Site Flipping University

More often than not, flipper don’t take into account the money they SHOULD be making while flipping a blog.  Monetizing some niches is harder than others, granted, but with creative monetization, you can monetize anything.  What’s creative monetization?  It’s using your brain to figure out something you can sell in your niche that isn’t being offered yet.  Or if it is offered, you can offer something better.  In short, selling your own products would be the number one way to creatively monetize any blog.

The make money online niche is notoriously hard to monetize.  Why?  Well, for one, your target audience is bloggers, which are trying to do exactly what you are… make money online.  Why would they buy your product when they can sign up for an affiliate program, and buy the same product under their own affiliate banner and get 1/2 off?  The industry is cuthroat, and it’s not going to get any easier as time passes.  Over 80k new blogs are created daily, and about 1/4 of them attempt some form of monetization.  The problem?  They don’t know anything about it.  So they’ll run off to Problogger or John Chow and see these huge success stories that have them thinking that making money online must not be that difficult.  HAH!!!  So these bloggers start to research monetization options, and generally, spend a lot of time on make money online blogs.  A lot of you can atest to this, because several of you don’t even have blogs in this niche, yet you’re still here.

So what happens?  They start to experience monetization from all angles.  CPC programs such as Adsense are the most popular, but even Affiliate Banners are largely the same from one make money online blog to the next.  Bloggers start to become conditioned to the advertising around them, and they almost cease to notice that it exists at all.  Why?  Most of us have the same banners and promote the same programs.  After seeing the same banners over and over, you almost forget that they exist when you go to a blog.

The Solution

Create your own products.  It can be an ebook, a Wordpress plugin, a software.. the sky is the limit here.  To give you a recent example, I just made about $200 on the front end of a blog flip, and then sold it for an additional profit of $1,500 via a BIN bid at auction.  That’s an extra $200 in profit that may have been lost had I not found a simple ebook, which I was able to purchase master resale rights for.  I sold this ebook for $5, and had over 30 sales during the month which I promoted it.  Had I relied on Adsense I would have cleared about $20 in additional profit for that month on top of the selling price.  This money adds up guys… if you aren’t taking it, then it’s slipping off into oblivion and becoming a moot point later.

I realize that the thought of creatiing a product scares most people.  It’s unwarranted fear.  I can create an ebook in just a few days, and I’m sure you could too.  Don’t want to create anything?  Buy it… start looking for products with master resale rights, or even PLR (private label rights) products.  Anything you can do to start squeezing a few extra dollars out of your flips, or even your flagship blog.

You can also create a software.  I, like most of you, have absolutely no idea how to create software.  But there are freelance forums all around the internet like; Guru, Rent-A-Coder, and Scriptlance that can help meet your needs.  It’s not as expensive as you might think either.  As an example, I had a simple script programmed for $130 that I could have resold for $50-$100 all day long.  I used it just for me, but it COULD have been resold.  It’s a moot point now, because it doesn’t work with Wordpress 2.5+, but it was an option.  The script allowed me to trade links with others, and notified me if the person I traded with had removed my link, so that I could do the same.  Simple, but effective.  With 100’s if not 1,000’s of programmers on these sites, the price is rock bottom due to the competitive nature of the industry, and the fact that you have the ability to select the lowest bidder on the project.

Guys, give this a try.  Start thinking outside the box a bit when trying to monetize the “unomonetizable”.  You’ll see more success this way.