The stock market and real estate industry have long been populated by day traders and “flippers”, those that buy and sell in a short period of time in order to make a quick profit. In the real estate industry the life of a house flipper can be very appealing. Buy a renovator’s dream property at a discounted price, renovate and modernize it and then sell it at a few months later at a profit. This process can then be repeated over and over for a reasonably stable income. You might even get rich.
Flipping Fun
The life of a house flipper is often romanticized, with images of married couples buying old houses, spending a fun-filled six months working renovating and then making a cool $20-$50K profit on the sale and moving on to the next property. Do this three times a year and you have a recipe for a fairly nice lifestyle.
If you plan to renovate yourself then you better have the skills to do it or have the friends or family willing to help out. Alternatively you can hire professionals to perform the labor but you must factor in the cost into your expenses. There are also many other variables that need to be carefully controlled such as financing fees, real estate agent costs, legal fees, government charges and all the other issues that come with buying and selling property. Those with a keen eye for a bargain can do exceptionally well but it’s just as easy to lose money if you don’t do your research and plan. Watching the real estate market, tracking house prices and monitoring economic conditions are all important activities for a successful house flipper. Provided you do your homework and control your variables you stand a fair chance of succeeding.
Trading on the stock market is another area where the educated and diligent researchers can succeed. Knowing market trends, tracking company performance and economic indicators can all provide an extra edge and if you work on it full time you just may come out on top more often than not. Both the stock market and real estate industry have long been considered staple investment opportunities and even full time careers for those that choose to take on the challenge.
There is unique breed of entrepreneur that has taken the concept of flipping to another area; buying and selling businesses. A shrewd entrepreneur will locate an underperforming business, buy it, work their magic to improve performance and then sell it for a nice margin. It is by no means easy and certainly requires a lot of research and due diligence, but the rewards are there and no doubt it’s a heap of fun too.
Flipping Websites
Website For SaleBuying and selling businesses is appealing but given the high costs of making the purchase it is quite difficult to start, especially as a young entrepreneur. If you go wrong you may end up loosing a lot of money (just as you can with the stock market and real estate), so you really want to be sure of your skills and ability before investing.
The Internet is very new and the whole online commerce industry is just establishing marketing practices that work. Quite frankly, and this may sound harsh, but most of the people running businesses online have very poor websites. A lot of people running popular sites are not taking advantage of their traffic by monetizing it (this could be by choice or ignorance). Making a profit may be as simple as implementing a smart AdSense campaign on a popular site after buying it from an owner wishing to move on to other things. Perhaps an e-commerce site could use some search engine marketing or some tweaking to an AdWords campaign might do the trick, or better still, monetize, optimize, affiliate and upsell for maximum gain – make use of all the marketing tricks at your disposal.
I’m sure if we did some statistical sampling of the web industry search engine optimization techniques would be understood by a minority of webmasters and implemented well by even fewer. Search engine optimization is becoming mainstream and no doubt as the web continues to mature more and more people will study, test and build better websites, but it’s definitely still early days.
What this says to me is “business opportunity”. For those with the know-how, the energy to implement and a little bit of funds to buy the sites there are big gains to be made. What makes it even more appealing, especially for young or new entrepreneurs, is the price – we are talking about a lot less funds then it would take to invest in shares, buy property or purchase a bricks and mortar “real world” business. Websites with potential go for as low as a few hundred dollars.
The Advantages of Buying A Website
The big advantage of buying a site is you don’t have to establish an audience and wait for the site to be indexed within search engines. Most webmasters, even those that don’t know their SEO from their XML, will understand the benefit of link exchanges. Even the most poorly managed sites should have some form of backlink network developed and return a result in the major search engines. It may not be a top ten search result but it will be a result ready for you to optimize and improve.
Taking over a mature site (at least 12 months old) will mean you avoid the Google sandbox, a significant perk of buying established web property. Of course it really depends at what stage you take over a website as to how much of a step-up you gain and will no doubt reflect how much the owner will expect to receive for it (traffic for cash in simpler terms, but there are other variables to consider when selling a website).
Tags: buy, domain name, make money, sell, website, website flip