ASK a few of Australia’s best-known entrepreneurs for recommendations on earning extra money plus they are prone to explain to you to obtain flipped.
Don’t be offended. It is actually sound advice because ”flipping” – buying rundown websites, sprucing them up then selling with a profit – is, apparently, where it’s at.
It is the digital equivalent of renovating a house before putting it back out there with a higher price, only with no back-breaking labour, dust mite-infested carpets and massive cash outlays.
”Unlike flipping property, it’s simple to add value to websites,” Melbourne flipper David Jenyns says. ”To add value to real estate, you should do something significant, labour-intensive and, usually, expensive, like developing a new bathroom.
”But with websites, you may make small changes like link building using their company sites or increasing the overall look for little cost.
”That result can be a significant rise in value.”
Jenyns, the homeowner of MelbourneSEOservices.com, has created thousands and thousands of dollars online through tips to start flipping website and ”domaining”, buying keyword-rich domains, stuffing them content suited to google search optimisation (SEO) and selling at the profit.
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Among his testimonials is forextradingstrategies, which he bought for $10 and sold for $10,000 after spending $100 to obtain SEO-friendly articles written to the site.
The Jenyns domaining repertoire includes wrestlingmoves, that was sold for $2000; WoodWorkingProjects.org ($1495) and fireplace-design.org ($997). He paid $10 for every domain contributing to $150 to create the accompanying websites.
”Flipping provides the lowest barrier to entry in comparison with almost any other business out there,” says Jenyns, who in 2001, aged 19, crafted a name for himself – and $70,000 – selling items of the old Ponsford stand through the MCG as memorabilia.
”You only need to be able to begin to see the diamond from the rough and have a plan of methods to unveil it,” he says.
”Even when you haven’t got the technical know-how, you may employ a freelancer from your freelancing site, who makes it happen.”
Award-winning Australian entrepreneur Matt Barrie, one of Australia’s brightest digital stars, runs this type of site, freelancer, a source of freelancers for that digital projects essental to flippers, such as logo design, website programming and Facebook app development.
Freelancer.com is probably the biggest flips for all time. When Barrie bought the web page during 2009, at that time called getafreelancer, it looked, in the words, ”grey, utilitarian and horrible, like a high-tech Ukrainian prison”.
Nearly three years later, sporting a revamped interface and new name, it has registered over 2.8 million employers and freelancers and the range of people making money, either by selling their services or hiring them, is diverse, from programmers and graphic designers to, a couple weeks ago, a scientist inside the jungles of Africa needing a poster designed to extol the virtues of saving a rare type of hippopotamus.
In reality, many of Barrie’s freelancer.com staff of over 100 range from site, a situation he says represents a ”seismic change in the world’s labour markets”.
”It’s never been easier to begin an enterprise and it’s never been more cost-effective,” says Barrie, whose own flip turned over greater than $US40 million ($38.6 million) this season and it has dispensed about $100 million ever since the original site opened in 2004.
Barrie came upon the getafreelancer.com site while building a shop site.
Needing 1000 pieces of data applied for a spreadsheet, he was incapable of find anyone to make it happen and reluctantly placed the job on getafreelancer.
Within three hours, he had 74 tenders ranging from $2000 to $100 from your team in Vietnam.
He picked the Vietnamese team and the spreadsheet was returned 3 days later.
”It was perfect,” says Barrie, who realised the world’s labour-market model was potentially near dramatic change and immediately set about creating a similar site before discovering getafreelancer was on the market.
He sought funding, bought the web page, tweaked it and made it more friendly to Western users. ”The site’s revenue doubled in round the clock after we changed the graphics and, as time passes, we’ve incorporated other changes, including rebranding and renaming that old site,” he says.
And what of arguments in regards to the West exploiting Third World labour, albeit digitally?
”A large area of the world’s population survive $10 per day or less and today they could jump internet and earn in a day anything they would earn in a month and why shouldn’t they?” Barrie says.
”They are merely as smart as us, in the same way motivated and want employment as much as perform.”
Barrie cites the illustration of a young woman from the Philippines who now makes $400,000 per year turning out logos for businesses and websites around the globe.
Freelancer.com’s top freelancer earns a whopping $1 million annually creating small $65-$100 websites and selling these to businesses that want fast and affordable web presences.
Another spectacularly successful flip is how to flip domain name, the king of the internet’s domain-flipping destinations.
The two-year-old Melbourne-based digital marketplace will this month clock up greater than $60 million in website sales and hosts greater than 1000 potential sellers and buyers of domains and websites every minute.
Although the digital offerings on Flippa vary from $1 domains to six-figure websites, many of them are flipped websites that sell cheaper than $10,000, normally about $2000 a pop.
Flippa this past year hosted the sale of FaceMash.com ($30,000), Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook predecessor, famously created during his time at Harvard University, along with Retweet.com, which was sold for $250,000, and BlogTopSites, which went for $117,000 in April this past year.
Flippa may now be the world’s biggest website marketplace but it, too, started being a flip.
”I’d found this little site, called webmaster-resources.com, run by way of a guy named Matt Mickiewicz out from Canada,” says co-founder and former Sausage Software programmer Mark Harbottle, who this season made his debut on the BRW Young Rich List by having an estimated wealth of $40 million.
”I was buying advertising space on his website for several software I was selling and, eventually, he asked generally if i could help him with all the site’s promotion and marketing.
Despite a $500,000 offer of sale from a third party, Mickiewicz, then this 16-year-old working from his bedroom, made a decision to partner Harbottle along with the duo spent the next year rebuilding and rebranding as sitepoint.com, which quickly was a popular place to sell websites, particularly flipped ones.
After achieving a long period of 150 percent growth, the pair, still residing in different hemispheres, decided to spin out of the website sales arm into Flippa.
Today, Flippa as well as its three allied websites (99designs, sitepoint and learnable) employ 110 people on three continents and hosted about 20,000 website sales a year ago.
”I had no idea whether it was going to be three months or 3 years as i started however nowadays I become to complete things i love and also this whole experience has allowed me to complete a great deal of cool stuff, especially helping others with great ideas,” Harbottle says.
”And it all started using a $400 investment in the little Canadian website.”
Six tips
1 If you do not would just like quite a site or to get buff your digital portfolio, don’t just invest in a site due to the fact you want it. Make sure to consider the trouble to do your research before handing over any cash and discover should it be able to turning a return. Look at the site’s Alexa ranking, consider the revenue and potential revenue, along with what technology your site is built from. If it’s within an obscure language and also you won’t be able to find people to code it, there’s little point.
2 Choose premium domains. You could always fix the content however, if the domain is worthless or irrelevant, you’ll must work doubly hard. Domains that contain natural keywords would be best.
3 Look into the expertise of the user base, the amount of users (and what number of these are active), where they’re originating from and just how they can be being acquired.
4 Pay money for quality content to become written to your site (if you can’t do it yourself). Then you can utilize these articles to share to other sites in exchange for links to the site. This can markedly raise the SEO on the new site.
5 Make sure to ask the owner your entire questions before sending the cash: exactly what is included (all of the code, original, editable graphics) and exactly what is not included (installation, changes); will you be selling this page or a site as if it again; exactly why are you selling; may be the content unique for the site or created specially for dexopky60 site?; just how much ongoing support will the vendor supply?
6 Begin small. There’s a great deal to learn and you won’t be capable of learn it through just reading regarding it. Invest in a small website with just as much money that you can manage to lose and also a play. Consider using a $50-$100 site and learn about what works and what doesn’t. Enjoy the selling and buying of tips to become an adventurer, exactly what is involved, the things you get and the things you didn’t.
Flipping resources
Flippa.com
THE world’s No.1 marketplace for digital goods is crammed exceeding 100,000 potential sellers of flappable sites and buyers of flipped sites.
YouTube
IF THERE’S anything you want to understand more about flipping, YouTube is undoubtedly an invaluable teaching tool. Look at Google’s Webmaster Channel especially for online search engine optimisation basics (plus some advanced tips, too).
Google Analytics
Take the time to master Google Analytics (or any alternative analytics you may choose to use). At first it may be like gobbledygook but once you discover what every one of the numbers and squiggles mean, you’ll learn to see from the haze and learn what individuals truly want on your sites.
Digital Point
A FANTASTIC resource for anything related to the net and websites in addition to marketing. Amongst the 15,565,000-plus posts, techniques to just about anything you can ask already are there – and if they’re not, just ask one of their 492,000-plus members. See forums.digitalpoint.com.