Discovering the Secrets to Long Term and Short Term Website Flipping Strategies Flipping a blog is something that many people assume is done in the blink of an eye. Buy it, boost it, and then flip it – that’s the standard procedure of website flipping! Put that way, it almost sounds as if you could do all of that in a minute, or less, but this is pretty much never the case. Time plays a factor in every one of those steps, and you’ll find that if you try to rush things, you may end up making some very bad mistakes. After all, it only makes sense. Even if you know absolutely nothing about flipping, you should know that it will take time for you to shop around, evaluate websites, and find one that is worth buying. And subsequent to that, you should probably expect that ‘boosting’ the website, in whatever way that you decide upon, would take yet more time. Finally, even selling your website could be a lengthy process. Even this is barely scratching the surface of what goes on. Contrary to popular belief, flipping is hardly as simple as it sounds, and the people who are best at it all approach each flip in a distinct manner. That’s because every website is different, and each one will have certain quirks that require a different approach. Commonly, this is known as the flipping strategy. Generally speaking, there are two main approaches that can form your strategy, and mastering both will be highly beneficial. Just for the record, these are: 1. Short Term Flipping 2. Long Term Flipping Both of the names are fairly self explanatory, and over this guide we’re going to be looking to both, and giving you a firm idea of what each entails, as well as how you should plan things out, and accomplish them.
Also, you’ll soon see that there are several advantages to each approach as well, which forms an important basis to help you decide which type of strategy you should be going for, and in what situation. But before we even think of getting into all that, let’s start from the groundwork, and fully explain what website flipping strategies entail!
An Introduction to the Strategy of Flipping Most beginners make one common mistake when they start to flip websites: They don’t plan it out. Instead, they just head out there, find a website that seems to be affordable, buy it, and then try to sell it off for more. As you probably notice, these beginners tend to miss out that allimportant middle step of actually improving or ‘boosting’ the value of the website. Frankly, more often than not, this approach results in nothing more than failure. In this situation, most often the website that was bought is eventually found out to have been priced higher than it should have been, and not worth nearly that much. Therefore, in turn, when it comes time to sell it off, trying to find a higher price, or even breaking even, seems close to impossible. All this could be avoided if instead of leaping before looking, a little judgment was applied and a strategy formulated. Being the key to any successful website flip, the type of strategy that we’re talking about is just a plan of action as to how to proceed with a website flip. So that means that it should start from the beginning, i.e. the purchase of a website, and then wind its way down to the improvements that are going to be made, before finally coming to an end at the actual sale. Frankly speaking, the foundation of any strategy involving flipping ends up taking the following rough form: 1. Evaluating the potential of websites that are for sale Needless to say, this takes place during the buying stage, and it is, quite frankly, one of the most important parts of your strategy, because it is going to form the foundation from which your plans are based.
When you evaluate a website, you need to remember that you’re not just going to be thinking about how much the website is worth. Instead, what you should be thinking about is how much the website could be worth too! After all, the final goal of your evaluation is to determine whether or not the website is suitable for flipping. That means that you’re interested in how much it is worth now, and how much it could be worth after you’re done improving it. Of course, the question of what a website could potentially be worth is very subjective, but with every evaluation, you should be able to pinpoint some areas of improvement, and be able to at least hazard a guess as to how much you could improve those areas. Naturally, these areas will be what you concentrate on in the next step… 2. Carrying out improvements and ‘boosts’ Once you’ve picked a website that has the potential you feel is needed, the next step is to actually put into action the improvements that you thought you could make, while looking for additional ways to improve on the website too. As you would expect, there are many areas that a given website can be improved upon, but for now we’re going to stave off from getting too specific. Why? Well simply because we’re just discussing the general strategy right now, and you’ll soon see that more specific strategies would focus on more specific areas of improvement. So for right now, just bear with the fact that a general mention of these improvements is going to have to suffice. 3. Packaging together the website and selling it Contrary to popular belief, selling a website doesn’t just mean saying somewhere that you have a website for sale, sitting back, and hoping that someone bites. Instead, you’ll want to actively sell the website, and make sure that any potential buyers are aware of why they’d want to buy your website, in terms of what your website could offer them! Course, you’ll be including each and every strong point of your website, but your focus will probably be on the improvements that have been made, since the prime reason for those improvements is to enhance the value of the website.
And this is where they come into play. All in all, this part of the strategy is the culmination of every part that preceded it. Being aware of the general approach and strategy is really just the beginning. From this, we’re going to start venturing deeper into what actually should be going on in the planning stage of any website flipping endeavor. To do this in a way that you will be able to fully grasp, we’re going to need to cover some other concepts first though. Before we proceed, be sure that you’re comfortable with the ideas that we’ve discussed so far. Then, once you are sure that we’re on the same page, let’s start looking at what type of factors actually form part and parcel of the evaluation stage.
Factors Worth Evaluating for a Website Purchase On the heels of our more general discussion just a minute ago, you should be comfortable that two main things are evaluated to ensure that a website really is worth buying. These are: 1. Current value of a website 2. Potential future value of a website Combined, the two will present a vision of what your website should look like once you’ve finished all your improvements and are ready to sell it off. Naturally, it would be foolhardy to expect that things will turn out exactly as planned, but with experience, you’ll find that you can predict this quite accurately. Until you’ve reached that level of experience though, you’re going to have to operate on a bestguess basis, and so the best approach to use is to underestimate, rather than overestimating. By underestimating, if things work out better than your estimation, then you’re going to be even better off than you hoped to be. However if you overestimate, and don’t hit that target, then you might have made decisions that would mean you’d end up making a loss. Anyway, judgment is something that will come in time, so don’t worry if your estimations are slightly off to start with. Instead, let’s focus on the factors that are bound to be playing a role in your estimation of value. There are, to be honest, three main ones:
1. Profit As it is the prime reason why websites are purchased, profit is going to be what you base most of your estimation on. Generally speaking, websites can be sold for anything from 1 to 3 years worth of their profits. Of course, other considerations come into play, such as the sustainability of the profit, the revenue model used, and so on, but we’ll get to that soon enough. 2. Traffic Next up is traffic, which is, as you well know, the lifeblood of websites. In this case though, profit definitely holds more importance, as it is proof of the usefulness of traffic. Still, traffic does have some value, though once again other considerations are at work, including the sustainability, as well as how targeted the traffic is. 3. Brand Value Many people give this a miss, purely because most websites that are flipped have little brand value to speak of. Still, it definitely is a factor, as a good brand value could be more important than the other two combined. Naturally, it has just as many other considerations attached to it too. From what we just mentioned though, however general it was, you should be able to grasp the fact that these three factors form the focal point when you make your purchase. And each must be evaluated not just in terms of their current performance, but also in terms of what you think their future performance could be. That’s the tricky part, but we’re going to help you along in that regard very, very soon! Knowing these three factors, and knowing their importance, should also clue you in on another fact: They’re the same thing that your eventual buyers are going to be looking at! Needless to say, this only doubles the emphasis that needs to be placed on them, and should tell you why they’re going to play a very big role in your strategy. Speaking of that, it’s about time we started to look at the specifics involved in long term and short term flipping strategies. First up – we’re going to discuss short term website flipping.