Create A Website That Sells (on flippa!)

Website flipping is back, this is not exactly new news to anyone. That is, unless you have been hiding under a rock, which I assume is most definitely not the case, a lot of leading experts and public figures such as Ed Dale and Yaro Starak have been talking it up for a while, so I would assume that you are more than well aware of this. However, at the end of the day, the ability to create a website that sells is something that is largely untapped, and today, I am going to tap into what it is exactly that you can do to create a website that sells.

For the purpose of this post, I am going to be using WordPress as my example. Why have I chosen this platform? Simple. Just take a look at the tag reports on Flippa to see what is selling and what is not, and you will see that there is a great deal of stability when it comes to WordPress blogs. Not only that, but WordPress is highly brandable, meaning that you can literally pick a tag from that page, and create a WordPress site around that tag.

So, what kind of website sells on Flippa?

Lets take a few things into account here. Although a lot of people are having great success creating a website today, and selling it tomorrow, this is not always going to be your best bang for buck. The key to creating a website that sells is in the form of a few separate factors:

• How old is the domain?

• How established is the website

• How well does the website rank?

• What keywords does it rank for?

• How many visitors do you get per month

• Does the site have commercial potential

• Can I buy today, and monetize tomorrow?

Now, I don’t mean to skip past any of the above points (I will be covering them in more detail shortly!), so I will start with how well the website ranks. Now, this is a combination of three factors. On Page SEO, Off Page SEO, and Keyword research.

First, before even purchasing your domain (or ordering your aged domain from Domain Samurai – hint hint nudge nudge), you really need to have your keyword research absolutely perfect. Consider the resources that you have, how competitive your niche is, and most importantly, consider the selection of buying phrases that you choose. These phrases will ultimately determine how easy it is to monetize your website from the git go, which can play a pivotal role in increasing the final sale value of your site. The difference between the selling cost of a site that makes no money every month, and one that makes 20$ a month can sometimes reach the thousands, so consider this part wisely.

When considering how many visitors the site receives per month, this really comes down to how much SEO you have performed on site. Amongst keyword placement on site, your off page SEO is always going to be of huge importance here. And in doing so, I recommend a variety of methods to be performed over the course of a month or two minimum. Below are my personal favorites in order of use:

Traffic Bug – I use this great little service as a way of getting my websites ranked initially, and focusing on other blog posts and pages. The service will submit to social bookmarking sites, directories, and RSS directories as well, and drip feeds over time as well. Not a service to be abused, as this is not a backlink building tool, more of an indexing tool. You can claim your free trial by visiting TrafficBug.

Blog Commenting – I will use the 5000 Backlinks package from Lynn Terry to identify great backlink opportunities from medium PageRank blogs and forums within my niche. At this point, this will not include .edu or .gov backlinks, as this can be risky in the initial stages of getting a website ranked. I will generally submit about two comments per page in the first week, and repeat each week. The package is available at 5000backlinks.com, and I think you should at least go check them out, I highly recommend this for your arsenal.

Ezine Articles – I will submit around 10 articles, with two links in the footer on each article. I will use a variety of anchor text links to the main site, and URL links. I will also use keyword based anchor text links to pages on the site as well, to help them rank better. This is a free service, you can sign up by visiting Ezine Articles.

Content Crooner – Once articles are approved by Ezine Articles, I will rewrite them so that they are unique, and I will submit them to Content Crooner, which in turn delivers them to a few hundred second tier article directories. I will follow the same principals as I do with the footer in Ezine articles. Content Crooner is great value, and saves literally days of work per article, and I have found it to be extremely effective when it comes to ranking. You can sign up at the Content Crooner website, I highly recommend this service.

AMA – This is the holy grail of it all to be honest. I will write at least one article per major buying phrase per fortnight, and I will submit them to AMA to be distributed amongst their network. In the body of the article, I will use anchor text to send link juice to a related article on Ezine Articles, and another link to the target post on the main site. The article will then be distributed to a number of medium PageRank blogs, and is always a very big boost when it comes to rankings. In fact, using AMA is a giant leap for anyone, you should go and sign up at the AMA website today, this is really the cutting edge for alot of the most succesful marketers out there today, as such, I promise you wont regret it.

Now, there is much more than this that you can do, however, this is the real nuts and bolts, especially if you are trying to create a site that ranks well, that appears natural to Google. Lets not forget that if you have Google Analytics, or even Webalizer enabled on your hosting account, you will be able to see how good your website is performing for certain keywords in real time, so that you can further gague what areas that you need to improve on in order for your page to rank better.

I will continue this article in greater detail over the coming days, as we are about to hit one of the most important parts of the process of creating a website that sells, and that involves the commercial potential of the site itself. If you want to be notified of when this is available, simply sign up for our RSS feed, you can also Follow me on Twitter, or even better, use the form below to sign up to the mailing list.

Talk to you soon!