reflections

As promised a couple of weeks ago, this post begins a series of articles on the subject of Website Flipping. At it’s simplest level, flipping a website involves the following steps:

1. Find a site to purchase
2. Evaluate, negotiate and complete the sale
3. Add value to the project
4. Find a buyer and make a sale

Finding a Site to Purchase

In order to narrow your focus a little, it’s a good idea to decide on some sort of specialisation. Perhaps there’s a particular type of site that you already have experience with - forums, blogs or e-book sites for example. Buying in an area that you’re already familiar with will give you a much needed step up the virtual ladder, at least over somebody who’s a stranger to them. If you don’t have existing experience then sites that provide a service like image hosting, file storage, content resources, tutorials etc may be a wiser investment. E-commerce sites that sell an actual product are also good to work with.

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Both the stock market and real estate industry have long been populated by day traders and “flippers”, those that buy and sell in a short period of time in order to make a quick profit. With luck, this process can then be repeated over and over for a reasonably stable income - and you might even get rich!

Flipping Fun

A unique breed of entrepreneur is starting to emerge - one that takes the concept of flipping to the area of buying and selling online businesses. The shrewd investor will locate an underperforming business, buy it, work their magic to improve performance and then sell it for a good margin. It is by no means easy and certainly requires a lot of research and due diligence, but the rewards are there and it’s a lot of fun too!

The big advantage of buying a site is you don’t have to establish an audience and wait for the site to be indexed within search engines. Most webmasters, even those that don’t know their SEO from their XML, will understand the benefit of link exchanges. Even the most poorly managed sites should have some form of backlink network developed and return a result in the major search engines. It may not be a top ten search result but it will be a result ready for you to optimize and improve.

I intend to write a series of articles on website flipping, covering top acquisition strategies, places to shop for sites and details on how to avoid the common pitfalls. If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered then let me know!

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What does design mean to you? For me design is both the process and the final product of an endeavour to fulfil a personal or professional brief. Whether you’re creating a piece of graphic work, a website, or a design for a new product, the underlying principal is the same – and the creative process is everything. So how do we make ourselves better designers?

Despite very different backgrounds, most designers offer the same advice – reading the brief and planning your work on paper are two frequent suggestions. Design is wonderfully subjective though, and we all have different ways of getting better results. Here are some of the things that have helped me become a better designer…

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There’s a goblin at my window,
A monster by my door.
The pumpkin at my table
Keeps on smiling more and more.
There’s a ghost who haunts my bedroom,
A witch whose face is green.
They used to be my family,
Till they dressed for Halloween.

Have a good night folks!

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Well folks, today is a special day for me and my blog, which has now been online for 6 whole months! It doesn’t sound like very long, but in terms of blogging it’s quite an achievement!

In the true tradition of blogging milestones, I feel obliged to share some stats that cover the last half a year:

• I’ve had 49,016 unique visitors to the site
• They’ve looked at 101,932 pages
• I’ve written 57 posts
• My most popular post (80,000 views) is this one
• I’ve had 933 comments left by visitors
• The first comment was left by Zep
• Askimet has caught 2096 spam comments
• I’ve got 302 feed subscribers
• Alexa ranks me as 201,043 most popular site
• Compete ranks me as the 267,244 most popular site
• Technorati ranks me as the 27,786 most popular blog (with an authority score of 205)
• 82% of my visitors are using Firefox
• I’ve managed to successfully resist monetising my blog!

I’d like to send heartfelt thanks to everyone who has left comments, sent me messages, or just read my blog - the feedback is what makes blogging worth all the effort, and what keeps my spirits high! I look forward to writing another post like this in 6 months time…

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