Interview with Blog Flipper Ben Bleikamp

Ben Bleikamp of College Startup fame is now selling another one of his blogs, College Startup. I sat down with Ben and we had a great chat on flipping websites for a profit. If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.

Ben first came to my attention as a Site Flipper when I read about his sale of The Poker Blog. His method of blog flipping can be summarized as build, write, and generate revenue, then sell for a profit.

Ben and I discussed a variety of things. Amongst others, Ben dicussed his new launching Lovely Blogs project, shared some great insights on what makes a website sticky, and traffic building techniques, and investing in websites by taking out mortgages.

Lovely Blogs is Ben's showcase of nice blog design, which makes sense when you consider that Ben is a succesful blog designer himself. What many people may not know, though, is that Ben is also a marketing genius. "I went from 0 to 100 subscribers since friday evening," Ben told me soon days after launching the project. "In 4 days I've gone from 0 uniques to over 270 a day," he continues. "People love the concept, so far."

This success has surprisingly not involved typical promotion methods. Perhaps it's because of his attention to design, or because they are often ignored, Ben hasn't pursued any blogrolling opportunities with College Startup, and he isn't blogrolling with Lovely Blogs either. Rather, he's pursuing an original backlink strategy.

"I'm not requesting links," Ben tells me. "I hate people that email me like 'hey I linked you, link me back!' So basically I interview a designer, then they are like 'hey check out my interview here,' so the designers are all linking back to me.

The question then is how Ben wants to keep traffic up, after the links from interviewed designers stop sending traffic along. Well, for starters, Ben's website is interactive. There's voting on how pretty a blog is, an integrated blog, and RSS readers obviously mean lots of return traffic as well. More is coming, according to Ben, and based on what he's told me, visitors can expect some great resources.

Finally, Ben and I discussed blog investing. That's a fascinating issue that deserves to be covered on its own, though, so I'll be writing about that tomorrow.

So where is this all heading? I checked back at Lovely Blogs today to find this lovely news: Ben's overwhelmed! There are 500 RSS readers already, and a week after launch, he's logged thousands of uniques! I, for one, have taken note of his traffic-building smarts. Anyone looking at updating a website's design should consider either hiring Ben or some of the designers at Lovely Blogs! Though ... with his marketing smarts, I sincerely doubt he'll need it. Lots of luck to this genius Site Flipper!

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