Many people are familiar with the concept of flipping real estate for a profit – buying an undervalued property in poor condition, spending some money fixing the property and then attempting to sell it for a quick profit. The internet is still fairly new but buying and selling websites is often likened to flipping real property and real estate.

Google loves older sites and tends to rank them higher in the search engines. Many websites were created as hobbies, using simple design programs like Microsoft Front page. Along with the age of a domain, Google uses these factors in deciding which website should appear first, especially the incoming links.

These hobby websites aren’t updated by the owner and contain little advertising. These type of websites are the best type of sites to look for – they rank well in Google, have lots of incoming links and don’t have much advertising. Look in the top ten sites and see what sites appear in the top results.

If you do find a gem, use a free email address
like Yahoo or Hotmail, rather than your company address and email the owner to see if they might be interested in selling. If you can find a contact number, you could even try calling the owner.

Once you have the site in your control, you can then carry out your own website makeover. Your first step should be to get some website data from the website, so you can see what keywords are being used to find the website and where the traffic is coming from.

Create a new modern design and start implementing strategies to monetize the website. If the site is static html it is important to make changes slowly to the website. The next way to make money flipping websites, is building a website from scratch, producing the content, doing some promotion and then trying to selling it. There are a large number of free templates available which you can use to build your website and then you need content for the site, either written by yourself or articles that you have outsourced.

No-one is going to buy a website without any traffic, so you need to spend time building links and promoting the website. If you think you can eventually make more money by keeping the site and developing it long-term, why not just keep it.

One good type of website to start is where users submit content to the website. This could be a forum, classified website, job site or a dating site. If you make the site free to join and spend some time promoting it, you will get people to start using the website and it will look like an active and prosprrous website.

A buyer of the website then will have the opportunity to monetize the website by selling featured listings or premium accounts.

You can sell the site, when the television program is at the peak of its popularity. One of the best places to buy and sell websites is sitepoint.com and its new website flippa.com. They have several categories for selling websites, including ‘established sites, ‘premium websites’ and ’start up websites’. An established website needs to have between 500 and 100,000 unique visitors per month.

Flipping website is not a beginners way to make money online. For people who are creative and can come up with interesting and new ideas for a website, flipping websites can be a good way to turn a quick profit.