’s imagine that we find ten domain names of this
caliber, and we are even paying up to $100 each for those names. That means we have about
$1000 invested in the domain names, but the domain names are earning us $5000 a month! So,
even after the first month you are already earning 500% on your investment. Domain names of
this caliber can also be resold at true market value which could be over $10000 each. You just
earned yourself a lot of passive income, or a quick cash deal if you choose to sell these names.
We will divulge more of what you can do with these types of domain names later on.
Finding expired domain names with traffic and revenue has been simplified by some
aftermarket venues. This has helped and hurt us at the same time, it easily allows us to locate
domain names that have an estimated revenue projection and estimated monthly traffic to be
expected. This means those hidden gems that you had to manually investigate and do a
significant amount of due diligence on are no longer available at a low cost. Formerly GoDaddy
Auction Marketplace was my favorite and most profitable source for expired domain names as
they did not provide buyers with traffic or valuation of the domain names so I could find
domain names that had thousands of visitors and generated thousands of dollars a month for
as little as $10, those same names now sell for thousands of dollars. There are a lot of
inexperienced domain name buyers on GoDaddy because it is the largest registrar in the world.
Here is an example of expiring domain names on the GoDaddy marketplace:
As you can see GoDaddy is not playing around anymore, they are providing an expected value
for the domain names along with traffic which drives domain name prices through the roof on
this marketplace. They are very sneaky as well, the valuation is based off of the current monthly
revenue multiplied by 12 months so the valuation is how much money they are predicting you
will earn per year for the domain name. The traffic is how many unique visitors a month the
domain is currently receiving. Expired domain names that do not receive type in traffic will
gradually or in rare cases rapidly diminish in the amount of visitors it receives. Generic domain
names that receive type in traffic and type-o domain names may actually increase in visitors
and revenue so they are considered the holy grail and worth overpaying for because they may
provide revenue for a lifetime. Once you have acquired enough Holy Grail domain names you
may never have to work another day in your life. Don’t expect to retire tomorrow, these
domain names don’t come up every day. If you are buying expired domain names on GoDaddy
for the purpose of just parking revenue I would recommend that you don’t bid more than half
of the valuation price to limit your risk exposure. If you are buying the domain name for
website flipping we will use a different calculation which factors in pagerank, how much we can
sell text link ads for, average cost per click, type of traffic, actual domain name value instead of
parking value, what the site formerly was and what country the visitors are mainly from. That
information will be provided later in the website flipping portion. I do still buy domain names
from GoDaddy, the return on investment is just lower. Here is what my account looks like now:
All domain names have reported more than 500 monthly visitors so you can see there is always
a lot of domain names to bid on at GoDaddy which keeps it interesting. As you can see the
domain names I am bidding on have no value by themselves or as websites but only in parking
revenue.
Gladly GoDaddy is not our only source for expired domain names, it isn’t even the only one with
revenue and traffic calculations. There is a hidden gem, at least somewhat hidden and less
known place where you can still get insane deals. It is a smaller registrar so it does not attract as
many bidders but it is where I make most of my profit from.
Welcome to DynaDot, their revenue is based off of monthly cost per click earnings and their
estimates are usually way under what you can actually receive if you use the right domain name
parking provider. The one that I use that beats DynaDot monthly revenue is Bodis which
guarantees you revenue based off traffic instead of just clicks like most. They resell your traffic
to webmasters looking for site traffic. You will see many domains being auctioned on DynaDot
that have thousands of monthly visitors and no reported revenue, you can get these for the
$12.99 starting price and make a fortune sometimes. Here is an example of a domain I
purchased from DynaDot for $13.99
Here is this week’s revenue so far parked at Bodis:
It has been averaging over $500 a month for the 3 months that I have owned it. That is off of a
$13.99 domain name that DynaDot said wasn’t generating any monthly revenue which is
because the users are not English reading and don’t click ads but as you can see I still make a
sick return on it.
There is another interesting site that you can buy expired domain names from that provides
traffic stats but does not include revenue stats. The other benefit of this site is that it does not
focus on users bidding against other buyers but instead has buy it now options. This site is
Name.com and here is an example of what the expired domain name market looks like:
GoDaddy and DynaDot will rarely have premium domain names, domain names that have a
value by themselves over $10,000. For premium expired domain names I use two places;
SnapNames and NameJet.
As you can see NameJet has a little bit of everything, it has expiring domain names, pending
delete domains and user selling domains. You can get some good deals on there and great
domain names to build into six figure websites. Here are some recent buys I’ve made on there
and the prices:
For instance the last domain on the list securitybarrier.com is worth about $20,000 just as a
domain name so I purchased it for about a 20th of what it is worth:
The other domain names that I purchased on there are either high pagerank domain names
with traffic I can easily resell or ones that earn parking revenue. On sites like NameJet and
SnapNames there are no traffic numbers or valuations so you have to do some research. There
are sites out there that will help you narrow down the stats such as DomCop:
You can also do it manually if you have to, you want to check ahrefs.com which will show you
how many backlinks a domain name has, next check prchecker.info to check the pagerank and
finally you can check alexa.com to get a feel for how much traffic a domain name has. For
domain parking purposes most of that is irrelevant. Alexa ranking is the only one that matters
as it is a prediction for how much traffic a domain has but it is not very accurate. An Alexa
ranking under 100,000 will have thousands of hits a day, a rank under 1,000,000 may have
several hundred a day but there are no guarantees. A webmaster may have been paying for
traffic to get the domain a low Alexa rank and selling it based off of inflated numbers or the
domain expired and is slowly losing traffic and Alexa has not caught up with it still showing a
low ranking. You have to use your best judgment if buying based off Alexa rankings.
Misspelled or Typo Domain Names
Domain hunters are always searching for “misspelled” or “typo” domain names. These domain
names are very easy to obtain and you can buy them directly from the registrar in most cases if
you’re buying on speculation. These domain names can come with great risk. A misspelled or
typo domain name can come in many forms, but your main goal here is to locate domain names
that are closely spelled to other high traffic domain names. There are top level domain names
(TLDs) that can be used in this manner, for instance .com is easily miss typed and TLDs .co and
.cm will receive a lot of visits for a popular .com domain name. Another way to generate traffic
from a miss spelling would be for instance trying to buy something close to apple.com such as
aple.com or appple.com. You could also go for wwwapple.com and applecom.com. These
would generate ridiculous amounts of traffic but you could be in violation of trademark
infringement and at risk for lawsuit. If you’re going to play with fire you need to purchase the
domain name and pay a little bit extra for private registration. Domain privacy will shield your
name and information from a whois record making it very hard for legal action against you as
the registrar will be shielding you. The trademark holder could still press for action and the
registrar may release your domain name back to the holder.
This does not mean that you can’t still profit from miss spelled domain names, you can
purchase generic domain names that are one offs. If there is no trademark then there is no risk
of legal action or losing your domain name. If you are buying expired domain names based on
traffic and revenue from an aftermarket you may end up buying type-o domains without even
realizing it. If you wish to avoid buying these types of risk and reward domain names you can
search the domain free of charge using estibot.com or valuate.com and if there is a chance of
infringement they will flag the domain with a risk score for you.
Never try and develop a miss spelled domain name, this will for certain bring legal action
against you. If you are parking the domain name or forwarding it to an affiliate site you will be
at far less risk of action as you are not trying to mimic the brand. The internet only has so many
domain names available and there are many companies in the world that have the same name,
the owner of Nissan.com is not the car company but in fact an individual with the name Nissan.
The car company has attempted litigation against the domain owner but if you visit the website
you will see that even a massive billion dollar company has not been able to take the domain
name from the owner. The owner is not using it as a car company or anything related to the
trademark of the car company therefore no court has ruled in favor of the car companies right
to own the domain name.
The parking companies that I recommend using are:



Bodis.com – the best domain parking site currently for revenue, even if you have
domain names that receive no clicks they will pay you for visitors. They redirect your
traffic to people who purchase traffic so they are a great and reliable solution.
DomainSponsor.com – They have been around for a long time and offer domain name
parking with pop unders and pop ups to increase parking revenue.
VooDoo – Large group of advertisers, good revenue on click through, currently lack pop
ups and pop unders for CPM on domains that don’t receive a lot of clicks.
Another avenue you can take is to point your domain name at an affiliate link, there are many
options for affiliate sales. You can sign up directly at most large sites for an affiliate account but
it is far easier if you go with a company that specializes in affiliate companies. These companies
consolidate your revenue from all your affiliate sources they provide and you get one simple
payment. The best affiliate and associate programs I recommend are:

Clickbank.com – digital products and services, they have been around for a very long
time and you can promote products that have proven to sell. They have what is known
as a gravity ranking and average earnings per sale metric so you can promote things that
you know people are buying.



Shareasale.com – They have some massive known brands, you have to get approval for
some links before promoting as they have reputable companies.
Amazon Associate Program – This allows you to promote anything that is on the
Amazon.com website. The catch here is that your commission is far less than with any
other affiliate program but very high conversion rates as everyone knows and trusts
Amazon.
Commission Junction – The grand daddy of them all, they have fortune 500 companies
so reselling services and products from known brands is again very simple, here is a
screen shot from a few high quality domain names pointed to Commission Junction, not
bad right?
Now do not let me get you confused, this strategy of forwarding misspelled domain names to
affiliate accounts to generate revenue can be done with any of our domain name investment
types. But if you work at it enough, you can always find the perfect misspelled domain name to
go with any affiliate program. This means, as long as you follow our steps provided in this
system and do your own due diligence it will not be very hard for you to create a massive
stream of passive residual income from affiliate programs like our account above.
Now, upsstores.com was a domain name that I once controlled, it is owned by a former partner
of mine. This domain name is valuable for so many different reasons, but first off upsstore.com
is owned by a multi-billion dollar company. This is a domain name that is typed by a ridiculous
amount of people on a daily basis. Parked this domain name was making us about $100/day, if
we would have fully optimized it, we could have pushed it over $500/day. The real value here
would be if we sold it, to say FedEx, DHL, or another one of the UPS competitors or even to UPS
itself. My former partner still owns this domain name to this day and will most likely never use
it to its full potential, or use it at all.
One/Two Word and 2-4 Character Domain Names:
Short Domain names and single/two word domain names can be extremely profitable but may
take the longest amount of time for a return on your investment if trying to resell. Most of
these domain names look very appealing and valuable, but in reality most of them are
completely worthless to the resale market. However, these types of domain names often fetch
the highest prices at auction and private sale even though they have absolutely no traffic
pouring into them, no pages indexed in any search engine, no inbound links, and no webpage
associated with them.
How and why does this work? Just like with a patent or copyright we know that their value is in
the idea or the content even if they are not being used. This is the same concept here;
investors, webmasters, and companies purchase these types of domain names for the idea or
possibilities that they can use them for later on.
Make sure you avoid buying very long domain names, even if they are two words. Length
seriously hurts their potential value. Also avoid random five, six, and higher character domain
names. These names will rarely hold any value unless the letters mean something to someone
or some organization.
Domain names that can be branded, or easily remembered by potential customers have the
highest value over a long period of time. These domain names present us with so many
different buying and selling investment strategies it can sometimes be very difficult to figure
out which avenue to buy or sell. It would be advisable to not purchase these types of domain
names from a public sale or resale marketplace. Many owners of domain names of this stature
seem to think that they are all worth millions of dollars as you will soon find out. If you are
looking at GoDaddy, or eBay, even AfterNIC you will see many domain names priced in the
millions. BE CAREFUL! And be aware, these domain names are usually only worth a few
hundred dollars at best and you cannot purchase these types of domain names and resell them
immediately for millions of dollars, it just does not work that way or everyone would be multimillionaires.
These types of domain names will be best used in website flipping which will be discussed later
on. Domain names that are brandable and easy to remember are the ones we are going to flip
for ridiculous profits. Selling these domain names as just domain names you will lose out on
significant profits.
New TLD explosion:
With the explosion of the internet more new comers are creating websites and blogs. This
means the demand for quality domain names has risen dramatically. So what happens to supply
demand? New TLDs are created. A TLD is a Top-Level-Domain Name, examples of the main
United States TLDs are .com, .org, .us, .gov, .net. Some of the newest top level domain names
include (.tv .biz .info .name .eu .jobs .tips .casino .career .online .company .website .xxx .email)
and so many more. The purpose of adding all of these additional TLD names is to help better
categorize the internet. The future of search engines should be able to better help visitors
locate websites related to what they are searching for. If a visitor is searching for a new job or
career then sites with TLD .jobs and .career should return the top search results.
Only time will tell if these new TLD names will hold any value and catch on. These domain
names are currently classified as investment and speculation domain names. I have spent about
$20,000 on a portfolio of dictionary word and premium two word domain names with the new
TLD extension. I am started to see an increase in search ranking for .info, .biz, .eu and .biz so
far, the newer TLDs may start ranking higher as time goes on. If you are buying domain names
with these new extensions understand that there is risk associated with this and you should
only buying or registering what would be considered premium .com domain names but in other
TLDs.
Country TLD names:
Every country in the world has its own TLD, for instance Somalia is .so, China is .cn, Russia is .ru
and so on. If purchased with an American registrar and not directly from a registrar in the
country of the TLD they can be very expensive. Domain buyers make a lot of mistakes buying
foreign domain names, if you were to buy cat.mx it would be virtually worthless because all of
the major search engines rank country code TLDs for the language associated with the country
of the TLD. This means that Google.mx would be ranking domain names that are in Spanish so
you would need to buy gato.mx which would be considered the premium domain name in the
Mexican Google search engine. It should also be noted that cat.mx will not rank in Google.com
very well if at all.
If you want to invest in TLD names around the world you need to be purchasing premium
domain names in the language of the country that owns the TLD. The return on investment has
been considerably less for foreign TLDs because the average cost per click is dramatically lower
on average. United States traffic currently generates the highest cost per click on average and
following would be English speaking countries such as .uk which would be the United Kingdom.
I do not recommend investing or developing foreign TLD names unless you live in that country
and are familiar with what would be considered premium names for that country and that
language.
IDN Investing
This is a very complicated subject; most people will not grasp this concept right away and will
get very frustrated. Other’s will try and scam people for thousands of dollars and end up with
lawsuits and angry customers. So to save you from yourself I will not go into much detail here, I
will just point you in the direction you need to take in order to find out more information if you
are so inclined.
What is an IDN? An IDN is an International Domain Name. This means that when users with
different symbols and languages try to access certain websites in other countries they hit an
IDN which redirects them to the name typed in. Here is an example of what it will look like:
Domain Name: cc.com
IDN Name: xn--c-6tb.com (сc.com)
Domain Registrar : DomainSite.com
The example above is a domain name that I owned, and sold on eBay for over $3000. I did not
expect to receive this amount or even want anything close to it but the internet is full of
compulsive buyers. Potential customers thought they were buying (cc.com) which technically
they were and weren’t. For international customers they would own the name cc.com but for
English visitors they could only see this site if they went to xn--c-6tb.com which is the puny
code for the IDN to redirect to cc.com. So how confused are you now? If you can’t understand it
once through, now you can see why so many buyers would not understand it and over pay. This
IDN realistically was worth about $200, I paid close to that when I originally purchased it. I do
not sell IDN domain names any longer because customers do not do their own research and do
not think the purchase through or even read the description fully. When I have sold them I
listed them accurately and was not misleading one bit, and still I have customers buying and
either not being happy with the purchase or demanding refunds, or even reading the
description only after they won and deciding they do not want to pay. This is all very frustrating
for an investor. I am not saying that you cannot make a fortune selling IDNs or even suggesting
that it is wrong to sell them. I am just trying to make you aware of the drawbacks of selling
them.
There is a safe way to sell an IDN, I have completed several successful transactions for IDNs on
SEDO and AfterNIC sales venues. This is where experienced domain name buyers typically will
buy because they can negotiate the purchase price and time is not of the essence. I would avoid
eBay because of the bidding nature that lets customers overpay and demand refunds and many
of the domain name buyers on eBay know very little about domain names or their actual value.
If you buy or sell using SEDO or AfterNIC you will be able to use an escrow service to make sure
both parties are satisfied at the end of the transaction. This will save you time, hassles, stress,
and upset customers.
If you want more knowledge on this topic I suggest doing some research on the internet. Make
sure you pay for an accurate appraisal when buying and selling. Please do not rip off
unsuspecting customers, even if you can get away with it, and it’s legal to do, put yourself in
their position. It will come back to haunt you.
Domain-Names-With-Hyphens
I am sure that you have come across domain names with many dashes in them on the internet.
I am sure you have seen them come up in search results, and even seen ones that are so long
you laugh. Domain-name-like-this-one.com might seem like a pointless domain name, and you
would most likely not remember this site later on if you tried. The purpose of these domain
names is not to be easily remembered, unless of course you have a simple two word or two
segment dash domain name.
There was a massive dash to register hyphen domain names as it gave investors the chance to
purchase high cost per click domain names that previously were not available. For awhile these
domain names ranked at the top of search engines for the hyphen terms and generated lots of
revenue and traffic. Google has changed their search engine ranking algorithm to counter
owners of these domain names from sneaking to the top of their search results. Hyphen
domain names have lost significant value and ranking ability. These domain names have lost
about 90% of their value, investors are not paying six figures anymore for two word premium
keyword hyphen domain names. I do not recommend investing in hyphen domain names or
developing them into websites anymore since they are only declining in value and popularity.
Domain Names with Numbers
Think to yourself, how many big name internet companies do I now that have numbers in their
domain names? Pretty hard to do isn’t it? Domain names that have numbers in them are
virtually worthless. Avoid registering and buying domain names that have numbers in them,
they rank poorly have and appraise even worse. If you are trying to develop a domain name
with numbers you want one that is three or four characters long, the shortness of the name will
help offset the poor choice in using numbers. An example:
Here is an example of a domain name that you would think may be worth 100’s of thousands of
dollars but barely scratches the service with a number in the name:
CHAPTER 3. Setting up Transferable Hosting
Hosting is a very important part of your strategy, if you are trying to simply development and
flip one website you can register a hosting provider such as GoDaddy shared hosting with
cPanel access. If you are planning on hosting anywhere from five to twenty websites I would
suggest that you invest in a Virtual Private Hosting account which will give you access to create
individual cPanel hosting accounts, which means once you sell a website you simply have to
provide the login and password for the website and the buyer can login to the cPanel account
and manage the website or export it out to their own hosting. A shared hosting account will
offer you the same option but shared hosting accounts are traditionally not transferable so you
will have to backup the website and send the buyer a compressed .zip file which includes the
site content and database.
If you are ready to commit fully to website flipping and wealth creation I suggest you go with a
full dedicated server. This is basically a server that is yours just hosted at a third party provider.
You will most likely be responsible for installing server updates and maintaining the server just
like you would if it were hosted in your basement. A full dedicated server gives you a lot of
options such as many IP addresses to assign to individual hosting accounts. You have the
assurance that an actual server is dedicated to your needs whereas a VPS is a partial dedicated
server. The choice really depends on how committed and how much you are willing to invest in
your new enterprise. If you’re new to the game and focusing on one or two websites to flip I
would advise going with simple shared hosting which you can purchase for a few dollars a
month. Shared hosting will limit how far you can scale your website, if you are going to load it
with lots of content and advanced applications your performance may suffer. Shared hosting
accounts also have a serious limitations, they are shared which means there may be hundreds
of domain names using the same IP address as your website. This may not seem important on
the surface but Google sees it and will penalize your pagerank if you’re using shared hosting.
If you are trying to flip your first website I would still recommend going with a shared hosting
account, this allows you to keep financial expenditures to a minimum. Using a shared hosting
account and sending your website content and database via .zip files this permits you to reuse
the shared hosting account for your next website once you have transferred out your first one.
CHAPTER 4. Choosing the right software package
The fastest and simplest way to get started is to use your cPanel application manager and install
Wordpress. This is my favorite choice by far, you can have a professional looking website within
minutes. There are thousands of free searchable themes and plugins at your disposal. Here is
the setup process:
Login to cPanel:
Click on view more Applications:
Click on Wordpress
Once you click install:
You have now installed Wordpress in less than five minutes
Click on Appearance -> Themes and make your website professional in seconds:
Wordpress is perfect for blogs, content, reviews, Adsense revenue and basically anything your
mind can imagine. If you are looking for a straight forum bulletin board phpBB, myBB and
FluxBB are great free choices from within cPanel’s Installatron.f
Here is a screenshot of what myBB looks like:
As you can see, it appears very similar to phpBB and many other forum software platforms and
yes, it is very similar. Forums are very easy to get started, the biggest issue has to do with
spammers overloading your website. I would recommend installing a third party solution such
as SolveMedia which will do a great job of eliminating bots from signing up and spamming, oh
and you will get paid for visitors to your capcha on a CPM basis.
If you are planning on going an e-commerce route, the best solution is Magento, a free and fully
featured solution. You can integrate e-commerce solutions into Wordpress but they won’t
compare to the functionality of Magento. Default installation looks like:
You can load the site up with dropship products or wholesale products if you want to make it
active right away. I will touch on getting products for your website later in this guide. If you are
planning on flipping multiple sites Magento is a great choice for anything sales related and it
has built in SEO features that rank your pages well. Additionally, Magento has an export feed
option to have your products display directory in Google shopping search.
I don’t recommend content management systems (CMS) for beginners as they have a rather
long learning curve, if you do want to go that route there are two solutions I recommend, the
first is Drupal:
Drupal is a publishing platform created for building dynamic web sites offering a broad range of
features and services. Drupal can support a diverse range of web projects ranging from
personal weblogs to large community-driven and corporate sites. Use as-is or snap in any of
thousands of free designs and plug-ins for rapid site assembly. Developers love our welldocumented APIs. Designers love our flexibility. Site administrators love our limitless scalability.
Features:
Organize and Find: Drupal comes with many tools to help you organize, structure, find and reuse your content. Categorize with taxonomy, automatically create friendly path urls, create
custom lists, associate content with other content on your site, and create smart defaults for
content creators.
Creative Content: Drupal's flexibility handles countless content types including video, text, blog,
podcasts, and polls with robust user management, menu handling, real-time statistics and
optional revision control.
Administer: Drupal comes with great options for new user accounts and user permissions.
Users can be assigned one or more roles, and each role can be set up with fine-grained
permissions allowing users view and create only what the administrator permits.
Collaborate: Drupal's focus on social publishing can help you create sites and applications to
help your users express their opinions and engage with one another. You can have tight control
over who can create, view, administer, publish and otherwise interact with content on your
site.
Design and Display: Drupal's presentation layer allows designers to create highly usable,
interactive experiences that engage users and increase traffic. Use an existing Drupal theme for
your site or try designing your own.
Extend: With more than 6000 available modules, the vast majority of your site's requirements
can be addressed with Drupal core and available add-on modules.
Connect: Drupal makes it easy to connect your website to other sites and services across the
web, using aggregation, feeds, and search engine connection capabilities. Social networking
integration is also widely supported to help you engage with a wider audience.
The next choice for content management is Joomla, it has a very large community and a lot of
plugins and themes available. Running a Joomla site is similar to running a Wordpress site but
you will have to do a lot more manual upgrades and modifications.
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS) which enables web sites and
powerful online applications to be built. With millions of websites running on Joomla, the
software is used by individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, and large organizations
worldwide. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the
most popular web site software available.
Features:
Multi-user functionality enables different users to have different levels of access.
Media Manager enables easy management of media files and folders stored online.
Banner Management makes setting up advertisements on a website a breeze.
Contact Manager helps users find the right person and their contact information.
Polls and Surveys gather data from website visitors.
Search helps visitors navigate content and provides search statistics.
Web Link Management enables every click to be organized and tracked.
Content Management tools enable website content to be organized in any way.
Syndication and Newsfeed Management enables visitors to subscribe to your website using
their favorite RSS reader.
Menu Manager enables as many menus and menu items to be created as necessary.
Template Management is a powerful tool that enables a site to look exactly as intended.
Integrated Help System assists you at every step of creating your website.
Joomla! is infinitely extendable using the Joomla! extension manager.
The last solution that I support is Open Classifieds, this is a quick and dirty way to get users
creating content and have a growing site ready to sell very quickly. One of the most valuable
sites that I sold was an expired domain name that was formerly a classifieds site, I paid $400 for
the expired domain name and sold it for close to $55,000 in two months. Every day over a
hundred new users would post ads and buy featured ads so if your traffic would convert on a
classified portal this is the best choice:
Open Classifieds is the perfect software to start your own online business in few minutes. With
Open Classifieds you can have your listing site, contacts page, car/auto sales, job board, second
hand items, forum, or anything you want. You name the limit! Start today you own Craigslists,
Ebay Classifieds, Olx or Gumtree clone for free!
Features:
MOBILE FRIENDLY: We offer amazing responsive themes and Android app that will make your
site easily accessible from mobile devices.
DIFFERENT THEMES: Change a look and feel of your website and make it more beautiful in just
few clicks. Browse our amazing themes in the market!
ADMIN PANEL: Managing your site was never that simple! With a super easy and lucid admin
panel you can intuitively configure everything you need to.
MANY LANGUAGES: Change a language of your entire site by choosing one of the included
language version. List of available translations is still expanding.
EASY INSTALLATION: Installation process is super easy and takes few minutes. In case you have
any problems you can ask us for a support as well.
PAYPAL INTEGRATION: Earn money from your site and get your payments quickly through
Paypal. Really useful for your online business!
SEO FRIENDLY: With our script it is easy to optimize your site for a search engine and improve
your online visibility.
HIGHLY FLEXIBLE: Use our software for many purposes. Build your classifieds website, business
directory or whatever you can imagine!
Each solution that I have presented you with provides great resale potential as well as simple
configurations and maintenance. However, I cannot stress enough, Wordpress is the fastest and
most versatile solution you can implement and will typically provide you with the highest resale
price tag. There are more website buyers and investors that have experience with Wordpress
then any of the other options.
CHAPTER 5. Graphics, Analytics, Tracking & Webmaster Tools
Quickly creating Logos and Graphics
Realistically, this is the fastest section for me; I spend no more than ten minutes typically
creating the perfect logo for my site. The software that I use is called AAA Logo which comes
with hundreds of pre-created logos that you can simply modify to your needs. There is another
easy to use software solution called “The Logo Creator” which does a fine job as well. The
objective of using software with precompiled templates is time, this enables you to have a
website up and read for sale in a matter of minutes or hours if need be. Obviously this software
is not required, if you are any good with Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop, etc you can create
your perfect logo as you see fit without using templates. You want your logo colors to match
that of your main website colors. If you are graphically inclined don’t fret, there are countless
places you can outsource the creation of your logo, one great source is elance.com and you can
have a professional logo for under $20 with your exact specifications.
If you are outsourcing the creation of your logo you might as well have a banner or two created
for your business that can be used in promotion and advertising.
Stat tracking and Analytics
You need to be able to crunch the numbers, determine your visitors behavior on your website,
know what they are clicking, how long they are staying on your site, what countries they are
from and how you are ranking in the search engines. You might have the best website ever
created and the best product or service on the net but if nobody can find it or can figure out
how to access it than it doesn’t really matter much does it. I always setup three accounts right
away from stat tracking and analytics which are completely free and only take a few seconds to
prepare.

Statcounter.com – once your account is created you can track all your projects
from one view, this is optional but one I enjoy since I manage large portfolios of
website and like to see everything in one simple view. If you setup Wordpress
you can install the official Statcounter plugin by going to add new plugin and
typing Statcounter, it is the first and labeled official plugin. You will need to add
your project on the statcounter site and you will add the security code and
project code. If you’re not sure how to do that, this is the manual process and
breakdown:
<!-- Start of StatCounter Code for Default Guide -->
<script type="text/javascript">
var sc_project=10423232;
var sc_invisible=1;
var sc_security="44cfew22";
var scJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ?
You can see within the default installation code two distinct numbers, you’re
going to use the project code and security code as follows:
You can isolate site stats for a particular website easily and have a nice overview that is
visually apealing to me. You can see how many unique visits, first time visits and return
visits and pageviews in a nice compact view. You can obviously see the same
information with Google Analytics but the visualzation in my opinion is best with
Statcounter. Here is a shot below you can get a good overview of how a site has been
doing:
My favorite check that I methodically view is recent pageload activity, this shows me in a
near real time view where my visitors are coming from. Important to me is to see what
search engines are sending me traffic and from what country the visitors are originating
from. Another good thing to check to see is if you are receiving type in traffic which
usually means you have returning visitors, word of mouth or a typeable brand name.
You will also want to know what kind of devices your visitors are using, if they are
finding you on their cell phones they are less likely to be ordering products that have
complicated checkout processes. If your visitors are using tablets and cell phone you
need to make sure your pages are rendering in a legible and professional view and
everything is functional. The raw view looks like this:
The next and basically required tracking account you need to configure is Google Analyics :
www.google.com/analytics/
Once your account is setup you can use one master account to control individual properties or
make an account for each website you have, you are limited to 100 website properties. I use
the individual accounts for each one and receive a unique UA identifier for each.
Adding a new website as its own property you just need to click on the admin menu
option in the top right. Click on properties and add new property on the left side menu
and just follow the simple steps to add your web property. It will look like this:
Just like with Statcounter and all the other tracking software you can see where users are
coming from, Google Analytics is built around pretty and visually stimulating views instead of
just the raw numbers that I enjoy seeing and crunching. Here is a sample of search traffic from
Google for a day for one of the sites.
I am not really going to get into great detail here with Google Analytics for our purposes of
revenue generation and website flipping. There are plenty of books and manuals about Google
Analytics and you could read an entire book just about it if you are so inclined. Here are a few
of some the fun features you can see with Analytics but I’m not going to show you each option,
you should play around with the individual options. One important thing I will mention is that if
your using Google Adwords paying for traffic you should be using Analytics to see what those
paid visitors are doing and if they are purchasing your products, clicking your links and signing
up for user accounts, etc. If you are using Social Media like you should be there is a section
dedicated to social media conversations that is worth monitoring.
The next account your absolutely need with Google which was formerly known as Google
Webmaster Tools but now known as Google Search Console but the link is still the same :
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Once you setup an account here you need to add all of your website properties to your Google
Search Console account. This is how we get in good with Google and make sure our pages are
properly being indexed and found. Your portfolio will look something like:
Ironically, one of the most important things you can view from Google Search Console that you
would think Google Analytics would display would be the traffic from search view. You can see
that type of data in Analytics but the views and setup is not easily viewed and manipulated. The
search analytics link shows you what visitor keywords are being searched for in the search
engine to find and even display your website. By display, this means someone did a search that
resulted in your website displaying on a search result page but not clicked on by the searcher.
This information can better help you understand your click through rate (CTR), if your pages are
constantly being shown but not browsed to you have issues that need to be addressed. Google
may lower your search ranking for that search which sends us in the opposite direction. So here
is a site that you can see is generating between 20 and 50 organic search visitors a day and
what was being searched:
Most importantly, whether we have a new website with a newly registered domain name, a
seasoned parked domain name or an expired domain name that was formerly a website we
need to most importantly make sure that Google has found our website and indexed it in their
massive search database. This means if you do a search for “mysite.com” in the search bar you
will see a search result for your website. If you don’t see your website as the first result (it
won’t be anywhere else with quotes around it) that means Google has not Indexed your
website. This can mean that the site is simply too new and Google hasn’t found it yet, it could
mean that it was an expired domain name and Google pulled the site from the search results
when the domain name was parked which will happen and can take time to be re-added
sometimes, the last possibility and the worst for us is that Google has banned your domain
name and you need to either contact Google to try and make a case to have it unbanned, you
may have no idea why it was banned originally. If you read the domain name chapter you
should be avoiding domain names that are banned from Google or hosting illegal content. If the
domain was purchased at an aftermarket or from a seller and you were not the original owner
check archieve.org and see if there are results for your domain name and see what the prior
website was. If the website hosted illegal or questionable material you can bet Google banned
it based off of the former content. There are thousands of websites that claim to check to see if
your site is banned from Google, all they do is see if there is an index result for your website,
nothing special. Once you have added your websites to Google Search Console check the index
status of each and you want to see something like below:
Once you have created your initial website and you have touched all the basic requirements for
a site to be considered “developed” which means there will be no “coming soon” links or pages
or “under construction” click on the crawl link and fetch as Google as shown below:
After clicking on fetch as Google you should see a prompt like this:
Perfect, now click “submit to index” which will tell Google your website is ready to be crawled
by their spiders and hopefully indexed accordingly.
The submission method depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, if you are building a
network of sites and have links to those sites within your pages than you will want to crawl this
URL and its direct links. If this is your first submission and just want your site to be indexed click
the crawl only this URL. It is worth mentioning you can only select the second option a
maximum of ten times a month so use them wisely.
If you are using Wordpress download a sitemap plugin, by the time you read this there will
most likely be a hundred options better than what I’m currently using but one I recommend is
Google XML Sitemap, in any case just about all of the Wordpress sitemap builders will create a
sitemap and add it to the following location : http://www.blah.com/sitemap.xml
Here is one I use for Google optimization and deep link indexing:
After you have created your sitemap click on the sitemap link and submit the URI to your
sitemap so Google can hopefully index all the pages you have on your website and not rely on
organically finding every page.
Another important link you need to check is your keyword relevancy for your site. If your
website is about selling books than you need to have selling and books as many times as
possible on your website. You need to include them in <h1> and <h2> tags if possible and fill
your pages with content that has those keywords. For instance here is a site I own based on
cyber security. I want to make sure Google associates that site with Cyber Security and searches
related to it, here is how I can check:
For your website to be a top ranking site for search queries there are a few serious key factors.
The most important factor are links to your site from RELEVANT high ranking websites to your
site. Links from porn sites, sites hosting illegal content and poor content and quality sites will
actually hurt you in Google rankings. The site below I made a mistake with my site, while I have
millions of links to my site I don’t currently have a pagerank because I mistakenly pointed a
porn site directory to my site and Google sees that as the most linked content to my site
therefore penalizing my site for Cyber Security queries. Obviously I have removed the link to my
site but it takes time for Google to readjust and recheck your sites inbound links. Once done my
site will rank very high as I have also paid for link campaigns from Cyber Security sites instead of
trying to take the quick and old way of getting pagerank and high search results (this used to
work in an older Google search algorithm).
We can look at another negative the site has currently, it does not have a multilingual package
or plugin installed. This means only English reading visitors will be able to read the content on
my site by default. They can try and use Google translate or another translate service but that
might be a hassle and many visitors will simply move on. If your site automatically detects what
country the user is coming from and renders the page in their native language they won’t think
twice about the content and may just assume you are from their region, this also would build
trust In their mind. Possibly the biggest loss by not having a multilingual package installed is
that Google will not index your website worldwide in each native language. This means your
site most likely will be at the bottom of searches worldwide, if your site can parse its content in
whatever language is detected by the visitors browser the Googlebot will crawl your site in each
of those languages and index the content in that foreign language.
If you setup these accounts and be mindful to how Google is handling your content you will be
far more successful in quickly setting up sites and having Google instantly start driving you
organic traffic which is very valuable for resale.
CHAPTER 6. SEO Techniques, Link Building & Directories
I assume if you have come this far you understand at least the basics of Search Engine
Optimization. If we are flipping a lot of websites we don’t necessarily need to be at the top of
any search engine nor generate thousands of visits from search traffic a day. We still need to
prepare our websites properly for optimal SEO, we do this for our future buyer of the website
and also in case we have to hold onto the website for a significant amount of time which means
we want to generate as much revenue from traffic were receiving before sale. Additionally, if
we are flipping websites on reputable aftermarkets and through respected brokers search
engine traffic is an asset and will only keep adding value to your website. Nothing makes a
buyer more at ease about making a big offer than showing them that the site receives natural
traffic and they don’t have to worry about buying a trumped up site and will pay top dollar.
I wish I could tell you that there is some secret formula that goes into the Google search engine
ranking system and how you can rank #1 automatically like thousands of sites out there claim.
There is no secret formula; there are best practices that are used to provide your site with the
best chance to rank at the top of the search results. Google continuously changes its formulas
and ranking criteria to stay in from of scammers, blackhat SEO propagators and SEO firms. Any
site that claims they have a secret formula or method to rank #1 in Google is hype, I have paid
top dollar testing some of these sites to see if they actually do know something the industry
doesn’t, they don’t, there is usually fine print or something hidden in your user agreement that
protects them from their guarantees, puffery is a common legal word which basically means a
comment made by a company that is so ridiculous nobody would actually take seriously which
by law allows them to make outrageous claims.
There is software that is FREE which has some amazing SEO features to help you out monitoring
SEO status and placement which you may have heard of know as Traffic Travis which provides
the following information for your website FREE.
Projects
Set up separate projects for each website you wish to monitor. With one click you can then
bring up this data for analysis.
How do you rank?
Find out where your site appears in the search engine results for every word in your keyword
list. Traffic Travis hunts through Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and Ask to show you exactly
where you stand.
Competitor Analysis
Monitor your competitors' movements in the search engines. Traffic Travis remembers data
from previous searches, so you can see whether a website is moving up or down the search
engines over time.
Top Ranking Sites - Analyse the top ranking sites for your keywords with the click of a button.
Keyword Suggestion Tool - Suggests variations on a particular keyword. Useful for both PPC and
SEO campaigns.
Print & Save Reports
Great for SEO professionals: Once you've created your reports and graphs of search engine
positions, competition behavior and movements over time… save them or print them out to
send to clients. Or simply file them away in a nice folder somewhere… it's up to you!
I certainly recommend making a free download of this software - Traffic Travis
Meta Tags
The basics of SEO have not changed, first start with your meta tags which most modern web
applications will try and create for you based on the content of your pages but you need to
verify they are being done correctly.
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on
the page itself, but only in the page’s code. Meta tags are basically little content descriptors
that help tell search engines what a web page is about. The only difference between tags you
can see (on your favorite blog) and tags you can’t see is the location of the tags and how search
engines parse and database them and your site. Meta tags only exist in HTML, usually at the
“head” of the page, and so are only visible to search engines (and people who know where to
look). The “meta” stands for “metadata,” which is the kind of data these tags provide, brief
summary or keywords of what data a page and site contain.
If you want to view what your meta tags are or any site your browsing just click on “view page
source” anywhere on the page.
A new tab will open in Chrome and in FireFox it is currently a pop up window. The part at the
top, or “head” of the page, is where the meta tags should be.
There are four major types of meta tags that are worth knowing about, there are significantly
more but most are irrelevant for our purposes. Some meta tags have also been deprecated by
Google and other search engines and others should be regularly used, and will very likely
increase your traffic by letting Google know who you are and what you provide. So the four
types of meta tags we care most about:




Meta Keywords Attribute - A series of keywords you deem relevant to the page
in question.
Title Tag - This is the text you'll see at the top of your browser. Search engines
view this text as the "title" of your page.
Meta Description Attribute - A brief description of the page.
Meta Robots Attribute - An indication to search engine crawlers (robots or
"bots") as to what they should do with the page.
Meta Keywords Attributes which are our meta keywords are an example of a meta tag that has
lost most of its value these days and search engines use keyword density and other factors on
your page to generate valid keywords for your webpage. Years ago, the meta keyword tags
were one of the most important pieces of SEO and search engines relied on your keyword list to
display your page based off of people searching for these keywords. The meta keywords were
basically devalued as a way to stop blackhat SEO and SEO firms from using a list of high paying,
high value and high searched keywords in the meta keywords list for a website that had none of
the content the keywords listed. This was an obvious loophole, virtually all the search engines
have patched this hole and devalued this meta value.
Meta Title Tags are the most important meta tags these days for SEO and page related ranking
criteria. These tags have a real impact on search rankings and, perhaps just as importantly, are
the only one of the tags that the average user will actually notice. You’ll find them at the top of
your browser. This is particularly useful if you want to give the page one primary title for the
user but want to clarify or simplify that information for SEO purposes and for the user who’s
shuffling multiple tabs on their desktop.
The meta description tag can be a useful meta tag as, very simply, it explains to search engines
and even searchers themselves what your page is about. If you were to Google the phrase
“meta keywords” for example you would see results like this:
It’s important to note that the description tag won’t always show up in the results for a Google
search (Google frequently picks a snippet of text from the page itself) but it’s useful in other
ways. Google has also stated that keywords in meta descriptions won’t affect your rankings.
However, a compelling meta description tag could entice searchers to click through from the
SERP to your site, especially if the description includes the keywords they were searching for.
Meta Robots Attribute tells the search engines what to do with your pages:
index/noindex - This tells the engines whether to show your page in search results or not.
follow/nofollow - This tells the engines what to do with links on your pages: whether they
should trust and "follow" your links to the next page or not.
Meta tags and how they affect SEO in a nutshell; the title tag alone can impact your search
engine rankings, descriptive tags may encourage users to visit your site, the meta description
may serve as "organic ad text”.
Meta tags aren’t hard to implement yourself you don’t really need a programmer, just some
experience with HTML. I recommend doing a search for “generate meta tags” and you will find
countless free SEO sites that will take your webpage or input about your webpage and generate
optimal meta tags for your site. If you are running a Wordpress site simply search in the plugins
section and load an SEO optimization plugin, here is the one that I use which automatically tries
to detect the best meta tags for each page, you can also manually override the settings if you
do not like the defaults, this is the most popular plugin now SEO ULTIMATE:
SEO Crafted URLs
Using well crafted URI structure for optimal SEO, simply put if you have a Sony Video Camera
you want to sell and your default E-Commerce software adds your listing page like this:
http://www.blahblahblah.com/item.php?=23432 this is horrible for SEO, there is nothing in the
link related to your product so you have to rely on meta tags and the search engines correcting
ranking the content inside the page to rank high. A page like that will almost never rank well
unless you have countless relevant high ranking domain names and links pointing to it. A well
crafted SEO link would look like this: http://wwww.blahblahblah.com/new-sony-video-cameramodel-35323. What I did there was use the product as part of the search criteria, Google will
use the URI in the search results.
Quick Dos and Don’ts with link structure: Use hyphens to separate words when necessary for
readability. They should not use underscores, spaces, or any other characters to separate
words. Overuse of hyphens in URLs can be seen as spammy, so it’s best to use caution and limit
hyphen use in URLs when possible. Never be longer than 2,048 characters; otherwise Internet
Explorer won't be able to load the page. Avoid the use of parameters, if possible. If parameters
need to be used, they should be limited to two or less. URLs describe a site or page to visitors
and search engines. Keeping them relevant, compelling, and accurate is the key to ranking well.
The URL of a web document should ideally be as descriptive and brief as possible. If, for
example, a site's structure has several levels of files and navigation, the URL should reflect this
with folders and subfolders. Individual pages' URLs should also be descriptive without being
overly lengthy, so that a visitor who sees only the URL could have a good idea of what to expect
on the page.
A well-crafted URL should semantically make sense and be a semantically accurate URL. (This of
course assumes that the page actually is about what is described) It is easy to tell the subject of
the URL just by examining its URL. This is helpful to both humans and search engines. The other
benefit of having a semantically correct URL, is that webmasters are more likely to get search
engine-referred traffic due to the keywords in the URL. These, like title tags, are used for
determining relevancy and computing rankings. Well-written URLs have the additional benefit
of serving as their own anchor text when copied and pasted as links in forums, blogs, or other
online venues.
Social Media Accounts
Social media accounts span multiple chapters, they are essential these days if you want to build
and flip a website for five figures plus. I am not talking about Facebook and Twitter followers in
this chapter, I am talking about adding multiple links to your website(s) within your social media
accounts. You can make social media accounts for each website or just setup individual social
media accounts and promote multiple websites. Links and discussion about your website within
your social media accounts will help your website rank higher in search engines these days. If
you are planning a big sale of a single website you should make social media accounts just for
that website, do this because when you sell the website you will want to include the social
media accounts in the sale as they are an asset and add significant value to your website or
brand. If you are planning on flipping lots of websites and at quick and easy prices you can get
away with promoting multiple sites from the same accounts and not include them in the sale. It
really comes down to your plan, typically I will make individual accounts for sites that I want to
sell for $15,000+ and have group accounts for sites that I don’t mind dumping for less. In either
case you will want to link all of your social media accounts together, that way if you update, like
or post something it should propagate throughout all of your social media accounts.
Social media accounts recommended:
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Facebook.com – Create a Business page and User Account
Twitter.com
HubPages.com
InstaGram.com
Pinterest.com
StumbleUpon.com
Google Plus
Reddit
Myspace (Might still have a little bit of value – but probably not)
Link Building
Just like with meta tags the concept of link building has drastically evolved from what it once
was and how it was seen by the search engines. In the older days of search it did not really
matter where links to your site came from, their quality or content, just how many links you
had pointing to it. The more links you had, the higher you ranked and it really did not matter
how many sites you linked to as only the links to your site were counted and factored into your
search ranking. This created a haven of sites with “trade links with us” where just about any site
would add a link to your site just so long as you added a link to theirs. This also created massive
amounts of link farms where webmasters would create websites or a links page just full of links
to other sites that they were trading with and eventually selling text links to pages that were
completely unlinked from any functional website at all. Since this practice was not yet frowned
upon it spawned a bunch of companies with the sole purpose of selling links between websites
and could offer one way links from a hundred links on one unlinked link page they would point
at your website. For a long time this all worked, webmasters were happy because they could
buy their way to the top of the search results and then could sell back links to page on their site
for hundreds of a dollars a month. Search results began displaying portals and link directories at
the top of every search making it impossible for an internet user to find the content that they
were actually searching for as they would have to sort through a labyrinth of garbage websites
to find anything useful. This is what helped Google rise to power so rapidly as they started
ranking sites based on their actual content and the quality of the links to their sites.
This does not mean that link building is dead or worthless, it means that if your are exchanging
links with another site you need to make sure the site is established, well created, indexed in
Google and does not have a bad reputation or filled with spam or you may be penalized for
linking to the site. The term penalized can mean many things when talking about how Google
ranks and processes sites on its search pages. Penalized could mean your pagerank drops one
number, maybe it drops one spot in the rankings or maybe it is delisted completely from all
Google search results and banned permanently. Google is certainly an enigma and they do not
have any set guidelines or rules for how they treat and rank your site, which they publish
anyway. They own the search market, your site being listed in their search pages is a privilege
and not a right as far as they are concerned so they will do as they please and there is not much
a small webmaster can do in retaliation or in defense, Google does not publish a number to a
hotline for webmasters to ask questions about how their websites are ranking. If you get your
website banned from Google, you’re pretty much done as the value of the site has dropped to
virtually nothing unless it receives a lot of type in traffic.
There are still plenty of sites that are thriving in Google that offer link exchanges and link
trading, just make sure your trading with similar content sites and preferably higher pagerank
sites then your own. Many SEO firms used to think they had the formulas cracked that Google
uses for ranking, an example would be a pagerank 5 site linking one way to a pagerank 1 site
would immediately bring the pagerank 1 site up to a pagerank 2, a PR 8 site linking to a PR 1 site
would bring it to a PR4. If a PR8 site gives up 20 links to PR5 sites or lower its rank will fall to a
PR7 site and so forth. Some of the metrics were pretty close for awhile and Google became
easier and easier to predict which drove Google to the point of completely rewriting its
algorithms to the point where they don’t seem to make any sense anymore. From search
results and pageranks they are giving out we can still infer that link building with the right sites
will help your site in the rankings and that is all we really care about. If you want to try and
decipher Google’s latest algorithms and ranking metrics go right ahead, by the time you get
remotely close to what they look like Google will have already shuffled up their algorithmic
deck if you will.
Sites that you can still sign up with and freely exchange links with other members without fear
of being banned are:
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http://www.freerelevantlinks.com/
http://www.linkmarket.net
http://www.link-exchange.ws/
http://www.links-pal.com/
These link exchange sites have stood the test of time, they have good Google pageranks and are
established and trusted therefore using their sites to find link partners is the safest way to do
so. If you decide to go on your own hunt for link exchanges and find yourself trapped in a link
farm and get banned don’t say you were not warned. This is the free and cheap way to get links
to your site, nobody said it was the only way though! If you’re willing to invest a little bit into
your site there is an easier and safer way.
Buying One-Way DOFOLLOW Text Links
Inbound links are still one of the most important factors in climbing to the top of the search
results, if not the most important factor. Over time our sites will naturally get linked to if we
have relevant useful content, products or services. This process can take years to yield
significant results so were going to kick start the process. A one-way DOFOLLOW text link
means that another site is linking directly to your website without you having to link back. The
DOFOLLOW means that when Google crawls the webpage that has your link it will follow the
link onto your site and index and credit the link to your site. If the link wasn’t a DOFOLLOW link
Google would index the page with your link but not treat the URL to your site as a link and
would not continue to your site and indexing and ranking your content for the link. These links
are essentially worthless to us, you will run into a lot of people on link exchanges trying to get
away with proving you a NoFollow link to your site while you provide them a DoFollow link to
theirs, essentially helping them and hurting you.
I have already done all the work for you and created a list of well trusted, well established and
reputable companies that I have all personally used more times than I could ever count to buy
and sell text links on. These sites will either let you chose your own sites that you want links
from or automatically generate a list of sites with content and site category that matches
closest to yours. These sites only allow reputable, high ranking and thoroughly vetted websites
to be added in their pool of linkable websites. This means they are manually reviewing the site
to make sure that it has plenty of content; it is aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, well
established and not created yesterday. Typically they will only accept domain names with over
a thousand pages indexed in Google, a domain authority of at least 10 and a pagerank of at
least three. For more on what Domain Authority is checkout the (PUN intended) authority
https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
Here is my list of vetted and trusted sites you can safely buy links from at a price you set:
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TextLinks
LinkWorth
BackLinks
LinksPanel
MatoMySEO (Formerly Text Link Ads)
Website Directories
So here we go again, another former SEO gold mine that could rocket you to the very top of the
search results over night. This was the last piece of the puzzle, you create your perfect meta
tags, buy some text links and submit your website to a directory search engine with a list of
hundreds of directories adding your website instantly to them all. Take a nap, search for your
keywords and you’ve done it, now you need to upgrade your hosting because you have too
much traffic coming in. In a nutshell, that was SEO in the old days and like everything else
discussed in this chapter website directories now come with a catch and require some due
diligence on your part (In general, you know I’m going to give you a list).
Basically a website directory is exactly as it sounds, it is a directory of websites (sometimes
images, company information, etc) organized from top level category down to sub categories
where every website fits in like a puzzle. Now don’t get me wrong, directories are still
extremely powerful and they have been around since the dawn of the internet, however if
you’re using directory submission software from some no name company it is more than likely
filled with a list of unchecked directories pulled from internet searches for strings that are
contained within common directory scripts and slapped together for your website to be
submitted to. Google respects older directories, ones that have been around for years and
earned their spot to hold ranking power. Google on the other hand may penalize you for listing
in newly created directories, directories it considers spammy or slapped together just to sell
links in the directory and provide nothing in return and directories that claim outland nous stats
and SEO return on listing guarantees for listing your site in their directory. Google wants
directories to act with some class, they expect a directory to provide a community service by
organizing relevant businesses and websites into nicely categorized structures, Google wants
directories to vet the websites that it accepts into directory to protect browsers of that
directory from harmful links and fraudulent companies.
Avoid mass listing your website on every free directory site that is on the internet as that will
only spell disaster, you may be linking your website next another site that is hosting illegal
software or child pornography and you and all the sites in the directory will likely end up
banned from Google. You need to check the age of any directory you are attempting to submit
into, is this directory going to exist tomorrow or are they trying to pump and dump? Are they
accepting every link that is submitted or are they rejecting most links? Does the directory only
have a paid option and not a free submission to compliment? Does the directory have a high
pagerank? (Looking for 4 or higher) Does the directory receive a lot of traffic? (Alexa ranking
200,000 or below) These are questions you need to ask yourself before considering any
directory submission.
Typically website directory sites will have several different types of submission services offered,
they will have a free website submission that will typically limit the length of your site keywords
and your site description, this free service will typically have a disclaimer that it may take
several months for your site to be reviewed and accepted or rejected. This is all fine, we would
except that any directory worth being listed in is receiving hundreds or even thousands of
submissions a day and if they are going to vet the listings time will be required. Just like with
trading links, it is free but a slower process so if you are on a tight budget and you are at a legit
directory website than take your time and fill out your website information professionally and
accurately and eventually it will most likely be listed in the directory. The next common service
is usually a middle of the road type of listing, it will have a small listing fee but will guarantee
that your site is reviewed within maybe 5 days or up to 30 days for some sites. This option will
also usually offer you a money back guarantee, if your website is rejected your review fee or
listing fee will be refunded back to you. Typically you will also have a few additional listing
options such as deep URL linking (links to not just your homepage but sub pages – good for
SEO) longer descriptions and maybe more keywords. Lastly, just about every directory site will
have a featured listing which will include possibly top listing for your website in its category,
permanent directory placement for life, login and password access to update and change your
website in the future and typically there will be a one to three day turn around time.
Realistically, the only time you should be considering the featured listing option on a directory
site is if it is going to provide you with a good amount of traffic. There are only a few directories
I recommend considering doing a featured listing and I’ll outline them in my recommended
directory listing websites below. Directory sites are about quality, that is really all we want from
them. They provide us with backlinks, help bump up our pagerank and maybe provide us with
some additional traffic to our site. We don’t want to pay top dollar for directory listings so the
basic small fee service that guarantees us inclusion and a quick review period is all we really
need. How many times have you found yourself searching for a product or service and used a
directory website to try and find it? This isn’t 1994, we are blessed with search engines these
days so we don’t have to bounce around from directory to directory trying to locate something.
However, established directories will still give our websites that SEO shot in the arm booster
and help us rank better and more accurately as our website category should be clearly defined
to the search engines as well as a description of our website content and keywords as we want
them to appear.
Directories are still very powerful and here are the ones I recommend and regularly use:
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www.dmoz.org – Pagerank 7 – Alexa rank 2,000! FREE – best and most powerful
directory on the net
http://www.products-and-services.com/ - Pagerank 7 – Alexa Ranking 250,000 – FREE
http://www.bizweb.com/InfoForm/index.html - Pagerank 6 - 500,000 – FREE for
Businesses in the United States
https://www.somuch.com/submit-links/ - Pagerank 5 – Alexa Ranking 14,000 – FREE
Option, Accelerated Option and Enhanced Option
Botw – Pagerank 7 – Alexa Ranking 20,000! (3rd best directory behind DMOZ and Yahoo Recommend for a site you want to sell for more than $5,000 – not free service but
worth the money if you have a site you want top dollar for)
Yahoo Business Directory - $299 Annual fee but the second best directory on the web
behind DMOZ
http://directory.ac/ - Pagerank 4 – Alexa Rank 100,000
InCrawler.com – Pagerank 5 – Alexa Rank 150,000 - $25 Regular Listing
http://www.splashdirectory.com/ - Pagerank 5 – Alexa Rank 600,000 - $25 Regular
Listing
CHAPTER 7. Creating & Generating Content
Generating and creating content is what freezes most would be website developers, flippers
and enthusiast from getting off the ground. To get started you don’t need to waste any of your
wisdom or brain power creating meaningful posts, articles and videos. You may want to create
some of your own content later on or just go right at it if you have a topic you know a lot about
and you are good at writing and don’t mind spending time writing.
Using Free Already Created Article Content
If you are creating a content based site a good way to get the site off the ground and loaded
with free content in a matter of minutes is to utilize free article posting sites. We can use these
sites again later if you create your own content to have other webmasters blasting your content
and links all over the web without you lifting a finger. Here are some great FREE or low cost
article sites depending on if you want unique or shared content. Too much duplicate content on
your website may hurt it in search engine rankings, it is a great starting point and if your
focused on quick flipping of websites it is a fine strategy. Sites (In no particular order):
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http://www.allthewebsites.org/
http://goarticles.com
http://www.articlesfactory.com
http://www.articlesbase.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://my.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.amazines.com
http://www.articlecube.com/
http://www.freewebsitedirectory.com/
http://www.a1articles.com/
These article sites were created for us, authors have spend countless hours writing all of the
content available for us to put on our websites FREE of charge in a matter of seconds. Most of
the sites will require that you copy the content exactly as they provide it for you, typically you
will have to post a link to the author (make it a NOFOLLOW link unless required to make it a
DOFOLLOW which is rare). If you are using Wordpress we can really take advantage of this free
content and our save our valuable time, instead of manually copying and pasting articles and
posts onto our websites we can download a plugin in the directory such as RSS poster and a
myriad of others that will query the article sites you provide with a list of keywords on an
hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc basis and automatically post new articles to your websites
without you having to lift a finger. This means you will be receiving updated, recent and
constant content for your website without doing a thing. You can sit back and let your website
grow, watch Google keep indexing more and more pages and have more and more users sign
up to your site.
Later on I will show you how we can make ridiculous revenue on auto-pilot using this free auto
generated content. I sold my first $10,000 website using this process, I spent a total of 5 hours
on the website the entire time I owned it and purchased the domain name for $25, you can do
the math on that ridiculous return on investment.
Generating Content from Media Sites
Another easily exploitable means of free content is the use of video streaming sites such as
Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, Dailymotion and hundreds of other media giants. These sites allow
for users to “share” and “embed” video content onto other websites. This allows us another
method of instant content. Do a search on a niche your interested in creating a website around,
a domain name you currently own or an expired domain name on youtube for example. For
example I want to find a security video from a Defcon speech for one of my security websites, I
also want free content without having to create the content myself. I do a search for “How to
Shot Web Defcon” and here is the video I want to add to my website to create more free
content:
You’ll see I clicked the share menu option and am provided with a short URL for the Youtube
video to share or I can use it to embed into my site without lifting a finger. If you are running
Wordpress download this plugin:
Once this plugin is activated anytime I create a post on my Wordpress site and include a link to
a video for any of the media sites it will automatically embed the video into my page and create
a thumbnail for my blog post. The post is this simple:
So I created my own SEO title, and used the brief description provided by the author, this will
now be indexed on my website. Where you see the video post thumbnail all I type was paste
the code https://youtu.be/VtFuAH19Qz0 into the box and it was automatically generated for
me. The plugin also created the thumbnail for my main page:
Now I can take advantage of social media links, category keyword tags, title tags and SEO, not
to mention new content which Google looks for in order to keep ranking a site higher or letting
it fall. New content on your site is essential, your either growing or dying in Google’s eyes.
If you’re not using Wordpress you can use an iframe and embed the video into your website
with simple code (I used the full youtube URL) such as:
<iframe width="665" height="499"
src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VtFuAH19Qz0?feature=oembed" frameborder="0"
allowfullscreen></iframe>
You can quickly generate hundreds of pages and content related to your website niche or
theme in a derivative manner such as just described. You can mix up videos with free articles
and have a site full of niche content that you did not have to create. Once you know how to
manually do it there are plugins and scripts that will allow you to automate it but you should
practice manually doing first to get a feel for what content and how much and how fast you
want it to be loaded. A website that is blank one day and has 10,000 posts the next day may
create suspicion within Google so pace your content generation out at first. You can also spread
out the content amongst your sites if you are flipping more than just one site so you keep
Google hungry for more and everything gets indexed as it should.
Paraphrasing, Quoting & Recreating Content
Another easy way to generate content is to paraphrase other content, this takes considerably
more time but will allow you to add content for latest news items and events. You can monitor
news feeds such as news.google.com and monitor twitter to see what is trending currently. You
can usually find sites where you can paraphrase or quote entire blocks of content as long as you
give credit back to the original author or site providing you with news and information
essentially hot off the press. You can also read multiple hot news items and combine and
rewrite the information in your own words, once again you’ll have hot trending content but you
will have to do some work in most cases depending on what sources your using and if you’re
willing to rewrite content in your own words or quote or paraphrase other sites. Make sure you
always read the terms and policies of a site you are going to try and quote and paraphrase
from, you’ll find that some sites encourage it and others forbid it so tread carefully, remember
though, if you are writing an article in your own words you are not copywriting anyone else’s
content, it is now your content and your words.
Using Forum Software for User Generated Content
What is better than derivative content? Fresh user generated and unique content! Think about
scripts and applications you can setup where your visitors are commenting on something,
discussing something or reviewing something on their own. A very common method of
automated content is to setup a forum. There are loads of options for setting up forums, so if
you took the Wordpress route, your still in luck! There is a very popular forum plugin called
bbPress which is very well supported and has a large community backing it. You’ll see it in just
about every plugin search you do:
This forum software rolls right into your Wordpress site and once installed will look like:
I have disabled the forum for now, but you can see by creating a few topics and generating
some hot debatable topics you will get a lot of visitors who will sign up and get involved in the
discussion.
You can also keep your Wordpress site and install an independent forum software and link to it,
or you can go straight with the forum software and let a community develop. Here is one I just
setup in a few minutes called fluxBB which is free and available in your cPanel application
manager.
This forum is also disabled, forums with default installations become spammer central and once
they find out they can post content with links they add it to their forum auto posting software
which gets spread like wildfire on the Blackhat SEO market and in the blink of an eye you can
have 10,000 spammers signed up posting nothing but spam links.
To prevent this we need to first configure the site to not allow unregistered users to post,
secondly users that are newly registered cannot post links and usually I will never allow any
links to be posted but for users that have posted ten posts on topic without spamming I may
allow a single link to be posted if it is on topic. Next, and an extremely important thing you
need to do is install a Captcha, this is a user test to prove they are not a bot and a real visitor
attempting to sign up or make a post. Why not make money and verify users at the same time?
Guess what? You can! Sign up for a free publisher account with SolveMedia and it displays a
very short advertisement and provides a user a solve phrase to type in. Once the user types in
the phrase they can login, register or post depending on how you set it up, you will also be
generating CPC and CPM revenue from your site. Lastly, you need to pay a little bit of attention
to your forum sites, once forums get large enough the amount of posts a day can be several
thousands and consume large portions of your time. This also means that you are having
thousands of pages indexed in Google a day and generating thousands of pageviews a day
which means your forum is making you a lot of money on a daily basis once you add in some of
the tricks coming up in the revenue generation chapter. Typically, I sell my forum websites
when they have around 10,000 users and less than 100,000 posts as they become too time
consuming for me and I am not interested in running a forum site, you may be interested in it
and they can be extremely profitable. I have sold several young forums, less than six months old
for over $5,000 which required very little maintenance and management.
If a forum does not seem like a path your interested in pursuing your still in luck if you took the
Wordpress route. Wordpress allows for comments, you can set up WP to allow anyone to leave
comments for any posts without registering, you can require registration (recommended – use
SolveMedia Captcha as well). My recommendation though if your allowing comments is that
you do not allow for comments with URL links or spammers will take advantage of this again.
Spammers are sneaky as well, they use what are known as “scouts” which are actual users that
register on blogs and make real comments that are relevant to your content luring you into a
false sense of trust. Many webmasters will select the user and allow them to post freely since
their first posts were harmless or even helpful, once the scout knows they are in this free post
state they begin to spam for other spam groups, or they make a list of sites where they are
approved and they sell their ability to post links on high rank sites, you can see eBay sellers
offering 1000’s of text link ads on high pagerank sites and a lot of those links come from these
sites where they have become “trusted”. Regardless, commenting, correctly configured and
somewhat routinely monitored can keep generating new content for your site and drive new
registrations and discussions on your blog. If you’re lucky your blog could end up being shared
around the internet where hundreds of users are taking part in an almost real time
conversation which Google will eat up and keep ranking you higher.
Setting up a Directory
Another common but time consuming way of creating content is by creating a Directory based
website or adding a Directory plugin to their Wordpress theme. You can allow free directory
submission from users to add their websites or services, etc which provides free content to
your site. The faster way of doing this is by adding sites yourself into your own directory and
writing a brief description or review of the product, site or service. I will go into this process of
self adding and why we would do it again once we get into revenue generation. We will be
adding sites, companies and products to our directory creating content and generating revenue
when people click on our links. Directory sites are usually hard to get started, they need a
pagerank and a lot of links to become relevant. However, once a directory site gets off the
ground it can generate you significant passive revenue. I have had directory sites where I sold
links for $10 each and would earn between $120-$200 a day just from submissions, this was a
website I wish I had not sold but that is what I do, I don’t like to be attached to websites for too
long with the exception of ones that interest me (this one I should have kept because it was on
autopilot but I was offered a ridiculous amount of money for it and walked away).
Borrowing RSS Feeds
Free content can be as simple as an RSS feed, do some Google searches for “RSS Feed” and your
niche or keyword(s) and see how many sites offer feeds related to what you’re trying to build or
grow. See if these sites have restrictions on their RSS feeds, many of these feed sites will only
allow users to view the feeds through user apps or directly to your cell phone for instance.
However, some of these sites may allow you to redisplay the feed content directly on your site
as long as you are linking back to them. These sites can be gold mines of free content if they
allow you to aggregate the data onto your website. There are many scripts such as page2rss
and countless ones built into WordPress and Joomla that will repost the RSS feed content as it
becomes available onto your site providing you will new relevant content, if you find enough of
these feeds you can sit back and watch thousands of pages of your site being indexed daily
blasting you to the top of the searches and driving thousands of visitors to your site. Once
again, this can take a good amount of searching, time and even negotiating to find sites with
RSS feeds related to your content that will allow you to repost their content.
Writing Product & Service Reviews
Another simple way to create content is to pick products, services or websites or something
related to your niche that you have knowledge of. Use your knowledge of these products, sites
or services to write reviews about the different ones and provide ratings. There are many rating
and review plugins for Joomla and Wordpress you can use. This is usually easiest if your
reviewing products as there are typically a lot more products out there than sites or services for
you to review. For instance, if you’re a Camera expert were going to use this to create content
and generate revenue at the same time. A more detailed description of the revenue part
discussed later but essentially you will be reviewing products on a site such as Amazon for
which you will provide a link to the product with an affiliate or associate code so if the visitor
reads your review, clicks the link to the product and purchases it you will earn commission from
the sale. For free content sake, you can practice by choosing products you know about or are
related to your niche and write reviews about them. Some of the top Google searches are
related to reviews “What is the best Camera?” “What is the best car for the money?” “What is
the best drone for the money?” and so on and so on. Your page title would be related to the
question, either something such as “The Top Ten Best Digital Cameras” or go directly for the
question “What is the best digital Camera?” Guess what, you’re up! If you know what you’re
talking about visitors will trust your opinion and take your advice when making a purchase for
which you’ll take commission on. Get the gist? Some of the top affiliate earners make simple
sites just providing reviews and advice to the top searched products and services. These top
affiliates are clearing $100,000’s a month.
Let’s not forget, you don’t have to rely on others content, products and creations to generate
content from. What do you do for a living? Are you an expert at anything? Is there something
you are highly interested in? Do you have a hobby you love? Get those brain juices flowing and
you can create your own unique genuine content from nothing other than your own ingenuity
and this usually draws a crowd if it is something that has a large following or there is not a lot of
information about. You can control this niche if you’re knowledgeable, confident and honest.
This is not optimal for website flipping, but it can be a great start for your first website, perhaps
you will want to keep this website and never sell it. What you do with the information provided
to you is truly up to you.
CHAPTER 8. Setting up Product Based Websites
Some website flippers find a web application they can master, know the ins and outs of it,
configure it subconsciously and move onto the next web project. Other website flippers don’t
like routine, they don’t want to build with an assembly line but rather by the seat of their pants
which leads them to continuously develop different web applications, different niches and
different types of websites. Personally, I do enjoy the assembly line process for 95% of my
websites, I like to know that I can setup, customize & configure a Wordpress site with hundreds
of pages of content in less than an hour. I like knowing where every piece of the puzzle is and
fits but sometimes it is good to switch things up a bit. When I originally began website
development and got into internet sales it was through E-Commerce, I was an executive officer
of a corporation that sold millions of dollars worth of products online using websites, scripts
and programs that I actually wrote and developed. I did not use any cookie cutter packages that
had options with themes, plugins and extensions that could be turned on or off with a few
simple clicks of the mouse. I have personally sold over a million dollars worth of physical
products online, everything from antique guitars to hand built corn hole game sets. I am talking
about products that I physically shipped out of one of my storage sites or my own house,
packaged with my own hands (I’ve also paid college kids and outsourced shipping when sales
get ridiculous).
Learning the Basics of Online Product Sales
Don’t be scared of this chapter yet, you don’t have to physically pack and ship anything if you
don’t want, you don’t have to create and assemble your own line of products, you don’t have to
schedule daily USPS/UPS pickups to get the myriad of packages at your doorstep everyday but
for those of you who do want to sell physical products and ship them out yourself you’ll find
that making money online is too easy. The easiest and fastest way to generate revenue online is
from selling physical products that are actually in your possession. Keep in mind, you can sell all
kinds of products on your website but if you have never sold anything online before the best
way to start and usually what I teach people is to sell something they can touch. Why? Because
a product that you can see and feel means that you can describe with great detail everything
there is to know about the product, you can pull out your digital camera and take the perfect
pictures of your item which allows you to focus on the perfect condition the item is in or
highlight a small flaw you might have noticed. You can stick the product on a scale and measure
it to know exactly what size box and materials are needed to ship it out. When your item sells
you get to make sure it is carefully and properly packaged and shipped out on time to the
correct recipient and receive the payment directly and in real time.
This type of sales process empowers a new seller and helps them quickly generate confidence
that they can sell anything with ease because they have seen the whole process unfold from
start to finish and it happened right in front of them using their own abilities. I like to call this
the training wheel approach to online sales, typically I will have new sellers actually use a third
party site such as eBay or Amazon to make their first sales. Using a third party to help facilitate
the sale simplifies everything so the new seller can focus on just the core process of the sale
and not be distracted with marketing, advertising, merchant accounts and timelines. If you have
never sold anything before online I recommend you give it a crack to get your feet wet, sell
your old cell phone, video game system or games or just find something that maybe you were
too lazy to return or never wanted as a Christmas gift and see how much money you can get for
the item. Practice researching the potential resale value of an item and the description you’re
going to write to sell it to anyone and remove all doubt from your potential buyers mind that
the product isn’t exactly what you are telling them it is, make the potential buyer think the
product is even better than you’ve pictured and described it, not by lying but by selling. Sales
are made on trust, if you can’t write a sales description that accurately describes what your
selling, exactly what condition it is in, how and when the buyer will receive the item and that
their money is safe in your hands because if they receive your item and it isn’t what you’ve
described you had better show the customer your honest nature and quickly process them a
refund. If you have alleviated any and all potential and actual buyer concerns and quickly and
concisely responded to any message they have sent you and answered their questions in a
professional and timely manner you have nothing to worry about, online sales is an easy game.
However, if something goes wrong with an order and you panic and respond in an
unprofessional manner, argue with or insult a customer, ignore their questions hoping they will
just go away and are hell bent on never providing a customer a refund thinking you’re never at
fault and won’t take responsibility for a bad transaction – stop reading – skip this chapter – do
not waste anymore of your time.
In sales of any product or service there will always be transactions that don’t go smoothly for
whatever reason, there will always be refunds that have to be issued at some point, there will
always be a customer that no matter what you do will have an attitude and will never be happy
or content with the transaction. The good news, you’re going to win so many more times than
your going to lose that you’ll learn it is all just part of business and continue making forward
progress but learning from mistakes and misfortunes that come your way.
I am not trying to teach a sales course in this guide, I have already authored books you can pick
up at your local bookstore teaching sales techniques and I have a digital course on the way as
well. We are here to flip websites and along the way generate revenue from our domain names
and websites from all angles. For this guide to help you and be efficient I am going to have to
show you which doors to open to fill in any gaps you may have.
I am going to briefly touch on the various types of products that can be easily sold online and
point you in the direction needed to go in order to buy those products, build them, resell them,
drop ship them, print on demand them or digitally create and produce them.
This chapter started out with selling physical products that require storage, pictures and
shipping. These products can range to such a variety of products so I’ll break it down into some
easy categories and then let you know some easy places to find them. If you’re selling physical
products online it is pretty much essential that you sign-up for an account with one of these
sites:
PriceMiner/WorthPoint
The world's largest online price guide that helps you:
- Identify your items by viewing photos of similar items
- Ascertain current value
- Determine maker or artist
- View items currently for sale matching your search
- Find a venue to sell items
TeraPeak – Established and reputable site that will help you to navigate e-commerce, revealing
how products perform and how shoppers behave online. They make sense of some of the
biggest data sets around to tell you about trends and selling opportunities that matter right
now. Their main sources used to determine item value is based off of eBay/Amazon/Alibaba
sales. This is still a good metric for what you can sell an item on your website for, your research
is based off of “actual” sales prices and not “listing prices” that you see all over the internet,
most of those products never sell.
Finding Used Products
Physical products that can be purchased and resold with nice profit margins are household
goods, electronics and generally used goods. These products are very simple to get your hands
on, if it is warm out check your local classifieds or newspaper and locate yard sales that are in
your area, preferably community yard sales are great sources of inventory. The point of a yard
sale is to sell everything that out on display, this means you should be able to negotiate your
way into sick deals with huge profit margins. If you come at the end of a yard sale, the owners
are usually practically giving their items away; some will even trash whatever is left over. Make
sure you bring cash obviously as most sellers are not capable of accepting credit cards.
Another source of instant inventory are thrift stores and secondhand shops which are found
throughout American cities and suburbs. I can go to virtually any thrift store and make a $500
profit from one visit. This is why we purchased PriceMiner or TeraPeak accounts, we can
research on the fly and scan barcodes with our cell phones to quickly locate mispriced items
and underpriced items with lots of value and profit left to be made. If you’re not sure where
any local stores are there is a website dedicated to making them easy to find, just enter your zip
code: http://www.thethriftshopper.com/
There is a lot of buzz about Government repossessed auctions as well, there is a website service
dedicated to the resale of seized property, vehicles and high value items which can be found at
GovernmentAuctions.org. This is a membership web site that exists to help its users find, locate
and attend government auctions and foreclosures of every type so that they can achieve every
success buying things they would ordinarily pay retail prices for, but that, through government
auctions and bank foreclosures, they can buy at a significant discount.
If you’re looking for high priced, rare, vintage and antique products you’ll want to check out
some estate auctions, estate sales and storage auctions in your area. Just like with thrift stores
there is a website dedicated to these types of sales in your area: http://www.auctionzip.com/
and http://www.estatesales.net/ is decent at locating estate sales but not great. Antiques &
rare products can draw loads of traffic to your website which we can monetize in more ways
than just selling the product as we’ll talk about next chapter.
Most estate auction sites have online bidding options now which means you don’t need to
physically stand around bidding all night unless you enjoy doing that. You can use your
PriceMiner/TeraPeak account to research resale value of the products being offered and bid
accordingly.
One more key point to remember is that we are trying to earn revenue from our website while
we preparing to flip it, selling individual products does create website value but it is the least
optimal when selling the website unless you are going to include the inventory you have on the
site in the sale (I have done this before when selling a corporation). I have had success selling
antique and vintage websites without inventory, I used to slap up E-commerce sites for each
type of antiques, electronics & collectibles I had my hands on and I was able to sell everyone of
them.
Dropshipping & Wholesale Products
One of the most valuable websites that we can build and flip is a successful drop shipping Ecommerce site. Once you find a niche product line that doesn’t have a lot of competition or
weak competition that we can crush with the techniques in this guide we can control the sales
market for that niche. If our distributor is reliable and capable of fulfilling thousands of orders
at a time if need be you might never have to work again. Realistically it will come down to the
demand for the niche and if you can dominate your competition. You would need to recognize
your opportunity, analyze the market and figure out if it is an all in kind of deal or just going to
be a steady stream of sustainable but low growth income. Most product niche lines are just
that, steady streams of income that never gain the demand to explode or they explode rapidly
for a very short period of time which would be your exit window before the bubble burst. I’m
sure you can think of countless products that everyone had to have and then nobody wanted it
anymore, the Snuggie comes to mind when I think of niche rise and falls, if you were the
primary reseller of the Snuggie at its height and sold your website as a business you would have
cleared at least 8 figures.
Finding drop shippers is rather hard actually, true drop shippers that is and not middle men of
middle men. If you are interested in this avenue you will need some help, the best source for
reliable and niche drop shipping products came from World Wide Brands which is a company
dedicated to developing relationships with dropshippers so that when you create an account
with them they have a searchable database of all their verified and vetted companies you can
choose from. They also let you know who the contact at the company is, cell phone number
and they can even process and facilitate your account creation which is something you simply
can’t do on your own as a nobody. Another amazing benefit of this site is that you can apply to
hundreds of companies in a matter of minutes, all your information is stored in your profile and
forwarded to the drop shippers you are applying too. You will not have to visit each company
individually and fill out hundreds of forms to setup accounts.
When I had my corporation and sold massive amounts of drop shipped products we found all of
drop shippers at World Wide Brands, they do not get any commission for referring customers
or incentives. All drop shippers listed in their directory are constantly updated and removed if
inactive. They are also listed on the eBay website as a verified third party solutions provider. My
E-commerce Corporation owned a wholesale/drop ship packaging company that made specially
crafted foam packaging material and we were listed on the World Wide Brands directory and I
can assure you we had sign ups everyday and I never paid a penny to be listed in their directory
nor did they pay us. Drop shipping and wholesaling is big business, you may not qualify for all
accounts as an individual and WWBs will let you know ahead of time if a tax id and reseller id
for instance are required or if they accept sole proprietors for example.
Salehoo – This is an alternative to World Wide Brands, they are amazing but compared to
WWBs they still fall short. You can find Low-Cost Computers & Parts – access to over 8000
genuine wholesale suppliers and 1.6 million products at genuine wholesale prices. Find
products with low competition, easily filter out the super-competitive products where sales
could be slow and profits could be slim. Find products with great sell rates, use the slider
control to find products that sell more often than not. When you combine low competition with
good sales rate, you have a recipe for success! Get accurate selling prices as they will find the
average selling price for an exact product, so you can easily work out what your profit will be
combined with PriceMiner/WorthPoint
Alibaba.com should also come to mind, it is a great place to buy wholesale products, not great
for finding drop shippers. It is best suited for businesses that can make large purchase orders. I
have completed over a hundred wholesale orders from Alibaba based distributors and only
once did I not receive what I ordered which really became a problem when I had to try and
breach the language barrier. There is a great third party solution for Alibaba which I will cover in
the revenue generating chapter that can create accounts and integrate products onto your
webpage without you having to try and create accounts with companies in other countries that
can be a nightmare dealing with directly. I hired a Director of Sales just to deal with my
International distributors when I was pushing wholesale and drop ship products on a massive
scale. Don’t get off course and go down a rabbit hole, we are trying to flip these types of sites
repeatedly for huge returns, not get stuck negotiating international deals that could threaten
our financial stability and leave us with thousands of products that we can’t sell. For website
flipping niche drop shipping is certainly the way to go. If you’re going to build a company
around this one revenue stream or income type you’ll have to hire a lot of people and invest a
lot of time and money to even get started. I am speaking from actual experience as I have been
through the process several times but backed by LLCs, Corporations and investors.
Building and Creating Your Own Products
I have taken the liberty of providing you with some examples of products you can create and
resell online if you are so inclined. I am just trying to provide you with basic ideas of products
that can be easily made and reproduced so you can get your own creative juices flowing to find
something of your own or your interest that you might want to develop or create.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
http://www.internetsales.biz/make-and-sell-your-own-proucts/
A product that I listed above that I used to build and sell were cornhole sets, I was able to get
the product cost for each set down to $18 and would resell them for $150 all day long. This was
more of a hobby, I built one for my own pleasure and got the idea to try and sell them and
found it that it was a piece of cake to do so. The problem that I ran into was that I was selling
them at a rate that I could not keep up with. I even hired some employees and outsourced
some of the work and could not keep up, this meant I needed to either commit to this business
and hire the appropriate workforce to support the venue, slow down on the amount of sales
received by limiting the stock available or flipping the website and walking away. Obviously I
sold the website as an e-business and did so locally so I could show the buyer the process (for a
huge fee of course).
Print or Create On Demand
This is an interesting concept, it is basically drop shipping, however it is with your own products
that you own the rights to and it becomes your intellectual property which equals value for us.
Have you ever seen a T-shirt that you thought was hilarious and you should have thought of it,
a coffee mug with that perfect slogan or a bumper sticker you thought to yourself that it was
probably a million dollar idea. There are two giant sites out there that allow you to design and
customize your own T-shirts, mugs, pens, posters, bumper stickers and a myriad of other simple
products that you can easily resell. The create on demand process means that your design or
product is saved on file with the third party distributor that you place orders with as you sell
the products, once they receive the order they create the product and ship it to your customer,
you collect your percentage. You don’t need to have a graphics design background or even be
good with graphics as the sites will help bring your idea to life. If you create a product that sells
really well you can also purchase your product in a wholesale quantity at a highly discounted
price which allows you to increase your profit margins. This type of product development and
sales is so simple, anyone can do it, and the limitation of such obvious creation and sales of a
product is that your commission is going to be very low meaning you will have to sell a lot of
products to make substantial income. The biggest and best create on demand site in my
opinion is Zazzle, there is another site which is basically a duplicate which is CafePress – either
will allow you to do the same thing. VistaPrint is starting to gain traction in this market as well,
they are all free to create accounts with so there isn’t really anything you’re risking, just your
time.
Print on demand is more geared towards books and product manuals which follow the same
guidelines as create on demand. I have had success turning eBooks into books and selling them
online and in bookstores. One publisher that I use and trust is CreateSpace.com because it is
owned by Amazon. Basically you upload your eBook, manual or document in the format they
specify and your digital eBook is now a physical book. Using CreateSpace will automatically add
your products on the Amazon marketplace and their distribution networks but will also provide
you the opportunity of selling the product directly on your own website. You still own the rights
to the content, this means when it is time to flip our website we can chose to include the rights
to our content as part of the sale and add value. Just like with create on demand, print on
demand has very low commission rates for us, here is an example of what my account looked
like last month:
Nothing to write home about, however I flipped the website that I was using to sell it and
structured the contract with the buyer that allowed them to only have resale rights to the
product for the website. This means that I still own the content, the buyer of the site still gets
to generate revenue from selling the product on the website at whatever price they want and I
still get a check every month for doing nothing.
CHAPTER 9. Traffic Generation
Natural Organic Traffic
If you have read everything in this guide thus far and implemented the processes that have
been created for success than guess what? You have already started the process of creating
organic traffic. Setting up our meta tags correctly, adding content and products, trading or
buying text links and adding our site to quality directories is where our organic traffic
originates. As your website increases in pagerank, backlinks, content, age and popularity
naturally the organic traffic to the website will increase. We can help increase the speed at
which our organic traffic grows by generating traffic to our website. If our site has anything of
value or interest we will start to receive return visitors.
Add an RSS feed link to your website, the most common place that visitors look for the link is in
the top right of websites. The standard image that is used looks like this:
Redirecting Expired Domain Names
If you took my advice about buying expired domain names you should be on your way to a
traffic filled portfolio. Expired domain names that are currently earning you significant income
through parking services I would leave them be and enjoy that passive income. Expired domain
names that have traffic primarily originating from countries that speak a language other than
what is on your website I would certainly not bother redirecting them either unless they are not
earning any revenue through parking services. If you are going to use foreign expired domain
name traffic to direct at your site you need to “clean” the traffic first. This is kind of like
laundering money, you need to conceal the initial source of the traffic or Google and the search
engines will associate your website possibly with the content of the expired domain name
which may hurt your search engine position. A simple way to make your traffic clean is to use
another domain name that you own that already is forwarded directly to your website or a
domain name that isn’t being used but the keywords in the name are close to the niche of the
website your trying to generate traffic to. Forward the foreign expired domain name to another
domain name that is forwarded directly to your website. This adds a layer of protection to your
site and the traffic that hits your website will not have a referrer in it which will appear to the
search engines as type in traffic so you don’t have to worry about being penalized or having
your sites content miss linked within the search engines.
Ideally you want to forward domain names that have similar content as the website you’re
trying to flip or at a minimum the same language. If the expired domain name has somewhat
similar content with a pagerank and backlinks go ahead and forward it directly to your website.
You need to make sure that you chose “forward permanently” as the option at your registrar
when you forward it, otherwise it will lose any potential SEO value you would have gained.
Forwarding domain names directly in this manner that are were once well established can help
sky rocket your sites pagerank, backlinks and popularity as well as rain traffic on your site.
If the expired domain name traffic is beneficial to the website or your planning a quick website
flip and want to be honest about the traffic sources you can include the expired domain name
in the sale of the website you are flipping. If you are selling the website with the expired
domain name you can claim all of the traffic to your new website as essentially organic as the
source of the traffic will continue and it is being organically generated on the expired domain
name side.
Buying Expired Domain Name & Direct Traffic
If you have not been purchasing expired domain names or just started you can still benefit from
them. There are a lot of companies that specialize in selling expired domain name traffic, you
can chose which country you want your visitors to come from and chose what category your
site is and they do their best to try and forward similar content sites traffic to your site. You
should have some type of content or product on your website by this point and this traffic
should result in product sales and user sign-ups as well as begin to boost your Alexa and traffic
rankings.
One of the things to keep in mind when buying traffic directly is where does the traffic come
from? Pure expired domain name traffic can be some of the best traffic for the cost but a lot of
sites mix up their traffic sources. Many traffic selling companies will claim expired domain name
traffic but in the fine print you will see that it also comes from pop ups and pop unders and
traffic exchanges which end up accounting for 99.9% of the traffic you receive which is virtually
worthless. I have been burned many times and have tried to filter out the sites selling garbage
traffic with ones that sell actual converting human traffic but you can never be 100% certain as
the traffic will always land on your website through a hop point (traffic reseller’s way of
redirecting traffic to you from the source). I have purchased traffic from the top site on the list
before and sold 35 products from 10,000 visitors but it really depends on what type of site
you’re promoting, you may have to try multiple sources to find one that works best for your
websites.
Sites that I routinely purchase traffic directly from with overall good results:
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Elitewebsitetraffic – This is one of the best, pure expired domain traffic – no pop under
worthless traffic
Revisitors – Various traffic sources, one of the most reputable
Buy Expired Domain Traffic – Not the best looking site but all expired domain traffic
GrowTraffic – Traffic sourced from high percentage of expired domains
VisitorZ – Various traffic sources as well, UK based
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Outbrain – One of the newer and more popular traffic sources, traffic mostly from
popular websites
ZeroPark – Mainly traffic from expired domain name parking companies
Extore – Expired domain name traffic packages as well as E-mail marketing campaigns
Expired Targetted – Website looks like it is from 1995 but I buy traffic from them weekly
Cheap Web Traffic – Another website that needs to be updated but the traffic is legit
The Parking Place – Domain name parking site that sells the traffic back to advertisers so
you are truly buying domain name redirect traffic
It should not happen to you, at least not until you have thousands of expired domain names
generating hundreds of thousands of visitors a day but I did once purchase traffic from
ZeroPark that sourced from my own domain name being parked at one of their traffic
providers.
As you can see, ZeroPark uses domain name parking companies as one of the sources for the
traffic they sell. Expired domain names that have high traffic that are parked with a parking
company are commonly used in this method to better help domain parkers monetize their
portfolios.
Traffic Exchanges
Before I talk about the standard types of exchanges there is a unique exchange which is more of
a traffic exchange directory that you absolutely have to sign up for an account with which is
known as LinkReferral and it is a free directory that you list your site on and other users visit
your sites and sometimes will write a review or add it to their favorites. If your website is in a
category that isn’t popular you can generate 500 clicks a month from 10 seconds worth of
work. Every 24 hours you have to login to the site for your site to stay active in the directory,
after 24 hours your site turns red, when you log back in it goes green. By logging into the site
and doing nothing else you can be at the top of the directory if others haven’t logged in during
that 24 hour period in your category meaning your getting all the traffic FREE without lifting a
finger.
That is 367 visitors so far this month; it is the 4th of the month! As you can see all I did was login
and my site is ranked first in main category and sub category.
Moving on, there are two main types of traffic exchanges that you will find; Manual Traffic
Exchanges and Auto Surfing Traffic Exchanges.
Manual Traffic Exchanges
Manual Traffic Exchanges will require you investing time or money for traffic, I recommend that
if you don’t invest money in this traffic. Basically these exchanges work by displaying a website
to you with a timer which is usually between 5-30 seconds. When the timer expires you have to
click on an image, color, picture or whatever the site has configured to move onto the next
available website.
And then…
Most exchanges have a ratio of 1:1 which is great, every click we do we get one in return.
Ideally what I do when I am generating traffic from an exchange I login to close to ten sites at a
time and just continuously click from tab to tab clicking on the solve option. By opening so
many accounts at once I can optimize my time for traffic and receive hundreds of clicks to my
sites in a very short period of time.
Something you need to be aware of is that if you are using Google Adsense on your websites do
not use a traffic exchange, this type of traffic is a violation of their terms as well as several other
ad companies so make sure you check their terms if you’re going to generate traffic to a site
with ads on it.
Conversion rates usually aren’t great on sites like these but they can help you get sign-ups and
visitors if your content is geared towards making money, SEO, website promotion, marketing,
traffic and unique types of sites, otherwise the traffic usually isn’t great.
When your flipping websites do not count this type of traffic as organic, I recommend using
these sites for the initial several months after creating your website and not while trying to sell
it as this is a red flag for investors and the third party sites you’re selling them on.
Here is my list of Manual Traffic Exchanges to use ranked in order of quality of traffic, all of
these sites have been around for over five years and have massive communities of surfers:
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LinkReferral
TrafficSwarm
EasyHits4U
TS25
TrafficPods
TrafficEra
TrafficPunk
TrafficG
Hit2Hit
TrafficSplash
TrafficWitch
StartXChange
Auto-Surfing Traffic Exchanges
I am reluctant to really even mention these sites as they provide us with little in return. Just as
the term describes, they are automatic surf exchanges. Once you login and click surf your traffic
bar loads and will continuously load websites based on a timer, over and over. Since the traffic
is automatic most surfers login and click surf and walk away without viewing any of the sites
being displayed. There are some surfers that do pay attention and will click links but conversion
rates are low and your site usually needs to be displayed continuously before someone will click
it.
This traffic is commonly used to boost Alexa rankings of websites, this makes a site look good
from the outside but selling a website with trumped up autosurf traffic claiming it is real traffic
is unethical and your buyer will not be pleased you lied about the amount of traffic. Mostly the
traffic will just eat up bandwidth and resources on your web server.
Since I am not going to mention auto surfing sites again, there is one reason that I use them
which is to generate revenue from CPM advertising sites. I have accounts with big media
companies that pay very little for banner impressions such as Adcash.com and
CasaleMedia.com but using auto surf websites you can generate thousands of pageviews to
your site a day while you sleep. I use a Linux server to load up my accounts and collect a small
check at the end of the month. I use Linux because the autosurfing website owners are not
always great about vetting the sites that are displayed and you could potentially get malware
on your computer.
I hate to really recommend any Auto Surf websites but if you’re going to use them here are a
few that have been around for awhile:
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AutoSurfPro
AutoHits
Auto Surf Traffic Exchange
Auto Surf Traffic
Proceed with caution; don’t say I did not inform you of the dangers if something bad happens.
Social Media Exchanges
Social media exchanges are becoming more and more popular because social media is playing a
much larger role in SEO and website rankings and valuations. There are virtually exchanges for
every type of social media and user based sharing and meeting site on the web. You can
exchange sites I had never even heard of, below is an example of some of the types of sites on
an average exchange:
These sites have fast growing user bases with thousands of users; here is an example of a quick
growing new social exchange site:
The smartest course of action if you’re going to get involved in social media exchanges is to
create basically a burner account for each social media site you want to exchange. Setup a
gmail account for the sole purpose of registering for every social media site you’re interested
in. If you have not already done so, create a social media account for your portfolio of websites
or one or two big websites that you’re developing or planning on flipping. Add links to the
website you want to promote on the exchanges and exchange Facebook likes, tweets, LinkedIn
likes, Google Plus clicks and so forth using your dummy account.
Make sure that your website has all the social media links on it as well, you don’t want just the
social media accounts linking to your site and promoting your website, you want your website
popularity to increase as well. If your using Wordpress you can use a plugin called Hupso Share
Buttons:
Social media buttons will appear as so:
As always, here is my list of verified and active social media exchanges that I have tried out:
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Socializa
FollowLike
MyDailyLikes
Likes Fan Exchange
Social Hits Exchange
Hitserr
Linking to your portfolio of websites
This is the easiest way of promoting sites in your portfolio, add a links page somewhere on each
of your sites, it is best not to actually use the word links as Google would prefer “partners”
“Other sites” or something that does not seem like your creating a link farm. It is best to link
sites of similar content, for instance I am developing a portfolio of Cyber Security sites so I have
a page on each site that includes links to all the other sites. This is beneficial because each site
has its own IP address, if all of your websites are hosted on the same IP address it is not a good
idea to add more than five links to your other sites on the page, if the sites have unique IP
addresses it will actually help them all rank better at the same time.
It does not have to be a page full of links, you can write posts about each site; create buttons
and banners to put on each site to promote your other sites. For instance, here is an example of
a website I am going to flip that has a high pagerank and I turned into a directory site:
Here is an example of using a classified ads site to promote my other sites and create instant
content:
E-mail Subscribers & Newsletters
If you are just starting out this will be hard and it is something you should come back to after
you’re more established and experienced. If you are getting started or not currently allowing
your visitors to subscribe to a mailing list or newsletter you are losing serious value and wasting
website traffic. As usual, if you’re running Wordpress here is a great plugin to start building an
e-mail subscriber list from called Newsletter:
Once you install that plugin you’ll want to configure it correctly, if you’re not familiar there is
something known as single and double opt-in. If you chose double opt-in this means that the
visitor has requested to subscribe to your e-mail list and they will receive an e-mail confirming
that request with a link inside that they have to click on to finish the double opt-in process.
Personally, single opt-in is good enough for me as it saves resources on my mail server and it
qualifies for the CAN-SPAM legal process. In order to receive the most subscribers without
forcing subscription (you can set everyone who registers on the site to be a subscriber and you
can e-mail them all day long, it just may not be legal).
If you’re not using Wordpress you’ll have to find a plugin, extension or script that will manage
an e-mail subscriber list. Buyers want a site that they can generate some kind of income with
typically when they are taking it over, e-mail subscribers in the right hands can result in huge
profits. I will touch on how exactly to create that revenue in the revenue techniques chapter.
For traffic purposes though keeping contact with your visitors, subscribers, customers or clients
will keep your website fresh in their minds and will visit more frequently. You can send out a
newsletter, monthly or weekly e-mail that lets your users know about a new website that you
have created, you can push links to your new sites and drive traffic all around.
Product Feeds
This only applies to those who have E-commerce sites or those interested in creating one.
Merchants can take advantage of free targeted traffic from the two largest search engines on
Earth, Google and Bing. Instead of paying thousands of dollars on clicks to your products with
ads you can upload a feed to both of these search engines and your products will display in
both search results and in the shopping sub-domains on each.
To setup your Google Merchant Feed visit
https://merchants.google.com/Home?a=7853948#merchantdashboard
You will have to do a good bit of reading if this is your first time using it and are trying to create
your own feed to import. If you are using E-commerce software such as Magento,
WooCommerce or OsCommerce there are plugins and settings to easily export your products
for inclusion in the Google and Bing feed.
It has been a few years since I have sold website lines of E-commerce sites but I stay current
and up to date on the availability and features. Here is an example of a site I sold in 2014 with
the free traffic I was receiving with a simple antiques & collectible site that only had a few
hundred products.
The secret to keeping the traffic flowing when you’re selling single products is that you keep the
products on your website with a notice that the product is currently out of stock. Visitors will
still find these out of stock products through the search feeds which provides you the
opportunity to sell them another similar product that is actually in stock.
The Bing Merchant Shopping feed can also be very beneficial and actually generate more traffic
for you than from their search engine directly. You can sign up at
http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/bing-merchant-faqs
There is far less competition on Bing which you can take advantage of if your selling products
that are niche or rare as you will most likely have the only one on the search engine which will
display at the top of the search driving your click through rates and conversions through the
roof.
There are some paid product feed search engine options as well if you are looking for maximum
exposure. Amazon has a product feed which displays on their main website with the option of
allowing webmasters to promote your products on their sites as well. Shopping.com has good
results from search feeds but their CPC on products is rather high. The other solution that is
commonly used is ShopZilla.
Paid Product Feeds:
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https://advertising.amazon.com/
Shopping.com Feed - https://merchants.ebaycommercenetwork.com/login
http://merchant.shopzilla.com/
Using Pay-per-Click & Pay-per-Impression
If you’re willing to pay for traffic based on keywords or banner advertising your website(s)
needs to be ready for sale or generating some type of return on investment from your paid
advertising efforts. If your website is not at this point in its evolution and you still want to drive
visitors to your site, for instance to track how they behave on your website and how long they
last there are some cheaper options than the mainstream search engine PPC sites.
Here is a list of some of your options for PPC and PPM
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Google Adwords – This is everybody’s first instinct as they can provide the most traffic
but you will be bidding for ad placement against the most competition driving ad prices
Bing Ads – Bing has partnered with Yahoo as they can no longer compete with Google
taking up the majority of the search market. The average cost-per-click is far less then
Google Adwords but they can rarely deliver near the quality or even remotely close to
quantity of traffic as you would receive from Google.
Bidvertiser – They have continued to grow as a legit pay per click advertising solution
despite not having a search engine to deliver clicks, they instead rely on webmasters
placing text ads on their sites like Google does with Adsense to deliver clicks for
advertisers and create revenue for publishers.
7search – Somehow this site has been around since 1999 offering pay per click search
services at very low rates based on broad keyword matches.
Clicksor – Just like 7search, they have been around since 1999 and found a way to stay
afloat offering pay-per-click advertising using broad keyword matches for pennies a
click.
AdClickMedia – Since they can’t compete in the PPC world they offer low cost Photo
Text Ads, Banner Display Ads, E-mail PPC ads, Full Page Interstitial Ads
AdCash – They provide some interesting advertising solutions such as background ads,
slide-in ads, interstellar ads, banner ads and smartphone app ads
SiteScout – Formerly Adbrite, they provide a marketplace where advertisers can bid for
ads on websites and publishers can serve ads on their sites.
Article Publishing
One of the easiest ways to generate traffic and drive SEO for your website is through article
posting directories. This requires that you create original content and have some type of writing
skills and knowledge of something of value. Your articles do not have to be hundreds of pages
long, a few paragraphs typically will be enough to have your article listed on the directories.
This concept is very straight forward, it isn’t for everyone but for those who don’t mind doing a
little bit of writing and want to reap the benefits and rewards of doing so this option is for you.
If you have a blog or content based website you can double dip, write content for your website
and post the content on the article sites.
Posting articles on an article directory means that your content will be published in the
directory for other webmasters to add to their own websites. Why would I want to let other
people use my content? Because your content comes with strings attached, your name and bio
as well as a link to your website are required to be included by the webmaster posting your
content on their site. This means that you are getting credit for writing the material and your
name or pen name will start to be blasted across the internet, hopefully creating a powerful
reputation for yourself. Links to your website will also be distributed around the internet which
will drive traffic to your site and create backlinks to your site helping with SEO.
It can be very time consuming posting your articles to a myriad of article directories, it can be
time consuming creating new articles so there is a site that has a solution for you. Submit Your
Article To 700 Article Directories In 5 Minutes.
The other competitor which offers free article creation allowing you to create brand new
traffic-getting articles with just one click - Articlespinning
Here are the best Article Directory sites worth your time posting to:
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Article Base – Pagerank 5, Alexa rank 7,000! Sign-up with Facebook option available
All The Websites – Pagerank 5 directory, Free sign-up and submission, been around
since 2003
Articles Factory – Pagerank 4, Alexa rank 17,000
Article City – Pagerank 5 – Alexa rank 20,000
Amazines – Pagerank 4 – Alexa rank 30,000 – small $9.99 one time setup fee but worth
a onetime fee, has featured authors which promote your content within the site
Free Website Directory – Pagerank 4 – Alexa 25,000 – Nice directory with relaxed
restrictions on content
Article Cube – Pagerank 4 – Alexa rank 30,000 – Strict article content requirements
A1 Articles – Pagerank 4 – Alexa rank 80,000 – Some restrictions on article content
Ezine Articles – Pagerank 4 – Alexa Ranking 2,500! This directory will drive you a lot of
traffic and it isn’t ranked higher on my list because you can’t post the articles on your
blog as well, the content has to be unique for them
Hub Pages – Pagerank 6 – Alexa Ranking 1000! Just like Ezine Articles however, your
articles and content have to be unique. They also have strict article guidelines and
publishing requirements
Guerrilla Marketing Techniques
Avoid spamming your website at all costs as this will only end in disaster, it can be tempting to
mass e-mail your site to an unsolicited list of millions of people, spam links on every forum and
blast our site in chat rooms, resist the urge, it can even cost you legal action these days with
anti-spam laws being enforced. People are tired of being spammed and they are taking action
against webmasters that still continue these practices.
You have to be willing to dedicate your time and focus if you’re going to find success with
Guerrilla marketing. A good start is doing searches for forums that may have discussions or
topics related to content on your website. This is a rather sneaky practice, however you can
register on these forums and ask questions, more specifically questions about an article,
content or even a product on one of your websites posing as another average forum user
making a legitimate inquiry. If you have an E-commerce website for instance with a rare
baseball card listed for sale you could register at forums that specialize in collectibles,
memorabilia and baseball products and ask the audience a question about your product or
even query the audience to see if anyone has purchased anything from your website and what
they think of the site, do they trust it? Would they make a purchase there? This brings visitors
to your website to check it out without getting yourself banned for spamming as well as
possibly providing you honest unbiased opinions about your website. If your post remains
without being removed it will also help with SEO and provide you with a backlink to your
website.
Blogs comment sections can be used for promotion and SEO as well but typically are a lot
harder to use for promotion. You have to be intelligent, find blogs that have similar content to
your own website and propose your site as an alternative or as a supplement to the blog post
you are commenting on. If the blog prevents the posting of comments with hyperlinks you can
still type in your website as simple text and have users and commenters type in or Google your
site from context.
Your marketing efforts don’t have to be all digital, you can create a flyer and post it on the
boards of local colleges, you can print business cards and hand them out and pin them up
everywhere you can. One of my favorite marketing techniques when I was in the real estate
market was to purchase promotional business cards that looked like folded up dollar bills and
drop them everywhere I went. When someone picked it up and unfolded it they would see my
sales message or advertisement. VisaPrint offers business cards in that format, trust me
everyone picks up what they believe is money.
Marketing does not have to always even be related, this type of marketing is based off of free
traffic to your website. If you sell products on eBay for instance you can include a logo of your
website in the listing and a message to your customers after a purchase to visit your website.
Reddit has become a hot source for free promotion as well, start a discussion about something
on your website and post it in a relevant category. Make sure that you are not coming off as
spammy, you want to be as genuine as possible and people will respond favorably.
There are countless classified ads sites on the internet these days, do a search and gather up a
list of sites that you can freely promote your website or make posts related to it without the
ads being flagged as spam.
If you are going to invest a considerable amount of time guerilla marketing the website you are
trying to promote and flip needs to be worth your time. This type of effort should only be put
into sites you plan on selling for five or six figures or you are better off starting your next
project or promoting your other ventures.
CHAPTER 10. Generating Website Revenue & Value
Affiliate Programs & Promotion
Whether your website was created today or ten years ago, anyone can take advantage of
affiliate programs. This is a great way to create initial revenue streams for your website without
having to worry about it being established, ranked and needing approval. There are a lot of
third party affiliate marketplaces that allow you to search for products and merchants that you
want to promote. You can also do some Google searching and find websites that have
independent affiliate programs, this can be a hassle sometimes trying to keep track of
individual affiliate accounts and revenue tracking but if there is a specific site that fits your
niche with an affiliate program it is usually worth signing up directly.
There is a technique that I have perfected that a lot of people don’t know about or have never
tried it. This strategy is perfect for lazy people, basically you don’t need a hosting account or
worry about setting up a website while reaping all the benefits of having one. I am talking about
domain name forwarding with masking. The most important part of this method is the masking
part, if your registrar does not allow forwarding with masking than you will not be able to take
advantage of this, GoDaddy is the one I use for this process. Masking allows our domain name
to be indexed in the search engines just like a website would be with meta description and
keywords. It looks like this:
This is a great way to have a website without actually having a website, as you can see in the
image above that I am forwarding my domain name to a digital download site that also has an
affiliate program. In the example above, RX7manual.com was a domain name that I owned for
awhile but did nothing with it until around 2010. I have access to Rx7 manual PDF technical
manuals without copyright restrictions. All I did was upload the manuals to TradeBit, set a price
for the digital download and collect commissions for every sale. I let this domain name
forwarded with masking organically generate traffic and after six months the site one the first
search result for “rx7 manual” which resulted in over $1000 in sales in just one year of
completely passive income.
For some stupid reason I decided to sell the domain name/website on eBay and received $1500
for the sale. While writing this guide I remembered this transaction and thought about how
much I regretted selling something that required no work to create monthly income. The
person that I sold the domain name project to somehow let the domain name expire and I get
deleted! Using a GoDaddy promo coupon I re-registered the domain name for $1.00! It will take
several months but the domain name will be at the top of the search again for its organic
keywords generating me revenue again without lifting a finger! Here is some proof, this is one
week after forwarding the site with masking, and someone has already found it and made a
purchase on TradeBit for a manual:
Be creative and setup passive income streams like this, it is literally FREE money!
Another easy way to generate significant revenue and earn commissions like there’s no
tomorrow is by creating a comparison shopping website. There are some obvious kingpins in
this industry that I’m sure you have come across if you’ve searched for hotels, plane tickets or
rental cars. There are a lot of scripts out there for purchase or use that integrate products and
services into a nice user friendly search engine which you can find on a site like hotscripts.com
or scripts.com. These sites require a lot of targeted traffic to actually generate a lot of revenue
so be prepared to do some keyword bidding. If you can create a profitable stream of traffic
based on the amount of money spent on advertising to the amount of revenue from affiliate
revenue you got yourself a big ticket sale in your future.
Here is a list of Affiliate Marketplaces that you can sign up with FREE and start instantly
promoting products and adding banners and links on your websites:
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Clickbank – The largest digital marketplace on the internet, if you are looking for digital
products and content to resell this is the place to do it. No restrictions on new accounts,
no website approval requirements, instant sign up and selling
TradeBit – This site is a lot like Clickbank but you can also promote individual software
packages, media content and other digital products directly instead of having to
promote a website
Commission Junction – This is the largest and most reputable affiliate promotion
marketplace on the internet. This is where you can promote fortune 500 products and
services. Big name brands very easy to sell and promote but lower commissions
Pay Dot Com – This is an up and coming digital marketplace, specializing in the sale of
software and digital content
Share-a-Sale Affiliates – This is a site a lot like Commission Junction, they are smaller but
still have some large company products and services to promote
Avangate.com/affiliates/ - The biggest European based affiliate company, promote
European companies – you don’t have to be in Europe to use them
PayLoadz Affiliate Program – This site is considered the Clickbank alternative, they will
process payments for sellers and send a check or paypal. Affiliates can promote
products and websites similarly to how you would on Clickbank
Click 2 Sell – Affiliate marketplace similar to Clickbank and Tradebit, European based
digital products
Revenue Wire – Promote software & programs instead of products and services
Amazon Associate Program – Promote any products listed on the Amazon Marketplace
– low commission rates but easy to sell products for high volume sales. You can use your
domain name to forward with masking a custom Amazon eStore free of charge.
Advertising Publisher Programs
If you are just starting out you will find that no media companies will want you putting their ads
on your website. Once you are established it will obviously flip, advertising companies will come
to you hoping that you will partner with them and try and sell you on why you should. This does
not mean that there are no publishing solutions at our disposal. If you have created a
professional looking website with a decent amount of content added or products on your site
you have a good amount of options, if you are driving a lot of traffic to your website then you
have even more options, even before you’re established. If you are driving a lot of traffic to
your sites you may want to go with a banner centric CPM publisher account. CPM advertising
does not generate a ton of revenue by nature, only the largest media companies will pay you
top dollar for CPM ads. The large media companies will vet your website very thoroughly; they
will want to see months or years worth of high volume, consistent and quality traffic. High
volume does not mean 5000 visitors a month, it typically means north of 500,000 visitors a
month. You can generate insane amounts of traffic if you’re buying and redirecting expired
domain names, using traffic exchanges and buying traffic packages. If you are creating high
volume traffic here are your five best options for the highest paying CPM advertising
companies:
1. Tribal Fusion: Tribal Fusion is one of the most popular CPM ad networks. They are popular for
high CPM rates. If you get more then 500,000 unique users per month then you can apply on
Tribal Fusion for publisher program.
2. Advertising: Advertising.com is part of AOL. Advertising is also among top CPM ads network
and also one of the high paying CPM rates. To join advertising.com you must have high visitors
base.
3. Casale Media: Casale Media offers high CPM rates other than that they also offers fixed CPM
rates. To become Casale Media publisher you must get 50,000 unique visitors each month.
4. Burst Media – Burst Media gives you high CPM’s, quality campaigns, and full control of which
ads run on your site. Your site must have minimum traffic of 25,000 monthly page views or
5,000 monthly unique views.
5. CPX Interactive: CPX Interactive was named 6th fastest growing privately held US advertising
company in 2008 by Inc. Magazine for their annual list of corporate success stories. They deliver
true scalability and transparency.
Most likely you will not be generating enough traffic for a long enough duration if you’re
flipping websites, we don’t need to worry about getting high paying CPM accounts if we are
selling sites in volume. If you are focused on selling one or two websites for top dollar then it
becomes more important to secure quality advertising, you will also want to include your
publisher account in the sale. If you are able to secure one of the premium CPM advertising
agency accounts you are in a great situation for resale and can expect to sell your site for north
at least five figures. If your site is generating less than 5000 unique visitors a month there are
still some options if you are trying to squeeze every penny out of your site, you can expect
between $5-$10 a month with that amount of traffic which isn’t much but if you have a
portfolio of 20 websites all generating that much traffic the revenue adds up quickly.
Here are some lower volume CPM advertising companies you can target and be accepted with
minimal requirements:
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Info Links - Ad Products offered (no banner ads) - Infold Ads which is Search & display,
above the fold takes advantage of the power of search and display, delivering ads on a
wider scale of traffic. InFold appears in a unique location right above the fold. InScreen,
an interstitial ad, functions as an “ad intermission” between page views. This results in
well-timed display ads, driven both by user intent and website content. InText works by
scanning a page’s content in real-time to deliver relevant ads. The ads are neatly
presented within a page’s text, delivering effective results. InTag displays the most
valuable keywords directly related to the content of a page in highly customizable ad
units. InFrame provides a solution for unused real estate on wide screens.
Ad Click Media - Photo text ads are a combination of a picture and text in one ad panel.
Display various banners ads that match the topic of your website. Interstitial ads are full
page ads that go in between two content pages. Monetize from your email lists. Send
offers directly to your email list subscribers and get paid for every click generated.
AdCash – Ad products offered include all of the common banner sizes, slide-in and slideunder ads, Interstitial and site background ads that display behind your website like
wallpaper.
Ideally we will want to supplement our CPM advertising with a CPC advertising solution. When
it comes to CPC publishing there really is only one company that we want to get approval to use
which is Google Adsense. With Google Adsense we can earn up to $50 a click if your domain
name keywords and website content generate high competition keywords. $50 a click is not the
standard and it is very rare to get anywhere near that anymore, when Google first launched
there were several keywords that advertisers were paying $100/click for such as Lawyer &
Insurance company keywords. You can use a site like Estibot.com and input a domain name and
they will display what the average cost per click for your domain name would be based off the
keywords in the name. I have several sites that earn between $7-$10 per click, this is
exceptional these days and you should be very pleased with those rates. Once your Adsense
account is approved you are free to display ads on all of your websites that meet Google’s
requirements. Once your website portfolio has ten or fifteen websites that all generate traffic
you can clear $100/day with no trouble if your traffic is mainly United States based and your
content keywords have value.
If your websites are new and not yet established (I would wait 3 or 4 months if you’ve just
started) and do not possess a decent amount of content I would not apply for Adsense, if you
are denied an account it will be very hard for you to be accepted after that point, at least not
with that same Google account and website. If you are generating traffic from traffic exchanges
do not apply for Adsense or if you have an active account do not promote it on a traffic
exchange with Adsense on the site or you will be banned from Adsense, possibly for life. If your
websites have content that may be borderline illegal, promote any type of hate, solicit users to
click ads or have porn on them Adsense is not for you.
If your site(s) is too new for Adsense or your sites content or advertising practices may not be
acceptable with Google’s policies there are some other options for CPC advertising:
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Bidvertiser – They have continued to grow as a legit pay per click advertising solution
despite not having a search engine to deliver clicks, they instead rely on webmasters
placing text ads on their sites like Google does with Adsense to deliver clicks for
advertisers and create revenue for publishers. As a publisher you can actually make
decent money with BidVertiser, you can receive a few dollars a click if your site is in the
right industries
7search – Somehow this site has been around since 1999 offering pay per click search
services at very low rates based on broad keyword matches. They offer XML ad feeds
and a search bar you can add on your site to create money from clicks of search results.
CPC average for publishers is very low, you will need a lot of clicks to generate
significant revenue.
Clicksor – Just like 7search, they have been around since 1999 and found a way to stay
afloat offering pay-per-click advertising using broad keyword matches, average CPC will
not be very significant for you as a publisher.
There is one more type of advertising that is a one off and doesn’t really fit into a normal or
conventional type of ad product. This would be SolveMedia.com which I guess technically
would fall under our CPM solutions but with a unique twist. SolveMedia is used to prevent
automated bots from registering on our sites; it is a CAPTCHA solution with the added benefit
of revenue. The real downside is that the revenue is usually pretty low, but I’m not sure if you
can call it a downside when it is being used to prevent spammers and bots from registering on
your site, I feel like we should be paying them for their service. SolveMedia is preconfigured to
work with the following website applications:
Selling Digital Content & Downloads
There are so many different types of digital product downloads that trying to list them all would
be a pointless task. Some common examples of digital download products that you can create
and sell:
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eBooks – This is more of a broad term these days, it can literally be a book that has been
converted into a digital format such as PDF, It can be a bunch of articles or a series of
paragraphs packaged into a digital format, it can also include how to guides. Creating an
eBook can be intimidating for some people, a good starting point is to consider topics,
hobbies and subject matters that you either have an extensive amount of knowledge
about or really enjoy. The next step would be researching on the internet the amount of
popularity the idea might have, next you would need to determine if someone is willing
to pay for this information and if so, how much would they pay for it? You can make a
lot of money and waste a lot of time creating eBooks. A helpful way of determining if
the amount of competition, how much to sell an eBook for, market saturation and
frequency of sales is to do a search in the Clickbank marketplace and see what the
average sale price is for similar products, how often they sell and how many other
people are trying to sell them. This should better help you decide if your idea is worth
your time and effort.
Manuals – Typically separated from eBooks, this could be specifications for how to
repair an XBOX one or diagrams for working on an antique car or a product manual for
servicing or putting together a stereo system.
Contracts & Documents – Real Estate contracts for selling or buying a house, legal
documents for registering a new corporation, business documents with templates for
how to make sales calls or dealing with customer service. This category is only limited by
your imagination
Website Apps & Scripts – If you know a web scripting language come up with an idea
that will enhance another web application such as a Wordpress plugin or theme. Create
a website template using the scripting language that does something useful or has a
great layout that someone would want to use as the framework for a website. Write a
PHP script that has an API call into a popular e-commerce marketplace or portal. Write a
script that will calculate domain name appraisals. Be creative and believe in your idea.
Software & Cell phone apps – This is the same concept as scripts and web applications.
If you can’t think of a new product or application to create take a look at what other
people have created and create a better one, just be careful about violating trademarks
or patents.
Media & Videos – Create a series of videos that describe how to make money on the
internet or a tutorial that teaches someone how to write a new programming language.
Make a video that teaches someone how to win at poker or how to rebuild an engine. If
you don’t like video, create an audio series that teaches someone how to speak a new
language or how to make money in the Real Estate or stock market.
These are just a sample of the different types of digital content you can create and resell over
and over again. Digital content that you create has so many advantages; after you have created
it there are no costs to keep creating it. It becomes intellectual property which can be very
valuable on its own. You can resell the rights to your product so that others can sell it for a fee,
you can lease the technology depending on what it is, you can have other people and
marketplaces sell it for you so you don’t have to pay for commissions or advertising costs.
Once you have decided on what you are going to create or develop you need to figure out how
you’re going to sell it, where the best places to sell it are, what payment processor you’re going
to use and how much you can expect to sell it for and how frequently. Another extremely
important factor that you need to consider is how you are going to manage payments for your
product. You always have the option of setting up a merchant account to accept credit cards
directly or using PayPal or another payment only solution. If you are directly collecting
payments for your product you will be responsible for handling customer service and refunds
yourself, if you sell a product and a customer request a refund and you don’t process it they will
do a chargeback on their credit card and your merchant account could be disabled. Also keep in
mind if you are accepting direct payments and not using an affiliate marketplace you will need
to install affiliate software and setup a marketing campaign to recruit your own affiliates to sell
your product and manage paying out their commissions, you don’t want to have to be the only
one promoting your product.
Most likely you are going to want to take advantage of using an affiliate marketplace to attract
affiliates to sell your product, process refunds and issue out payments. There are only a few
affiliate marketplaces that will let you process payments yourself with your own merchant
account and those will require that you setup a retainer basically and deposit $1000 or more
into your account for which to pay affiliates that are promoting your products. Once your funds
get low or depleted your product or site will be delisted so you will have to constantly keep
funds tied up. You don’t want to find yourself in a position where a big time affiliate is
promoting your product and they sell thousands of dollars of worth of your product in a few
days depleting your funds and freezing your product until you deposit more money to pay them
out.
Choosing an Affiliate Marketplace & Merchant Account
It depends on what type of product you have created to sell to decide what marketplace or if
using multiple marketplaces to sell your product in is the best course of action.
If you have decided to create an eBook or a manual the best way to sell it is on your website
using a third party affiliate marketplace such as Clickbank to process payments and additionally
list only the products on the PayLoadz Seller Affiliate marketplace that will process the
payments for you and make your product available for an entire community of affiliates to sell
for you. All you do is sit back and collect a paycheck!
If you created a video series or some type of media that you would like to sell it might be worth
loading up many options such as listing the product on Clickbank, PayLoadz Seller, Pay Dot Com
and then uploading your files to TradeBit where you can sell them on their marketplace. Using a
strategy like this should give you the best chances of success. Your website would use Clickbank
as the processor and have the largest affiliate base promoting it and you could have your
product uploaded to the other marketplaces using their payment processors and affiliate bases.
If you are a programmer and have created some type of actual software that needs to be
installed I would not recommend using Clickbank or the previously stated options unless it is a
very simple piece of software or if it lacks that professional look you expect from a piece of
software your installing onto a computer. If you have put in all the nuts & bolts you will want
the best possible promotion and control of your own product and sales, that doesn’t mean
handle the affiliate side of promotion but processing your own payments with PayPal or a
merchant account. The defacto standard for merchant accounts since the early 2000’s is known
as Authorize.net which integrates into just about every payment platform out there but there
are some other nice ones out there, Chase bank is offering one worth checking out, the
program is found here Chase Merchants and there is another site specializing in e-commerce
transactions CdgCommerce. However, if you do want to have access to use a real merchant
account your credit will have to be in decent shape as they will run a credit check on you just
like a bank will when you apply for an account. A merchant account will let you take payments
over the phone and enter them into a payment gateway as well as integrate into most common
e-commerce scripts. Authorize.net is built into just about every one of them as they have been
around for so long and one of the most recognized.
Continuing with your software promotion and sales, a good method of promotion is to use a
marketplace that specializes in the sale of software such as Revenue Wire and SoftwarePlaza
and using one of the bigger affiliate programs out there. If your software has been
professionally designed and you have a professional website you will want to setup an account
with Commission Junction, if your software is good and your website is good Share-a-Sale
Merchant is a great alternative to Commission Junction. If your website is accepted into either
affiliate marketplace you will be able to still accept payments but you will have to deposit into
one of their holding accounts for them to payout affiliates who sell your software.
If you have created a website app or script or loaded up your website with contracts and
documents it really becomes a judgment call but I would avoid using Clickbank as that site
won’t be the best option as you again most likely want to maintain control over payments. If
you are trying to sell website apps or scripts you will definitely want to put your product on
www.hotscripts.com , www.scripts.com , www.freescripts.com and possibly
www.scriptcopy.com if your script copies another popular product out there. All of those script
listing sites will promote your script or app as well as your website and drive loads of traffic and
sales. A good technique is to offer a demo version, free trial or free basic version of your script
or app which basically creates leads for you to close sales on interested and motivated buyers.
Share-a-Sale Merchant and Commission Junction may also be on the table for you and are
perfect suitors for scripts, apps, contract and document based websites. All of the product
types discussed can always be uploaded and listed on TradeBit as its own independent sales
market without conflicting with any other marketplace or sales site unless you sign an exclusive
agreement with one of them that you won’t sell your product outside of their venue which is
usually a terrible idea as it limits your exposure.
If you don’t want to create your own digital product but still want to be able to sell digital
products in all the same marketplaces and mediums there is another option. You buy or lease
the rights to resell a product that has already been created. There are marketplaces such as
www.resellrightspro.com where you can purchase the rights to sell other creators products
depending on what the terms of the sale are.
Selling Backlinks & Text Link Ads
As discussed previously about buying text link ads it now time to sell text link ads on your
website once it is ready. In order to be able to sell text link ads your website will need to meet
some minimum criteria. In the past everything was based off of pagerank, it was above and by
far the most crucial aspect of a backlink and determined how much you would be paid for a
link. Pagerank is still a value point and something you want your site to have but it is not and
end all if you don’t have a pagerank or a high one. Many text link ad sites now determine your
eligibility to list in their marketplace based on Moz domain authority value
(https://moz.com/researchtools/ose ) such as TextLinks , BackLinks and LinksPanel which
require a minimum domain authority value of at least 10 and your site will pretty much be
guaranteed a listing in the directories. Additional factors on other sites include how many pages
your website has indexed in Google, over a thousand is a good start, how old your website is
which less than six months may hurt you and pagerank is still required on many sites and a rank
of one is usually a requirement.
There is a quick and easy way to start selling text link ads and generate significant income; it
comes from buying expired domain names that have a pagerank, backlinks, domain authority
and traffic already. On a site like DynaDot you can buy pagerank 5 domain names all day long
for $13.99 which you can quickly develop. You can use third party sites like DomCop to find
expiring domain names with pagerank, MOZ DA, Alex ranking and more. If you want to find
them specifically at DynaDot with stats and domain information you can use FreshDrop.
Here is a screenshot of 13 domain names I purchased one month that had several pagerank 6
domain names, pagerank 5 and 4 domain names costing me only $348 which I have already
turned into several thousand dollars either reselling or selling backlinks and advertising on
them.
Once you have acquired a ranking domain name or your website development has taken effect
you can start adding your websites to the text link ad marketplaces and creating another
stream of revenue. Most of the marketplaces offer Wordpress plugins that you can use that will
automatically add new links that buyers have purchased to your website menu so you don’t
have to lift a finger, just sit back and earn!
Summary of the best places to sell text link advertising on your website:
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TextLinks
LinkWorth
BackLinks
LinksPanel
MatoMySEO (Formerly Text Link Ads)
Selling Products
Previous chapters have covered where to find all different types of products that you can make,
buy and resell, create or dropship and methods for getting free traffic from these products
using Google and Bing Merchant feeds.
Some of the highest valued websites that are flipped are proven e-commerce websites, most
specifically those with digital products and content included and those with drop shipped
products with a distributor account that can be included in the sale.
There hasn’t been much discussion about using Alibaba because I am trying to keep you from
investing too much money in wholesale products and getting frustrated trying to sell them.
Once you are able to successfully make wholesale international purchases and flip them at
incredible rates you won’t be listening to me anymore.
If you are interested in selling products from Alibaba there is a third party solution that helps
create a store and manage sales on Alibaba:
BigCommerce - Source high-performing, competitively priced products with Alibaba Wholesale,
or have suppliers send you quotes with AliSourcePro. Stock and sell online, BigComm allows
you to quickly create a beautiful, optimized online store to sell all those great new products you
sourced from Alibaba.com.
Process orders, update inventory and ship from your control panel:
Get real-time order updates and process individually or in bulk and print invoices, packing slips
and shipping labels. 360-degree inventory view with pro-level stock settings and it allows you to
easily manage returns and exchanges.
Get valuable business insights with advanced ecommerce analytics:
Powerful dashboards designed for all your reporting needs. Marketing reports measure your
best traffic-drivers. Customer and order reports show who’s buying what and a merchandising
report for inventory optimization.
Service & Membership Sites
This is a very ambiguous topic; there are countless service membership sites out there with
creative and innovative ideas. The service industry requires customer support and technical
support services and therefore can be a huge drain on your time or very costly to start and
maintain. Obviously if you have a service and huge membership base charging monthly fees at a
sustainable and consistent rates you will probably not want to quick flip it but go for that huge
payday.
There are however some simple and cheap service member sites you can put together with
minimal effort and maintain. Some of the more profitable service sites that I have flipped
include a drop ship directory site that members paid $9.99 a month for access to. I used my
connections from my E-commerce corporation days to provide an updated and growing
directory of verified drop shipping companies and the information required to create and setup
an account with them. I was able to grow the membership base to close to a thousand
subscribers paying a fee monthly when I flipped it. This site is still operational today and one of
the top drop ship directories out there with a membership base over 10,000 now. I signed a
non-disclosure on this one, if you do a search you will most likely come across it. This was one
of the highest grossing sales that I have made. Another membership site that I sold was a Media
company that sold advertising and had a fleet of publishers, essentially like BidVertiser and
Google Adwords but obviously a lot smaller membership. This site was also sold with a nondisclosure to a large advertising network that just ripped it apart for its advertiser and publisher
base and redirected the website traffic to their own website.
I have sold domain name parking membership sites, domain name buying and selling websites,
website buying and selling sites, link directory membership sites, countless pixel advertising
sites, countless traffic exchanges, a video streaming site (youtube clone), more classified ads
sites then I can count, and an online auction marketplace for a ridiculous profit (I had to put in
close to $10,000 of my own money to develop and promote it).
Flipping service based membership sites is not always easy; I have spent well over $10,000 on
scripts that have been created specifically as turnkey solutions to start your own service
membership sites. Typically these sites require knowledge of web scripting languages such as
PHP, ASP or ColdFusion as well as Javascript and HTML and a basic working knowledge and
understanding of databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. Since these skills are not required
for website flipping I have omitted a lot of detail surrounding these types of sites. If you have an
understanding of these concepts and you are willing to make some changes to turnkey scripts
and really do some web development and web promotion there can be some great returns on
your time and money but you have to be willing to do what it takes as these sites will not be
perfect out of the box and the communities behind them may be non-existent. Most of the
membership sites that I have flipped are turnkey solutions where I have purchased a script,
generated a small membership base with expired domain names, traffic exchanges and paid
advertising to get the ball rolling for the new owner.
Here is an example of some types of membership site scripts that I have purchased or
downloaded free for use in website flipping on my computer now:
Visitor Registrations, E-mail Subscribers & Customers
One of the keys to creating value in a website we intend to flip is by creating a user base, blog
subscribers, forum subscribers, e-mail subscriber lists, customers from product sales or
members from service sites. Each type of registered user has a value, you can try and establish
that value based on research of business sales which specify an appraisal based on each
customer value but this can be hard. It should be axiomatic that blog subscribers have very little
value compared to registered users on our auction marketplace, but they still have some value.
An e-mail subscriber list that includes opt-in users can be very valuable if the list is in an
industry of value such stocks or real estate. Just make a conscious mental note that users
equate to value.
CHAPTER 11. Flipping Your Website(s)
It has been a long journey and now it is time to cash in. Before you begin creating a website
property you should plan your exit strategy and a timeframe for getting out. In the big business
world venture capitalist and angel investors will invest money into a start-up or growing
business because they intend to receive exponential profits from that investment when the
company is ready to go public and they can dump their shares or through an acquisition by a
larger company, either way there is an exit strategy developed, the time when it is most
profitable to walk away and cash out. You need to ask yourself the same questions and decide
how far you want to take each project. Personally I have taken websites to a corporation that
acquired other corporations and LLCs to an initial offering and the point of going public on the
OTCBB to cash out. If you’re passionate about your idea and there is real growth potential for it
you need to decide if and when you can walk away. You will never become a billionaire flipping
websites and e-businesses too soon but you’ll go broke if you’re married to an idea and web
business that you can’t get off the ground.
I have provided you with a path to generate a lot of income and quickly, however once you’ve
done it enough, generated enough income and saved enough money you might want to find a
project that you want to take all the way and up the stakes. I seriously hope that you get to that
point and build something great that you can be proud of that will provide you with life
changing income or profit. I kind of went the opposite direction, when I was in my early
twenties I took a web company into a small sized corporation that I was committed to and
spent all my time developing, I was a paper millionaire by the time I was 22 years old but I could
never let go and wouldn’t get out when I had the chance which ended up burning me in the
end. I didn’t want to be a millionaire, I swore I would be a billionaire or die trying and it cost me
hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money trying to keep a dying company living which
is why I now flip websites and commit myself to no project past a certain point. I have more
money then I need but I’m not a billionaire and I never will be unless I can commit to a project
again with everything I have.
The purpose of sharing a little bit of my past is to better help you understand the stakes so you
can make your own decisions. If you have ever watched the TV show Shark Tank you know that
every one of those investors is either a multi-millionaire or billionaire because they knew when
and how to exit. If you’re young, driven and passionate you can afford to take risks regardless
of what anyone tells you. It doesn’t take any effort to be a loser, it doesn’t require any
motivation to stay down there at a low level, don’t take your greatness, your ideas and your
potential to the graveyard with you, now is the time to act. You’ll be married and have kids and
a mortgage before you know it and by that time you may have lost the drive to do something
great with your life, no regrets. Try and fail but don’t fail to try.
Flipping Domain Names not developing
Not every domain name that we purchase or buy at auction are going to be worth creating a
website and content for. You may also not have time to develop every domain name that you
have in your portfolio, I sold my portfolio last year of domain names and websites, since
February of 2015 I have purchased and created 355 domain names. Roughly 50 of those
domain names only have value in parking, meaning the CTR or country of origin of the traffic is
mainly foreign making it meaningless to redirect to my website portfolio. Another 150 domain
names were purchased as speculation domain names which include new TLDs and high value
keyword domain names. The speculation and keyword domain names are ones that I will
usually try and flip just as a domain name, if the domain names have high value on Estibot we
can use a very specialized domain name aftermarket known as CAX.com which simplifies the
selling process. You simply check your domain name on Valuate.com and see what the value of
the domain name is reported to be. There is a small onetime fee of $20 for a lifetime
membership allowing you to list unlimited domain names. Here is an example of how to list
using this tactic:
To the right of the domain name report is a button “Sell It” which uses the appraisal value of
the domain name as a metric for the expected sales price of the domain name in their
marketplace. Once you click “Sell It” you will be redirected to CAX where you can add your
domain name with a few clicks:
Next….
As you can see we have options, we get to create an additional description of the domain name
which is not a feature available on all marketplaces. We also have the ability to list as many
domain names as we want FREE in their marketplace. The marketplace is based off of appraisal
values making it very easy for investors to make offers for your domain name based off of
expected value. Another unique feature is the ability of rewarding bidders, I have mine set to
reward the second highest bidder with 5% of my domain name sale which encourages users to
make bids on domain names with the hopes of another buyer out bidding them or them
winning the domain name outright in which either case they win. CAX uses its own Escrow
service known as ECOP.com which holds the payment until you have transferred the domain
name to your buyer.
There is another catch to prevent worthless domain names from being listed on the CAX
marketplace, there is a minimum of a $75 valuation for your site to be listed on their
marketplace which is great for buyers and sellers as it limits the competition and buyers know
they are getting at least some value. Notice below that only one of the domain names is
available to be sold on the marketplace:
The next two marketplaces that you need to add your portfolio of domain names on are SEDO
and AfterNIC which is very straight forward; you have the option of earning revenue and
parking your domain names on these sites. By parking your domain names that you want to sell
on these sites it increases the search ranking of the domain names on the marketplaces and if
the domain names have traffic that will also better increase your chances of selling domains at
higher prices as both sites have search features for buyers to sort by domain names with traffic.
Since it is completely free to list on these sites you have nothing to lose by adding your domain
names on these sites, you can set a “best offer” option which allows you to consider offers from
motivated buyers which you can negotiate with.
Depending on what registrar is holding your domain names you have additionally options for
listing your domain name at auction or for accepting offers. I have hundreds of domain names
spread amongst about 12 different registrars, this is not by design, it is the result of me
purchasing domain names at specific aftermarkets that registrars use for resale. If you have
domain names with GoDaddy you can use their large marketplace for listing your domain
names. Simply login to their domain name marketplace (small $4.99 annual fee for access) and
click on list domains:
It is that simple, the domain names have to be registered with them but you can add all of your
domain names in one quick text box by copying and pasting your domains into the box and
setting a price for each domain name. It is free to list domain names on this site, there are
always options for featuring and promoting your domain for a fee.
If you are using Moniker or Network Solutions you can list those domain names on
SnapNames.com, those are the only supported registrars that are used on SnapNames. Both
registrars are very highly regarded and typically used by larger companies as domain name
costs are rather high on those sites.
If your domain names are at Network Solutions, eNom, BigRock and a few other partner sites of
theirs give you the option of listing on one of the highest selling aftermarkets which is NameJet.
If your domain names are at DynaDot you can list in their own specific marketplace which is on
their website under the marketplace option.
Domain name parking sites with sales offer price page included. Domain Sponsor, Voodoo,
NameCheap and Bodis are specifically parking based sites but they allow you to include a sales
page link when adding domain names that will be parked, here is an example of parking and
selling:
Estibot also has an interesting service that helps sellers generate possible sales leads which is
located at www.estibot.com/lead-research.php where they allow you to find register users who
are searching for domain names with similar content to your own site and you can have Estibot
contact these users to see if they may be interested in buying your domain name.
The last quick way of selling and flipping domain names is by using third party auction and store
marketplaces. The two that I use are eBay and GunBroker, these are best used for domain
names that are to expire in your account and you can put them up for auction to receive
something for a domain name you don’t intend to renew so you have nothing to lose. Sales
prices at auction will be significantly lower than trying to use a marketplace and locating a high
paying payer. Personally I list all my domain names on these auction sites in my eBay and
GunBroker stores to try and receive best offers and make deals, when the domains are about to
expire and I don’t want to keep them I simply click send to auction and try and regain part of
my domain name investment cost without just simply letting it expire and earning nothing.
Preparing to flip your website
You’re ready to walk away? Great, how much has your time and money been worth? Let me
guide you through the steps for a site that I am preparing to flip, my exit strategy has me out in
less than a year with a sales price target of $50,000. I have about thirty other sites moving
towards flipping but I’ll focus on one property to keep things simple. In order to sell a website
we need to know what it is really worth, this is nothing like selling a domain name which the
value is either based off of keywords or previous establishment, such as an expired domain
name with traffic, pagerank and millions of inbound links. The domain name portion is only a
fraction of what determines our expected sales price and appraisal price range. Here is what
goes into determining what a website is worth:
Website valuation formula possible variables:
Average Monthly Unique Visitors = MU
MOZ Domain Authority = DA
Inbound Links to the website = IL
Google Pagerank = PR
Average Monthly Revenue = MR
Average Monthly Cost to Operate = OC = (VPS @ $289 a year divided by 40 websites)
Average Monthly Expenses = ME = (Backlinks + Recurring Directory Fees)
Domain Name Appraisal Value = DV
Average cost-per-click for the domain name based off its keywords = CPC
Industry value of websites in the same category = IND
The age of the website = WAGE
The age of the domain name = DAGE
How many pages are indexed in Google and Bing for the website = PI
How many register users the site has (subscribers, clients, customers, e-mail opt-in list) = RU
Users Valuation Weight (Blog subscribers lowest value with real estate buyers, stock investors, business buyers, etc
on the high end) = UV
Social meter (how many Facebook likes, Tweets, Google Plus, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, etc hits) = SM
Alexa Ranking = AR
Average Monthly Revenue = AMR
Website Content & Graphics Value = WCV
Intellectual Property Value = IPV
Ok! That seems a bit excessive, and it very well may be depending on the type of website you
are trying to flip. The possible variables is there as a guide to help you get the most for your
website, when you are expecting five figures or more you want to have your ducks in a row. A
lot of website investors will try and take advantage of your lack of knowledge of how much
your website is worth, we want to be at the high end of the valuation so when a buyer comes in
at the low end we can meet in the middle somewhere.
Website valuations can’t be realistically determined from the outside, for instance the website
we are going to hope to flip for $50,000 (www.computersecurity.org) would be seriously
undervalued based on open source research:
See how easily someone could manipulate the value of a website? An open source appraisal
does not know the source of traffic streaming to the website, the real click through rate and
daily earnings, the size of the user base or intellectual property value and that is just scratching
the surface of how far off these sites really are. Let’s try and determine the actual value of the
website so we can present the information to our potential buyers. This website is a blog with a
single opt-in user registration in the Cyber Security industry, which is on the higher end of value
per subscribed user. Let’s run through some samples of data to include in our sales page:
There are 63,528 subscribers that have agreed to be on our e-mail subscriber list, the website is
set to opt-in subscribers by default (this view also shows newsletter subscribers, forum
participants and so forth). A visitor reaching our website clicking our register link will see the
following landing page:
Legally this allows us to contact subscribers that register on our site, to further cover ourselves
there should be a link to our terms of service on this page that denotes by registering on the
site you agree to these terms which would include that we can contact them, when we contact
them, that this information could or could not be sold to other parties and so on. However,
under the CAN-SPAM Act I am currently in the legal right, when I am actually preparing to sell
this site it will have that content so my buyer won’t have to worry about creating it.
Here is proof of the actual traffic the website has received over the last three months, once
again another way that sellers manipulate their sites value, earning a low Alexa ranking with
unrealistic website traffic. When it is time to really sell the website I will let enough time pass
that actual organic traffic can be clearly deciphered. The snapshot is from October 6 th and you
can see the website already has 4,000 real unique visitors which is the result of all the SEO and
backlink campaigns starting to pay off. The real monthly unique visitors will be around 30,000
and not 500,000, I could easily manipulate the traffic and generate ten million unique visitors a
month but I am not interested in scamming anyone. The statcounter results are from me
pointing a few expired domain names at the website to sign-up CAPTCHA registered users that
are real and of value. This was also creating several thousand dollars in revenue which is only
real if the expired domains are included. That doesn’t mean that passive income has not been
created, it now has consistent affiliate revenue, adsense revenue and product sales and service
revenue from e-mail campaigns.
MOZ domain name authority and page authority has been previously discussed, a minimum of
ten is required for listing in most backlink directories, as you can see it has that covered.
Another important aspect is the number of backlinks our website has, we can use ahrefs.com to
monitor and track this for us at no cost:
Compare the links to Google which is months behind:
Using a free chrome plugin by webrankstats.com we can monitor and view a quick snapshot of
our website which includes pages indexed, SocioMeter, Traffic and Pagerank.
The plugin is not very good at tracking backlinks obviously but otherwise reliable.
The base domain name value, monthly searches for the keywords in our domain name and
estimated cost-per-click for the domain name are also relevant factors that are rolled into the
valuation of our website.
The age of our domain name has a lot of value in the search engines, this shows how long a
domain name has been registered for without being deleted. We can assign a value for domain
name age and website age, there is no standard metric for quantifying this data.
The website has priority intellectual property value but it is hard to quantify, there are
hundreds of unique posts and published articles on article directory sites. It has graphics that
are unique within posts and on the main website. It has a website directory with both paid and
added affiliate promotion websites.
The only hard factors to quantify are the revenue statistics based on the current setup of the
website, when it becomes time for actual sale I will need to split up revenue into channels as
currently they are bloated and not accurate. The affiliate revenue is around $750 a month
which is split between Amazon Associates program, Commission Junction, Clickbank and five
direct affiliates for which there are links throughout just about every blog post on the site. The
website generates $45 in text link ads which is rather low but the site does not have a pagerank
yet, it should rank around four or five in the next few months. In CPM advertising the website
generates an average of $14 a month based on three months average from adcash with a single
banner. Adsense revenue can’t be quantified on an average yet as it was just added a month
ago, it is currently only around $200/mo when it should be closer to $500. The site has
generated direct revenue from a storefront (currently removed because of website plugin
compatibility) and from a business directory which currently has averaged $73/mo. If were
expecting to be paid $50,000 for this property I think we’re going to fall a bit short but let’s see
where we’re at. It’s time to put everything together and try and figure out an asking price for
our website.
Determining a sales price
It’s time to pull out our calculator and add up our value to create a bottom end valuation and
top end valuation. So, using the information we collected about computersecurity.org let’s see
what we determine the value to be based off of factors that we consider to be valuable. Let’s
determine a simple 3 month valuation.
So far the values we have to put into a formula are:
Average Monthly Unique Visitors = MU = 231,987
MOZ Domain Authority = DA = 19/10
Inbound Links to the website = IL = 540,000
Google Pagerank = PR = 0/10
Average Monthly Revenue = MR = $1082
Average Monthly Cost to Operate = OC = (VPS @ $289 a year divided by 40 websites) = $7.23
Average Monthly Expenses = ME = (Backlinks + Recurring Directory Fees) = $155
Domain Name Appraisal Value = DV = $4700
Average cost-per-click for the domain name based off its keywords = CPC = $8.59
Industry value of websites in the same category = IND = 8/10
The age of the website = WAGE = 6 months
The age of the domain name = DAGE = 14 years and 5 months
How many pages are indexed in Google and Bing for the website = PI = 4,907
How many register users the site has (subscribers, clients, customers, e-mail opt-in list) = RU = 63,000
Users Valuation Weight (Blog subscribers lowest value with real estate buyers, stock investors, business buyers, etc
on the high end) = UV = $.10 per opt-in subscribed user
Social meter (how many Facebook likes, Tweets, Google Plus, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, etc hits) = SM = 86
Alexa Ranking = AR = 186,049
Website Content & Graphics Value = WCV = (Third party appraised – 530 posts (488 unique content) unique logos
and graphics) = $
Intellectual Property Value = IPV = N/A
Simple Website Appraisal Formula:
Website Value = (DV + (MU * CTR * CTC) + (MR – ME – OC) + (RU * UV) + (AR + WCV + SM + PI)
+ (DA + IL + PR))
Variable Input = ($4700 + (231,957 * .05 * $8.59) + (3 * ($1082 - $155 - $7.22)) + (63,000 * .10)
+ ($500 + $976 + $4.30 + $100) + ($50 + $1500 + $0))
After the input we have $4700 + $99,625 + $2759 + $6300 + $1580 + $1550 = $113,754
This gives us a valuation based on three months of stats at $113,754 which would be spot on if
our monthly unique visitors was not a bloated number, substitute in the true organic value for
this equation and instead of it being worth $99,625 it drops to $10,738 which gives the real
value of the site currently a valuation of $24,867. I am not going to try and cheat a new buyer
out of over $80,000 by inflating the stats. This means I still have a lot of work to do growing the
sites popularity, increasing the monthly revenue, increasing the user base and more
importantly driving up the traffic exponentially in order to reach my $50,000 mark. Now if I
were using a 12 month revenue multiplier the site would be worth over $30,000 but in order to
pass off a 12 month valuation the site has to have been established for years with consistent
numbers and a rapid increase in growth.
When listing your websites on sites that allow HTML and images it is worth including most of
the above factors in your listing and you can use the basic appraisal value if you understand it.
You can always tweak it to fit your needs; it is just an example of one way to appraise a
website. In our valuation we did not use multipliers such as Industry Value, Website Age and
Domain Age. This domain name is almost 15 years old so that would have drastically helped the
value, but the website age is only six months so it would have evened it out. The industry value
is a multiplier from 1/10, Cyber Security is currently an 8 or 9 due to its recent elevated
importance.
Presenting this type of data to your prospective buyers shows that you know what you’re
talking about and it is more than likely more than they do. Use the above variables in your
listing to present your case for why you think your domain name should be worth what you say
it is. Buyers that don’t understand the various aspects of a website and what value is will have a
hard time making you a reasonable offer and you should thank them for their interest but move
along.
Where to flip website properties
At as many places as possible! Maximum exposure is the name of the game, putting your
website in front of as many prospective buyers as possible. This can be accomplished without
investing a penny and only paying a commission after a successful sale. Typically sites that we
sell on without having to pay any fees for listing are domain name aftermarkets that allow you
to include a website with the sale. There is also the option of selling your website and paying a
fee for it to be listed as a featured or showcased website for sale which can drive exponentially
the amount of visitors to your website sales page. This is usually the case on domain name
aftermarkets as a means to promote domain names but also websites. As well as domain name
aftermarkets there are website centric/specific marketplaces that focus on buying and selling
websites and e-businesses that may also include the option for a domain name listing.
Another option and this is usually recommended for website sales that will exceed $5,000,
using a website broker to help locate a buyer for your website or e-business. We can also make
use of popular marketplace venues such as auction sites that have all types of products and
services for sale but allow website and digital content to be sold.
There are also many businesses that specialize in buying and acquiring websites and ebusinesses directly. There are no middlemen involved, no marketing, no listing fees or
commissions; it is just you and them. You provide them with your website or e-business
information and they make you an offer directly if they are interested in purchasing it. This can
actually be a very good starting point to see if companies are interested in your website and to
see what types of offers they make. Usually they will low ball you something terrible but if
you’re on top of your game and you have read this guide closely understanding what value your
website has than you should be in a good position to negotiate and not be taken advantage of.
The last option is to basically do a for sale by owner type of strategy where you use one of your
websites, e-mail account or through phone to sell the website on your own with your own
marketing and payment collection.
Domain Name Aftermarkets w/Website Selling Options
SEDO – Most average sellers don’t know that you can sell websites on SEDO and it certainly is
not the best place for selling them but it is completely free to list them in their marketplace.
Once you receive an offer for the website you will have the option of countering or accepting
with the prospective buyer or sending the project to auction in their marketplace which will
draw loads of traffic to your project. Once you list a domain name as a website it will show up
under “My Domains” with a special “W” icon in front of the domain to specify that it is a
website project for sale:
I don’t use SEDO a lot for website flipping but I have sold about 30 websites on their
marketplace with great profit margins, here are some of the websites that I sent to auction on
SEDO after receiving an offer and SEDO takes a commission after the sale, hence the billing
information in the image below:
In order to list your website on SEDO you have to follow the same procedure that you would to
list a domain name with one small change during the add domain process. After clicking “Add
Domains” you will input the domain name of your website in step 1. When you reach step 2
you will switch the default option of “Domain” on the right side option to “Project” as pictured
below, it is recommended by many investors and rounded upon by other. Domakni names are
antother bi
Once completed and the domain name project (the website) is listed in your domains you can
click on the domain name and edit the offer page to descript your website offering:
It is that simple, they used to have an etracking button that had to be placed on the bottom of
your website to track your website traffic and patterns but they seem to have abandoned that
procedure. The description text box is limited in the amount of characters that can be used in
the description, you cannot include images or any rich content. The solution to this is to provide
a website link to either your listing on another site or on your webpage that has all of the listing
details and site stats so the buyer has a better understanding of what they are getting.
GoDaddy Marketplace
Just like with SEDO , GoDaddy will let you sell your domain name which includes a website,
however the description box again is very short at a 255 character max and no ability to include
rich content. This is where you provide a link for the buyer to see a full description of the listing.
The good news is that you can list your website over and over on Godaddy FREE until it sells.
Website Specific/Centric Marketplaces
These marketplaces seem to feature two different ways to sell your website, one way is to list
the website for a very low fee or no fee at all and pay a commission only when your website
sells. The other type of listing requires that you pay an upfront listing fee but pay no
commissions at all on sales regardless of price. I have sold websites on all of the sites described
below and I have noticed that the commission based sales seem to draw higher sales prices
which makes sense, once the sales site has your listing money and they are not collecting a
commission they do not have any motivation to advertise and promote your website because
they have no skin in the game after they have already received your payment. There is one
hybrid type of marketplace out there which is Flippa. They do charge a fee for listing and collect
a commission on sale. The fee is small enough that you can list multiple sites; the reason for the
listing fee is to prevent a saturation on their marketplace with hundreds of thousands of
websites to compete with for sales which demand can’t keep up with supply.
Flippa – The biggest of the big, features website auctions at a small fee from $9 and FREE
classified ad listings. Perfect site for quick flipping of websites, you can sell undeveloped
websites, turnkey websites as well as well established revenue websites. You have the option
for all kinds of upgrades to help promote your listings such as bold and underline title
descriptions, featured listings, website frontpage listings and e-mail subscriber blast for your
website listing. There are a lot of fees associated with a listing and sale on Flippa but you will
receive the most exposure to your websites and have the best chance of making a sale on this
site.
WebsiteBroker.com: Allows you to sell both domain names and complete web sites. Web sites
can be listed for 90-days for $9.95, or $29.95 for a premium listing that gains you extra
exposure. Domain names have similar auctions priced at $9.95 for standard listing and $14.95
for premium. There are no commissions charged on completed listings.
BuySellWebsite.com - $39 for a two week listing and $59 for a two month listing – this is one of
my least favorite website marketplaces, I have sold properties here but I don’t recommend
paying the listing fee unless you are trying to sell a website for $5,000+ which justifies the
expense. They have been around since 2001 and are well known in the industry which does
help with organic traffic to the website.
FreeMarket.com – Very professional looking marketplace with a pagerank of 5 and an Alexa
ranking under 50,000. They be the next up and coming Flippa. It's FREE to list to millions of
users with a commission only on successful sales. No Hidden Fees!
www.bizbuysell.com – If your website is also a business this is the place for you to get
maximum exposure and profit for your e-business. Each month BizBuySell receives over 12.3
million page views from individuals looking to buy a business or franchise and from owners
looking to sell their business. With a high volume of traffic, and record of over 100,000
successful business sales, they provide the best opportunity to find a business to buy or to list
your business for sale.
Webmaster-Talk.com Marketplace - A general sales site that allows you to do everything from
promoting your services to selling your established sites. General listing fees are free, but
services such as promotions will cost you credits you purchase with the site. With auctions, you
can select to feature it on the main page, highlight it, etc., and those services will cost you a few
dollars each.
InternetCompanyForSale.com - This site charges no commissions on the sales through their
company, but they do have one time listing fees depending on the type of site you want to sell.
Established sites pay $59.95 for list-til-you-sell. Start-up sites will cost you $39.95, and a
Permanently Featured Listing, either for a established site or start-up, it will cost you $99 and
will get you featured in their bi-weekly newsletter. This site is one of the lower ranking
marketplaces and currently only holds a pagerank of 2. Would not be one of my first choices for
listing websites.
Forums that have website sales listings
Forums.DigitalPoint.com: A forum for all types of web development that allows you to post a
site for sale as long as you have been a member for at least 14 days, do not have a reputation in
the red and have a minimum of 25 posts throughout their boards.
GeekVillage.com Forums: To list your site with the GeekVillage.com forums, it will cost you
$9.95 per topic, and you must be a member in good standing with the forum.
Talk.iWebTool.com - A forum dedicated to everything about developing your own web sites and
domain names. It also has an active sales area for selling domain names, sites, scripts and more.
WarriorForum.com – This forum has a massive webmaster user base and an active community,
they have a thread specifically for buying and selling websites and domain names
Website Broker Services
Brokers should really be considered when you are expecting sales prices over $10,000, they will
appraise your website(s) for you for and usually help you take the sale from beginning to end
which includes deciding a valuation, promoting your site to their buyers list, writing a sales
agreement contract and helping with escrow services to facilitate the sale. I have never used a
broker service and I have flipped 500+ websites but I know sellers that have used them with
great results. If you don’t feel confident selling a website for big bucks a broker will be more
than happy to take over that responsibility and risk for you. I provide you with a list of brokers
that have been recommended to me through my network of buyers and sellers who have had
successful transactions with them. The fees vary greatly, you won’t find a standard fee on the
websites, you will need to input your website information and speak with a representative who
will get you on your way.
http://www.websiteclosers.com/services/ - We offer a FREE Seller Consultation, so it costs you
nothing upfront to learn what we can do for you. We encourage you to give us a call, talk to our
team, and we will prove that we have the experience, skills and drive to sell your business using
our professional sales strategies.
Here are a few additional brokers that will be more than happy to help you sell your websites.



http://www.iacquisitions.com/index.php
www.empireflippers.com
http://feinternational.com/sell-your-website/
Selling Directly, Business-to-Business
One of the biggest benefits selling directly to another business is that you have the ability to
create a sales relationship. In the past one of my favorite places for flipping domain names and
sometimes even websites was my relationship with BuyDomains.com who used to allow
domain owners to submit their portfolio of domains they wanted to sell and BuyDomains would
come back with offers on the ones they were interested in. I have sold them hundreds of
domain names taking up only a few minutes of my time since they had worked with me in the
past. The sites below you may be able to create similar relationships with after your first few
successful transactions which may allow you to quickly pocket a profit and move on to your
next project. I have sold some websites to the following buyers in the past at reasonable prices,
you do have to know how to negotiate.
webuywebsites.org – They only purchase Established Websites, not “turnkey” sites. They are
looking for a userbase and/or some reputation in the site’s niche. They are looking for websites
with significant traffic in their sector. Obviously, “free stuff” sites, for example, are typically far
more popular than niche sites. Please use common sense.
www.thewebsitebuyers.com - What they buy: forums, content sites, blogs, online tutorials,
ebook, affiliate or any other type of niche website. What they don’t buy: NO proxies, celebrity,
video sharing, watch tv online, photo sharing, etc NO adult, pharmacy, casino, warez, spammy
or other questionable activities NO "turnkey" sites you just launched NO sites with zero organic
traffic NO sites where all the traffic is from paid ads or temporary free ads (craigslist, etc) NO
sites with mostly foreign (non-US) traffic NO sites that have been banned in google, msn or
yahoo The site must not break the terms of its revenue source (google adsense, etc)
websitebuyer.net - WebsiteBuyer.net is a web investment division of Art Branch Inc., looking to
acquire small to medium websites with original content as well as quality domain names. What
are they looking for? websites on any topic except adult websites. They will consider fully or
partially developed websites with or without visitors, as long as the website content is original.
The website form doesn't matter; they buy forums, content websites, blogs, online tutorials,
news websites, etc.
General marketplaces that you can sell on
eBay – Ironically, I have sold more than $75,000 worth of domain names, websites and
portfolios of domain names and websites on eBay over the years. eBay’s listing interface
provides you with the ability to list pictures of your website stats and clearly paint a picture of
value to potential buyers. There is a good sized userbase that focuses on buying and selling
domain names and websites on eBay which is surprising to many people. My plan of attack is
listing websites and domain names at rather high prices in my eBay store with the “best offer”
option selected which allows potential buyers to make offers which you need to negotiate with
and close out the best possible deal, if one can be made that satisfies both parties. You will
pretty much be on your own here, I have used escrow.com for website sales of more than
$5,000 to make sure I don’t get burned by a potential chargeback by them using PayPal which
does not protect sellers of digital content and services very well. I have lost several high value
domain names and websites due to scammers making purchases and doing chargebacks on
PayPal and me actually losing after they have the asset in their account. I’m not trying to scare
you, this has only happened twice out of several hundred successful sales but it is something
you should keep in the back of your mind if your selling a high prices domain name or website.
GunBroker – Really? A marketplace dedicated to the sales of weapons has a domain name
section? Yeah, that surprised me as well but I have actually sold some decent value websites
and domain names on their site. The site receives so much traffic and they have so few
categories that it just happens. If you have a site that has in anyway content related to weapons
or guns you could possibly generate the highest sales price for your website here. I sold a
weapons blog on the site for a ridiculous profit as the userbase is nuts for weapons and the
prospect of a dealer acquiring a website to sell their weapons on actually creates some
competition for your site. It is free to list on this site; you only pay a commission after a sale
unless you pay for upgrades to your listings. I don’t recommend you waste your time with
listing all your sites on here but if you’re hoping for that big payday you want maximum
exposure and that means list on as many sites as you can, especially ones that don’t charge for
listing.
Communities & Groups for Website Buying & Selling Discussions & Offers
Here are some of the largest online social media communities and groups that you can join to
better help perfect your skills as well as buy and sell your website and domain name properties
in no particular order.
https://plus.google.com/communities/116688443866284813457
https://www.facebook.com/flippamarketplace
https://www.facebook.com/groups/namepros/?fref=nf
https://www.facebook.com/dnforum?fref=nf
https://www.facebook.com/DomainVeggies?fref=nf
http://www.meetup.com/SoCal-eCommerce-Sellers-Group/
http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Buying-and-Selling-Websites-Community/
http://www.meetup.com/Website-Building-Target-Niche-Internet-Marketing-SEO/
http://www.meetup.com/Flippa-Buyers-and-Sellers-in-Melbourne/
http://www.meetup.com/Buy-and-Sell-Websites-Meetup-San-Jose/
http://www.meetup.com/Digital-Media-Webmaster-Entrepreneur/
http://www.meetup.com/CapitalAreaDomains/
http://www.meetup.com/Domain-Investors/
http://www.meetup.com/Dallas-SEO-Marketing-MastermindMeetup/
http://www.meetup.com/Flippa-Buyers-and-Sellers-in-Melbourne/
https://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4015956&trk=vsrp_groups_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsea
rchId%3A4253182241444373923325%2CVSRPtargetId%3A4015956%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary
https://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4212346&trk=vsrp_groups_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsea
rchId%3A4253182241444373923325%2CVSRPtargetId%3A4212346%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary
https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=4712450
https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=4692646
https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=4946253
https://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=6745454&trk=vsrp_groups_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsea
rchId%3A4253182241444373923325%2CVSRPtargetId%3A6745454%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary
https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=6772113
Escrow services
This is pretty straight forward, when you are selling a website or domain name on a third party
site you will want to make the buyer feel safe and secure about the transaction. There is one
big name in the game which is Escrow.com that has been around forever it seems. An escrow
service will ensure that you have met your obligations as a seller before releasing the money to
you, it will also ensure that there will be no chargebacks and limit any possible disputes after a
sale is completed. Once you have transferred everything over to the buyer, escrow.com will
verify the domain is successfully transferred and wait for an acknowledgement from the buyer
that all the content and everything you’ve promised has been delivered. After this has occurred
Escrow.com will send you a check for the proceeds minus their commission which can be
charged to the buyer, the seller or split between both. Typically if I use Escrow.com it means I
have sold a property or portfolio outside of a specialized marketplace and I want to protect my
properties and instill confidence in the buyer that the transaction will go smoothly. Here is a
breakdown of their fees:
Transaction
Amount
(Merchandise
+ Shipping)
$0-$5,000
$5,000.01$25,000
$25,000.01 +
Standard
Premier
3.25%
($25.00
minimum)
$162.50 +
0.26% of
amount
over
$5000
6.3%
($25.00
minimum)
0.89%
Not
available.
Not
available.
The alternative to Escrow.com is Ecop.com which is owned by the same company that owns
CAX.com and Valuate.com. Through my experience with Ecop I have been satisfied over every
transaction. They payout in a timely manner and receiving the money through PayPal is an
option.
Even if you are using an Escrow service it is best if you include some type of sales contract, here
is a sample of a website sales contract:
WEBSITE SALES AGREEMENT
This Website Sales Agreement (the “Agreement”) is made effective on this ___ day of _______________, 20__, by and between ____________________________________ of
____________________________________ (the “Seller”), and _____________________ of ______________________________________ (the “Buyer”).
WEBSITE SALE
Subject to the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement the Seller hereby sells and transfers to the Buyer the any and all of Seller’s right, title and interest in and to the Website
_____________________________________ (the “Website”) and any other rights associated with the Website, including, without limitation, any intellectual property rights.
PAYMENT TERMS
In consideration for the sale of the Website the Buyer agrees to pay the Seller the amount of $ __________________. This amount shall be paid within ___________________ business days from the date of this
Agreement. In the event if Buyer fails to make the payment, this Agreement may be cancelled by the Seller at the Seller’s sole discretion.
DISCLAIMER
SELLER EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
REPRESENTATIONS AND WARRANTIES BY THE SELLER
a) The Seller has all necessary right, power and authorization to sign and perform all the obligations under this Agreement.
b) The Seller has the exclusive ownership of the Website and there are no disputes with any third party over the proprietary rights to the Website.
c) The execution and performance of this Agreement by the Seller will not constitute or result in a violation of any material agreement to which the Seller is a party.
INDEMNITY
The Buyer shall indemnify and hold harmless the Seller against all damages, losses or liabilities which may arise with respect to the Website or its use or operation by the Buyer or by any other party.
ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTS
Seller agrees to cooperate with Purchaser and take any and all actions necessary to transfer and perfect the ownership of the Website Registration from Seller to Buyer.
NOTICE
All notices required or permitted under this Agreement shall be deemed delivered when delivered in person or by mail, e-mail, postage prepaid, addressed to the appropriate party at the address shown for that
party at the beginning of this Agreement.
ENTIRE AGREEMENT AND MODIFICATION
This Agreement constitutes the entire agreement between the parties. No modification or amendment of this Agreement shall be effective unless in writing and signed by both parties. This Agreement replaces any
and all prior agreements between the parties.
INVALIDITY OR SEVERABILITY
If there is any conflict between any provision of this Agreement and any law, regulation or decree affecting this Agreement, the provision of this Agreement so affected shall be regarded as null and void and shall,
where practicable, be curtailed and limited to the extent necessary to bring it within the requirements of such law, regulation or decree but otherwise it shall not render null and void other provisions of this
Agreement.
GOVERNING LAW
This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of ______________________.
ASSIGNMENT
The Buyer cannot sell, lease, transfer, or convey the Website to any other party during the term of this Agreement.
Signed this _______ day of __________________, 20_______.
Seller: _________________________________
By: ____________________________________
Buyer: _________________________________
By: ____________________________________
How to complete the website transfer after sale
Game, set and match! You’ve done it, sold your website property and the only thing left to do
now is deliver your website content, transfer your domain name and provide any login and
password information required to access the site.
If you are using shared cPanel hosting, a Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Hosting which is
recommend if you are flipping a lot of websites your job is very simple. You need to simply login
to login to your registrar account and set the changes under the hosting section or if you’re
using VPS or Dedicated hosting you should have Web Host Manager (WHM) which gives you
root access over all the accounts and you can change any password as needed.
The following example is from GoDaddy hosting, I use VPS and shared hosting accounts with
them as well as other sites but GoDaddy offered $1/year hosting and a free domain name so I
jumped all over that setting up about 15 accounts with domain names. Here is what you’ll see
after logging into Godaddy and clicking on view my account, for shared hosting click on web
hosting:
Next, find the website that you sold and change the cPanel password to something temporary
for the new buyer like Chang3m3123, you can use that same password to change your website
admin user password to, e-mail accounts to and any other accounts associated with the sale as
an easy, quick and secure password.
For VPS and Dedicated Servers, login to your WHM account:
Click on account functions or change password on the left hand side menu and it will bring up a
list of all the accounts on your server:
Changing the password for the user account associated with the website will also update the
FTP, SSH and cPanel password for the accounts main user.
Provide the buyer with the cpanel password and direct them to the default link
www.mywebsiteisold.com/cpanel where they can login and download the website content or
continue using your hosting account depending on your sales agreement, personally I give the
buyer 6 months of free hosting which doesn’t affect me any as I have lots of bandwidth and
servers.
If you are not providing the buyer with a hosting account or access to your hosting account, for
instance if you used a shared hosting account to host multiple websites that you don’t want
them having access to you will need to download your website home directory, databases and
any e-mail forwarders you have setup so that they can extract the information on their own
hosting account and get the site back up and running. If you’re not sure how to do this, login to
your cPanel account and click on backups and you will be presented with a list of things that can
be downloaded from your site as a backup in .zip format:
From there simply e-mail your buyer the .zip files or provide a link where they can safely
download the content. The last step, or first step depending on what order you prefer is to
push or transfer the domain name to the buyer. Each registrar has a different process for
handling this so you will have to check with them if you’re not sure. With GoDaddy you need
the buyers account number and e-mail address on file with GoDaddy on their account and you
can push the domain name to their GoDaddy account like so:
Click on the domain name in your list of domains within your Godaddy account and it will bring
you to this prompt. From here click on the account change button and enter the buyers
information like so:
For domain contact information make sure you click the option for using the details from the
specified customers account. Additionally, if you are letting them use your hosting account you
need to click on the check box to keep the name servers the same for the domain name. After
you hit next you are done!
This is domain name investing, website building, revenue creation and website/domain name
flipping in a nutshell. This is a very repeatable and potentially extremely profitable system for
making money on the internet. You can turn this information into your own home based
business, a hobby or a full scale company. There are many different aspected discussed within
and many might not apply to you and your plans. You can stick with chapter one and generate
enough passive income from parking expired domain names that you don’t need to worry
about anything else, you can buy premium domain names at discounts from aftermarkets and
resell them at huge mark ups on other marketplaces. You can use the website content, product,
drop shipping and membership base creation as a means to build a profitable website that will
take care of you for life and never have to flip anything. You can also buy domain names,
quickly develop them and flip them for quick profits. Personally, I do all of the above for
maximum profits and continuous streams of income!
Best of luck in your future endeavors, now go make some money!
ACCOUNTS LIST – QUICK REFERENCE
Domain Name Registrars
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Godaddy
DynaDot
eNom
Network Solutions
1and1.com
Buying Expired Domain Names
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DomCop
Expired Domains
FreshDrop
Dropping
Name.com
Stuck Domains
Domain Name Aftermarkets
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SEDO
CAX
Godaddy
Name.com
AfterNIC
NameJet
SnapNames
Pool
DynaDot
Domain Name Sales
Fabulous
NameCheap
Website Hosting, VPS & Dedicated Servers
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InterServer – Big name in the game for Dedicated Hosting & VPS
1and1 – They have great deals on Dedicated Servers & VPS
GoDaddy - $1/mo Wordpress hosting
GoDaddy – Free month Virtual Private Hosting
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HostGator - The best and most reliable shared hosting, a bit more expensive than the
others but worth it for guaranteed uptimes and performance.
RackSpace – The best and most reliable Dedicated Hosting provider, however their
prices may be double of GoDaddy and other competitors.
Website Building Services & Development Help
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Strikingly – Website development templates & Graphics
LogoGarden – Make a logo for your website in under ten minutes
SpaceCraft – Make a custom logo or build a custom website services
Website Monitoring & Submission Software
Traffic Travis – FREE tool Set up separate projects for each website you wish to monitor. With
one click you can then bring up this data for analysis. How do you rank? Find out where your
site appears in the search engine results for every word in your keyword list. Traffic Travis hunts
through Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and Ask to show you exactly where you stand.
Competitor Analysis Monitor your competitors' movements in tdhe search engines. Traffic
Travis remembers data from previous searches, so you can see whether a website is moving up
or down the search engines over time. Top Ranking Sites - Analyze the top ranking sites for your
keywords with the click of a button. Keyword Suggestion Tool - Suggests variations on a
particular keyword. Useful for both PPC and SEO campaigns.
Domain Name Parking
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Bodis
SEDO
Domain Sponsor
AfterNIC
NameDrive
https://www.godaddy.com/domains/cashparking
https://beta.domainapps.com/
http://www.voodoo.com/
https://www.parkingcrew.com/
http://www.smartname.com/smartname/
http://www.theparkingplace.com/
Website/Domain Name Analytics
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Statcounter
Google Analytics
Google Webmaster Tools
Domain Name/Website Research
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Ahrefs.com
Moz.com
Alexa.com
Prchecker.info
Estibot.com
Valuate.com
Advertising/Publishing Solutions
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Google Adsense/Adwords
InfoLinks
Adcash.com
Clicksor
Bidvertiser
Sitescout
Bing Ads
Buying Traffic
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Elitewebsitetraffic – This is one of the best, pure expired domain traffic – no pop under
worthless traffic
Revisitors – Various traffic sources, one of the most reputable
Buy Expired Domain Traffic – Not the best looking site but all expired domain traffic
The Parking Place – Newer company – buy and sell domain traffic
GrowTraffic – Traffic sourced from high percentage of expired domains
VisitorZ – Various traffic sources as well, UK based
ZeroPark – Mainly traffic from expired domain name parking companies
Extore – Expired domain name traffic packages as well as E-mail marketing campaigns
Expired Targetted – Website looks like it is from 1995 but I buy traffic from them weekly
Cheap Web Traffic – Another website that needs to be updated but the traffic is legit
Domain Name Appraisals
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Estibot
Valuate
Website Appraisals
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http://www.urlrate.com/
http://www.siteprice.org/
Affiliate Marketplaces
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Clickbank – The largest digital marketplace on the internet, if you are looking for digital
products and content to resell this is the place to do it. No restrictions on new accounts,
no website approval requirements, instant sign up and selling
TradeBit – This site is a lot like Clickbank but you can also promote individual software
packages, media content and other digital products directly instead of having to
promote a website
Commission Junction – This is the largest and most reputable affiliate promotion
marketplace on the internet. This is where you can promote fortune 500 products and
services. Big name brands very easy to sell and promote but lower commissions
Pay Dot Com – This is an up and coming digital marketplace, specializing in the sale of
software and digital content
Share-a-Sale Affiliates – This is a site a lot like Commission Junction, they are smaller but
still have some large company products and services to promote
Avangate.com/affiliates/ - The biggest European based affiliate company, promote
European companies – you don’t have to be in Europe to use them
PayLoadz Affiliate Program – This site is considered the Clickbank alternative, they will
process payments for sellers and send a check or paypal. Affiliates can promote
products and websites similarly to how you would on Clickbank
Click 2 Sell – Affiliate marketplace similar to Clickbank and Tradebit, European based
digital products
Revenue Wire – Promote software & programs instead of products and services
Amazon Associate Program – Promote any products listed on the Amazon Marketplace
– low commission rates but easy to sell products for high volume sales. You can use your
domain name to forward with masking a custom Amazon eStore free of charge.
Free Link Exchange Sites
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http://www.freerelevantlinks.com/
http://www.linkmarket.net
http://www.link-exchange.ws/
http://www.links-pal.com/
http://hardlinkexchange.net/ (proceed with caution)
http://www.123exchangelinks.com/ (proceed with caution)
Buy and Sell Text Links
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TextLinks
LinkWorth
BackLinks
LinksPanel
MatoMySEO (Formerly Text Link Ads)
Article Directories
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Article Base – Pagerank 5, Alexa rank 7,000! Sign-up with Facebook option available
All The Websites – Pagerank 5 directory, Free sign-up and submission, been around
since 2003
Articles Factory – Pagerank 4, Alexa rank 17,000
Article City – Pagerank 5 – Alexa rank 20,000
Amazines – Pagerank 4 – Alexa rank 30,000 – small $9.99 one time setup fee but worth
a onetime fee, has featured authors which promote your content within the site
Free Website Directory – Pagerank 4 – Alexa 25,000 – Nice directory with relaxed
restrictions on content
Article Cube – Pagerank 4 – Alexa rank 30,000 – Strict article content requirements
A1 Articles – Pagerank 4 – Alexa rank 80,000 – Some restrictions on article content
Ezine Articles – Pagerank 4 – Alexa Ranking 2,500! This directory will drive you a lot of
traffic and it isn’t ranked higher on my list because you can’t post the articles on your
blog as well, the content has to be unique for them
Hub Pages – Pagerank 6 – Alexa Ranking 1000! Just like Ezine Articles however, your
articles and content have to be unique. They also have strict article guidelines and
publishing requirements
Website Directories
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DMOZ
Yahoo Business Directory
LinkReferral
Business.com
Botw.org
InCrawler.com
scrubtheweb.com
directoryworld.net
somuch.com
jayde.com
rdirectory.net
Selling/Buying Websites
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Flippa
WebsiteBrokers.com
BuySellWebsite.com
eBay
Social Media Exchanges
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Socializa
FollowLike
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MyDailyLikes
Likes Fan Exchange
Social Hits Exchange
Hitserr
Traffic Exchanges
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LinkReferral
TrafficSwarm
EasyHits4U
TS25
TrafficPods
TrafficEra
TrafficPunk
TrafficG
Hit2Hit
TrafficSplash
TrafficWitch
StartXChange
Ways to generate Income
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Quick Pay Surveys – Cash surveys, Visit the Cash Surveys section daily for survey
opportunities. There are new surveys available every day and you can earn $0.50 - $1.00
per survey. Why not start earning money for your opinions?
Panda Research – One of the highest paying survey sites available, they have been
around for over ten years. Receive Cash for survey offers, coupons, discounts, gifts,
rewards and giveaways, targeted to your specific needs based on how you answer our
survey.
Shadow Shopper - IF YOU HAVE A MINUTE YOU CAN GET PAID TO EAT & SHOP
We'll notify you instantly of all new jobs in your area as they are posted and help you
apply in 60 seconds or less. OVER 190,830 JOBS AVAILABLE RIGHT NOW We have over
1300 of the top mystery shopping companies posting thousands of jobs everyday. And
we put them right at your fingertips. INSIDE SECRETS TO MYSTERY SHOP LIKE A PRO
Through our Education and Certification programs, we give you in-depth advice, howto's and step-by-step guidance. You'll always know what to do next to start getting paid
to eat and shop.
I-Say - i-Say is powered by Ipsos, a leading global market research company Ipsos is a
global market research company that provides a fresh perspective on issues and trends
of today. Owned and managed by research professionals, Ipsos conducts more than 70
million interviews a year to serve more than 5,000 clients in more than 100 countries.