Making a Good Assessment
One day, while using a search engine to find sites with flipping potential, I came
across a site that had a for-sale sign on it. The content—roughly 20 pages of it—had
been written by the site’s owner, who was an expert in the field. The site had virtually
no traffic and no revenue whatsoever, but it was in a vertical, or industry, that
I had experience with, and I formulated a plan to flip it. My goal was simply to rewrite
the pages with specific keywords to try to optimize the site for search engine
traffic, then to use the optimized site to generate revenue. I knew this work wouldn’t
take long, but it could make a big difference to what was then an unoptimized and
unmonetized site—with great content. I paid a couple of hundred dollars for the
site and began work.
Optimizing the site for search engines was simply a question of researching appropriate
keywords for each page, and making some simple modifications such as
changing the article (and page) titles to reflect those keywords. Next, I had the site
listed in a couple of relevant directories and added some other backlinks from important,
related industry web sites. The traffic didn’t skyrocket, but it showed a nice
gradual upturn, gradually receiving over a thousand pageviews a day.
The other issue I had to look at was monetization, since the site wasn’t generating
any income at all when I bought it. I signed up for AdSense, but I also saw an opportunity
to sell premium advertising on the site. After all, the content was good
and targeted to the niche, and the vertical had many potential advertisers. Between
AdSense revenues, and sponsorships that I sold directly to ecommerce businesses
within the vertical, the web site was soon pulling in about $250 a month. In total,
this, and the SEO work, took about a day of my time.
I sold this site for $3,500 to a buyer I’d worked with in the past—all for the initial
cost of the web site and the eight or so hours of work I’d put into refurbishing it.
The assessment I’d made at the outset had proven to be sound. Probably the most
important aspect of this site flip was that the site’s foundation—its content—was
solid to begin with. As a result, I had to invest comparatively little time for a substantial
profit.