Do You Want to Be an Independent Webmaster?

Doing business online requires work, and lots of it. If you have the drive and the passion to put in the hours however, being an independent webmaster can net you a lot of money. If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.
In short, check out this post on becoming a succesful webmaster. It addresses buying and selling domain names, a variety of ways to [legitimately] make money online without any scammy "home-based business opportunity" and does not try to sell you anything. So if you believe in teaching a man to fish, instead of giving them fish, that post is for you. What's more, there are a variety of links in there for you to read more and educate yourself.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories flipping a website, tips, domains and domain names.

Domainer.com - Building Domains Into Businesses

Domainer.com is a brilliant new startup that's recently raised $2M in funding. I love their business plan which is related to site flipping but with a different revenue model If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.

Essentially, Domainer.com have developed a site template and domain monetization plan that they are offering to domainers. The content comes from bloggers, the revenue comes from affiliate programs and adsense, the directories from Domainer's internal development team et voila: you've got a site with content and a revenue model.

My question is: What's the difference between domainers posting affiliate ads on their site and/or adsense and Domainer.com doing that with some aggregated blog content thrown in? What is the value add that Domainer.com provides domainers that they couldn't easily do themselves? I think they've got a good idea but need to develop their platform further.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories flipping a website/home improvement, site flipping case studies, domains and domain names.

SF News: Blogrolling Peter Davis, Ongoing Case Study this Winter Break

Some Site Flip news to let you guys know this blog is alive and well. If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.

First, a mentor of mine and internet Guru (yes, capital G) is being added to the blogroll. Peter Davis is the author of the very useful Rules for Protecting Yourself When Buying a Website as well as being a Sitepoint and Earners' Forum moderator. In fact, he's started his own blog forum, for those of you looking to talk with and learn from other bloggers.

Second, I'd like to announce an upcoming site flipping project that will begin over winter break. A longtime friend and I have identified a niche with little SEO competition and keywords with good bids. Starting around Christmas, we'll be launching an informative site around the theme. The plan is to implement Adsense and affiliate programs, SEO the hell out of it, and then watch the money roll in in a couple of months when it owns the SERPs and gets plenty of eager-to-click search traffic. (Search traffic clicks on Adsense ads much more frequently than traffic coming to a website from another referring source, such as a link from a blog.)

For the design, we'll be buying a template, and my buddy will work on the coding aspect of things to modify it and install plugins etc. (We'll probably be using Wordpress as a content management system, though it remains to be seen if it will be a blog.) For the content, we're looking at hiring it out, with a focus on tying in the articles to related blog carnivals to gain links.

Then with a little luck and good revenue stats, we sell out. I've got some buyers in mind and an estimated price tag that should hopefully let my friend and I start other sites and businesses...

So Stay Tuned for late December when I'll name the site and show you the actual techniques we're using, the nitty gritty that gets the site ranking and earning money.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories site flipping case studies, Site Flip News.

Don't get Burned When You Buy a Site

A key concern in buying a website is the transaction itself and ensuring the quality of what you're buying. The impersonal and international nature of the internet makes warranties of quality near impossible to enforce, even if law makes them an implicit part part of contracts If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.

A friend and mentor of mine, Peter Davis, has addressed these concerns with a little guide to avoid getting burned in buying websites (or other online property for that matter). As an active trader and a moderator at one of the web's most popular marketplaces for buying and selling websites, domains and other online products, Peter definitely knows what he's talking about.
Among the advice he shares:
Do a background check on who you're buying from. Plug their name and online nickname into the search engines. Ask other forum members about them.
Don't count on paypal to bail you out if you get scammed. Their first interest is their own bottom line.
Harassing forum mods will get you nowhere. The most they can do is ban the account/IP, and while that may be satisfying for those seeking retribution, it won't get your money back.

There are more rules and ideas Peter that shares that I haven't mentioned here. Generally, it's excellent advice for newbies to moderately advanced site flippers, so go check it out!.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories buying a site, flipping tips, and website markets.

Finding Expiring Domains with PageRank

Domaining and SEO pro Rob of the Wholesale Directory has contributed some knowledge here about finding good domains that are about to expire. The emphasis is on those domains with established PageRank, in order to speed up the SEO process of ranking the website/domain for its selected keywords. If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.
I frequently field questions about how one would go about finding expiring domains with high Google PageRank. When I realized that some people are simply checking the whois for current high-PR domains and hoping the owners will forget to renew, I thought I’d share my method for finding these domains.

The serious domain speculators who make 6-figures+ from domain reselling have their own software and sometimes entire teams of people working to find them good domains. Not all of us have those sort of resources at our disposal. My method, which does not require either, can be broken down into 4 steps.

1. Find the domains
2. Trim the list
3. Check the PR
4. Check the backlinks

Finding the domains

The easiest way to acquire a list of expiring domains is from a drop catching service. Personally, I get my lists for free from Pool.com. On their website, you can download a text file(in a zip) of all domains that are expiring within the next few days. Just click on the “Deleting Domains” tab and choose “Download the Full List”. This text file can be simply copied and pasted into MS Excel or any other spreadsheet program. Sometimes the list is too big to actually paste in its entirety, so you may have to split it in half.

Trimming the list

The problem with the lists you get from Pool.com is the extra characters. The text files are formatted much like a CSV file, and contain numerical values and commas after each domain. Here is where the excel “Find and Replace” feature comes in handy. From the “Edit” menu, choose “Replace” (or “Find and Replace”, depending on what program you’re using). You’ll be presented with two text boxes: one for the text to find, and one for the text to replace it with. The text you want to find is “,*” without the quotes. Using * as a wildcard tells the program to replace all commas and everything after them. But you don’t actually want you replace them – you want to remove them. So leave the second text box empty. Let ‘er rip!

Now you should have just a spreadsheet of domains. Here are a few other search strings that may come in handy for the “Find and Replace” tool at this time…

“*.biz” – Will remove all .biz domains, and can also be used for other TLDs you may not be interested in spending your time checking.

“*2*” – Will remove all domains with the number 2 in the, and can obviously be used for all numbers if you’re not interested in domains with numbers in them.

“*-*” – Will remove all domains with hyphens in them.

If you choose to use these strings to remove domains, be aware that you will now be left with quite a few empty cells. A simple “Data  Sort” (ascending) will allow you to remove the empty cells.

Checking the PR

Now that you have your list trimmed exactly the way you want it, it’s time to begin checking the PageRank of these domains. Rather than check one at a time, you can use a Bulk PR Checker like the one at http://seotools.alfalogic.com/bulk.google.rank.php to check up to 25 domains at a time. The rest is simply copying and pasting the domains 25 at a time and checking their PR. Personally, I ignore any domain under PR4. Write down the domains that you are interested in and save them for the next step.

Checking the backlinks

Just because you have purchased a domain with a high PR doesn’t mean it will retain that PageRank after the next PR update. Regardless of whether or not you intend to develop this expired domain, a domain with active backlinks is always more valuable than one without. Since the Google site: command has been on the fritz for quite some time, I prefer to use Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/) to check backlinks.

Since chances are you didn’t check the PR of every domain on your list, you may have stopped at between 10-20 domains of interest. Check their backlinks and decide on which ones you’d like to buy.

The process of buying an expired domain involved first requesting it from a drop catcher, and then bidding on it if more than one person has requested it. There is no way to know, however, which drop catcher will get a domain. For this reason, it’s best to sign up and reserve your domains at as many drop catchers as possible. DNForum.com is a great place to read reviews of drop catchers such as Pool.com, ClubDrop.com, etc.

Thanks again to Rob for the great SEO and domaining tips! Rob maintains Wholesale Wiz, the Wholesale Directory.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories the domain markets, domains and domain names.

The House Flip: Is House Flipping a Myth?

House flipping seems like the ideal business: for a low capital investment and with not much effort, you buy a house then flip it for profit. (If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.)

But is house flipping really all it's made out to be? Amongst my first readings on the topic when I first got into web site flipping and web estate flipping, I found a text-centric site put together by a real estate agent. The site's point was that house flipping is a myth.

The 'art of the house flip' as its proponents term it, is about fast turnaround time. You find someone interested in a property, buy it, and then resell quickly for a profit to the buyer you know. There are a few problems with that though.

First, people like to inspect a house and see if they're at ease in it. How can you give a tour of a property you don't own?

Second, a real estate agent can be sued for not finding the best price for a client. A house flipper might be sued to regain the deed if it's sold soon after the first sale. There are also other legal restrictions, varying on a state-by-state basis, which make house flipping extremely difficult or outright illegal.

Third, houses actually on the selling market that reappear on the market soon after they were bought suggest poor quality property. Agents and others will be aware of these conditions.

Really, the only legitimate house flipping is what's known as the fixer-upper. Buy, move in for 6 months to a year, renovate, clean it up, etc. and then resell. Except that if you're going to pursue that sort of house flipping, you'll find site flipping a lot easier, and requiring less capital.

Related articles are archived in the topical category flipping tips, real estate and house flipping (first post on house flipping).

Be Prepared to Sell Your Business!

Be ready and prepared to sell you web site or online business, says a new site flipping piece by Laura Alter. (If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter. )

Laura's article as an intermediate-to-advanced article for Site Flippers. The focus of her articles is sharing advice on good business management practices that increase the likelihood of a sale, and the value a web site will sell for.

Laura starts by mentioning advanced stats tracking.

Treat Your Records – Traffic and Otherwise – Like GOLD. What is it, exactly, that you own? Your online real estate is totally virtual. It could go -poof- into thin air in the blink of an eye. So, too, could your traffic stats, financial records, and other virtual data. Do you back up your website? You should be backing up everything, all the time.

In that same vein, make SURE you have a long trail of traffic stats. [..]

Next, she shares sound advice on managing your accounting:

Does Your Bookkeeping Hold Up? How many forum owners treat their forum like a business? Whether that means hiring a virtual assistant to do your books, or simply using a program like QuickBooks to do it yourself – it needs to be done.

I won't quote anymore, because it would just be spammy. But all in all, Laura makes the great point that you're managing more than just a site. Your traffic, accounting, deals with other site owners etc. are part of managing your business. Therefore, be ready and prepared to sell you web site business by following proper management technique!

Related articles are archived in the topical categories website appraisals, buying a site, flipping a website/home improvement, selling a site, negotiating, flipping tips, site flipping case studies, newsletter, Site Flip News, website markets, domains and domain names.