I held a BBQ a few days ago and a friend was asking me to show him how I made money trading websites online.
He couldn’t get how it was possible to really build and then trade a website. He assumed I must be selling one of those pyramid schemes. So I took up the number one BBQ stationary – the pen and napkin – and I drew out the whole method for him.
Buying and selling websites all begins with research. Get the first step wrong and everything that follows is typically a waste of time. If you want to start from scratch, you must find a market. I recommend you look into Market Samurai, or if you do not want to spend any money yet, Google’s free keyword tool works fine.
The first thing you do is choose a market – can be anything that interests you – and just pitch that title into the software. The results you hope for are below 60,000 competing pages and at minimum 100 searches a day. That way, you know that you won’t be in an over-competitive market where you will struggle to get results, but still, there is enough interest to make some cash.
The second step is to develop around three related keywords to support your main phrase. This will work with website traffic and to have your main keyword to rank higher and faster in the search engine results.
The next step is to register your primary phrase as a domain. Use a host like godaddy or hostgator and begin with finding if the dot com is available for your phrase. If it’s not available, try having a suffix or prefix to your domain, like blog or site. Let’s assume you go looking for shoes but shoes dot com was not available, try shoesblog dot com etc. till you find a name that works for you. Dot com is still the most prized of domain extensions, but if you can’t get anything appropriate, then move on to dot org. I don’t often drill down any longer to dot info or any of the other extensions.
Once you register your domain, you then need hosting for your domain. This is the place where your website will sit and you can usually buy hosting from the same provider that sold you the domain in the second step, especially if you get one of the larger hosting companies.
Now, you need a website. I recommend you create your website with Wordpress, and the quickest, most expedient way to create a Wordpress blog is with Wordpress Direct. Wordpress Direct is efficient and very basic to utilise for both setting up and developing your sites.
After your site is up and running, you will have to have some content. To start off, grab six or so YouTube videos that are about your market. You can do that from inside Wordpress Direct. For the video, write about 100 words of a description in the post and there’s your original content.
The next step is to be sure that Google and any other search engines know your site exists. The best way to ensure this is with social bookmarking. Submit your sites to sites like Digg, Mix, Propellor and Twitter. This will have the search engines locate your site and let the world know it is there.
As part of the installation process, you install both Google Analytics and Google Adsense. The first will chase all the stats of your site and Google Adsense is the ads that visitors click on in your site and this makes you money. Both of these may be brought up with a normal Google search.
Once you are up and running, you want visitors to get you higher on the search results to the first page of results, where our fun starts.
This is a two part strategy and it involves fresh content and backlinks. Content is simple; it consists of you creating articles, adding videos and other content on your site regularly. Backlinking is the procedure of having other websites linking back to your site. It’s essentially like a site telling Google that your site is good and that Google should tell others that they should visit your site too.
Now, when it comes to selling websites,the easiest method of acquiring backlinks is leaving relevant comments on blogs and forums that are related for your market.
All you have to do is repeat this procedure for three to six months and you could have a site that ranks on the first page of Google and making a couple dollars every day at least.
You would be ready to trade your site on flippa dot com.
I’ll tell you all about selling websites] over dessert, it’s time to go back to the BBQ!
