Powered by Max Banner Ads 

As you guys know by now, I am a bit of a website flipper. I absolutely love buying and then flipping established sites, especially established businesses. I periodically do this when my inventory of sites/businesses gets too low or when I simply need to make some extra cash or passive income (depending on the site or business). Either way, there are pros and cons of buying an established business. In this post, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of doing this.

The Cons

Along with the business, you are also buying the problems it has or the issues it may created both in the present and past. For instance, if the business was embroiled in a problem with employees, you may have some difficulties winning them over or getting them to trust you. There may be suppliers who are unsatisfied with the business terms or payments that you may have to scratch off every supplier and find new ones.

From the point of view of customer relations, it would be great if you could talk to previous and current customers. If not, you should see if there is information on the internet about the business that you may not otherwise gain access to from the seller.

You have to think of buying a business as buying an old house. Everything may look great at first and second glance but once you start working and living in the building, the cracks and leaks will start to show. You need to be prepared to deal with these problems as they are sure to happen.

The Pros

If you’re purchasing a franchise, you are basically starting with a clean slate. However, you are buying the components of a business and all you need to do is implement it.  Either way, this eliminates the need for a period of trial and error or introducing the business and marketing it from nothing at all.

If it is not a franchise, there are still other advantages to buying an established business and this would be a loyal clientele, staffing, SOPs in place, even a business site. In short, you are able to skip a lot of start-up steps in business which is part of what you are paying for. It does help that you get something with a personality and positive profile in the community but there are also benefits to revamping a business that has gone under but still shows a lot of promise.

As you can see, there are pros and cons of buying an established business. Just make sure that you know what they are before you make your purchase. This way you will make the best choice for you!

Do you have a HTML site or are you more of a WordPress fan? Over the past few years, we’ve seen the majority of our clients switch from HTML to WordPress. However, we still have a few die-hard HTML clients as well.  However, we are constantly asked, “which is better – HTML or WordPress?” Well, we have researched this question, tried out a few different models and have come to a decision – they are both very powerful if you market them correctly.  You see, both have pros and cons but without effective marketing, no one will see it anyway.Still not convinced? Keep reading!

HTML Site

The biggest disadvantage of an HTML site is that there is a learning curve involved. It can be difficult to do yourself (especially if you don’t know any HTML), so most people going for this kind of site hire website designers. As you can guess, this can be expensive. However, if you’ll be selling the same products all the time, rather than marketing several different products, an HTML site could work. In addition, if you don’t need to update customers often, an HTML site could work very well. On a positive note, static HTML sites tend to rank well in the search engines and are often as more “authority” sites by search engines and human readers. (Or at least this has been my experience).

Blog

The benefits of a blog are numerous, especially for individuals who will be marketing more than one product. It’s perfect for affiliate marketers, and with many more pages than an HTML site, you can optimize for more keywords. Blogs are easy to create because there are many free templates available that you can use, so you don’t have to hire someone to create it unless you simply want a completely custom design. Another benefit of blogs is that you can easily update your blog so that customers get the most in-depth information available. For products that are always changing and evolving, blogs are perfect. It also gives you a direct line to your customers so you can communicate with them easily.

One disadvantage to blogs is that it may be harder for visitors and search engines to see them as “authority” sites as they change often. In addition, since everyone has blogs, many visitors expect them to be updated on a more regular basis and if you don’t do that, you could lose some credibility.

The choice between an HTML site and a blog is yours, but it’s important to do some research and consider your purpose before deciding which one will be best for you or your business. In addition, you have to take a systematic approach to marketing your site or blog if you really want to experience online success.

I’ve got to be honest with you – I have been seriously thinking about going into the site flipping business and what I’ve discovered through all my research is that the market isn’t very good for start up businesses or sites that have no income, history or traffic. However, it is much better for more established sites or ones that have verifiable income, history, etc.

If you’re like me, you might be looking for additional ways to make money. Well, one way that I’ve been considering is flipping websites for profit. What I’ve discovered is that it is a whole lot easier to sell established sites than startups. This is because the market is tight and individuals are looking for verifiable businesses to invest in – ones that have a proven history of delivering profits. And, who could blame them? Here’s some reasons why it makes more sense to sell established sites:

Traffic Factor

One of the most important factors in how much a website is worth and how easy it will be to flip is traffic. Websites that are brand new usually have little to no traffic, while established sites have been indexed longer and receive traffic from search engines. Obviously, people are more willing to purchase sites that have a lot of traffic than those that don’t have any traffic. This is one reason that flipping start-up sites is harder than established sites.

It’s also easy to go into the tracking tools of a website to find out the most popular keywords or ways that individuals find the site, and then use that information to your advantage. With a start-up site, it’s impossible and you’ll have to either go in blindly or do research to determine what the best keywords to the site might be.

Verifiable Income Baby!

Websites that are more established and have more traffic will naturally make more money than a website that is brand new. Investors or those looking to buy websites want to know that it’s going to be a good investment. With a start-up, there is more risk than there is with an established site that is already making money. This is another reason that flipping start-ups is harder than flipping established sites.

This is not to say that it’s impossible to flip start-ups and make money from them. However, overall you should expect to make less money from start-up sites than you will for established sites that make more money and have more traffic. Depending upon how much time you invest in each start-up, it can be worth it or not.

What will you do?

If you’ve created a great website that is performing well as far as traffic and revenue goes, you might consider selling it for a nice profit. Website flipping is a very popular market today, and many entrepreneurs create or buy websites, make them perform well, and then ‘flip,’ or sell them for profit. However, sometimes, a website is worth holding onto. Below, we’ll discuss the question ‘should you hold or flip your site?’

Revenue

The most important thing to consider is the revenue when you’re determining whether to flip or hold your site. Think about how much you’ve got coming in each month, and then think about what you might expect to receive if you sold it. Steady income that is passive is very valuable, so if you’re making quite a bit of money each month, you might want to hold that website. However, if you are proficient at making websites that perform well, you might want to sell it for the lump payment from whomever purchases the site.

Spend a good bit of time thinking about the revenue and use the information you come up with to determine whether it would be best to flip or hold your site in terms of money.

When You Need Money

If you’re an entrepreneur and you need money, flipping your site might be the best idea. It’s possible to get quite a lot of money if the website receives a lot of traffic and if it’s bringing in a monthly income. The benefit of flipping the website is that you’ll receive a lump payment from the person who purchases it, and this can be helpful if you need the money at the time. In most instances, you will typically receive 10-20 months of income and this can help out tremendously.

Considering Your Schedule

If you just don’t have the time to invest in your website anymore, you might want to flip it. Not only will it free up your time, but the money can be great. Think about the revenue, whether or not you need money now or can benefit from the site’s monthly income, and your schedule before deciding whether flipping or holding your website would be best.

Ever since I wrote this post on autoblogging, I’ve been getting a ton of emails and skype questions about autoblogging and thought I’d better clarify a few things here. Autoblogging is a term for setting your blog so that you don’t have to manually maintain it. Some individuals use plug-ins for WordPress which allow the blog to scoop posts from different sources, so that there is fresh content on the blog daily or even several times a day. And, although it sounds like a great “hands off way” to blog, there are some benefits and disadvantages to this method as you’ll see below.

Pros of Autoblogging

Creating your blogs so that they pull information from different websites or other blogs is fairly easy to do. The true benefit is that you always have fresh content related to your keywords or your niche. Some individuals use Unique Article Wizard, a site that allows you to use their articles, most of which are fairly good quality.

There is little to no maintenance involved with autoblogs, so any income you’re making is passive. Most individuals use Google ads and affiliate links to make money. If you choose to post your own unique content once in a while, you can make the blog even stronger. However, although there are a lot of advantages, there are also disadvantages.

Cons of Autoblogging

It’s really important to find a good plug-in to pull content, and ensure that there are links back to the original site. If you’re getting content from other peoples’ websites or blogs without linking back and giving credit, you could really upset those people. Even worse, there is the possibility that you could be sued.

Another disadvantage is that there are so many variables. What if Google changes their ranking algorithm and decides that they will no longer support autoblogs. What is they penalize individuals with autoblogs by unranking them. If this is the case, you could be left with zero online income virtually overnight. Unfortunately, this has happened to many people, and can easily happen if you’re not careful. Another possibility is that the keywords change or your niche is suddenly not as important anymore.

Although there are pros and cons to every situation, it’s important to look closely before determining whether autoblogging is the correct route for you to take. I personally am not a fan of autoblogs UNLESS you plan to flip them. I’ve been toying around with the idea of doing that but keeping them within my collection, probably not – but that’s just my opinion!