Webflippers Try to Turn Poorly Designed Websites Into Popular Niche Sites
August 11, 2008
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article about webflippers - people who buy websites with the hope of improving them and then selling them for a higher price. One webflipper bought bird-cage.com for $1,800 and then sold it three years later for $173,000.
Dave Hermansen did not own a bird or a cage when he bought the online store bird-cage.com for $1,800 three years ago. He simply saw a Web site that was "very, very poorly done," and begged the owners to sell it to him. He then redesigned the site, added advertising and drove up traffic. Last December, he sold it for $173,000.
Hermansen, 30, is among the latest wave of entrepreneurs who, like the day traders and real estate investors before them, are looking to make a lot of money without much effort.
They use little more than home computers and free software to buy Web sites that appeal to a small and specific niche. Then they fix up the sites with hopes of reselling them for far more than they paid
The article says that webflippers look for niche websites that are poorly-designed and have little search engine exposure. They tweak the website and improve the website's exposure with SEO techniques.
Creating value, though, is the tricky part. Many Web site flippers said they begin by tweaking a site's template and making other superficial changes like adjusting fonts, colors and type sizes. After that, they manipulate a Web site's structure, coding and presentation so it shows up more prominently in Web searches.
In an era when Web use is increasingly search-driven, making sure people find your site makes all the difference, Hermansen said. "Once you beef up traffic, everything else just happens," he added.
It's much easier said than and done and to be able to do it you would have to have very good idea of what the search engines are looking for. But if you have the skills to dramatically increase traffic to a niche website that has little exposure you should be able to flip the website once you are done. One of the places webflippers sell websites is the Sitepoint Marketplace - there are always a number of websites and domains up for sale there.
