Site Flipping Case Study (Post Flip)

• Chris Guthrie
• Case Studies, Make Money, Website Flipping
• December 6, 2008
• 4 comments!

The last time I wrote about site flipping I discussed my initial opinions on site flipping as a way to earn money online by creating sites in a day and listing them for sale soon after. To read my pre site flip impressions check this post here.

I basically stated that site flipping seems like a substitute for a real 9 - 5 job. You grind out a few sites list them for sale and hope that not only do they sell, but that they do so for a nice price. I did not tell anyone the URL of the site I created as I didn't want any additional variables to impact my case study. I created a new Sitepoint account and the only thing I did was verify my phone number (so I didn't even have any prior sales feedback). So with that in mind I set out to create my site.

Finding a Niche

I searched for a niche using the free tool offered by SEO Book. The Keyword Suggestion Tool. Because the Ski season is upon us I decided to try and find a small snow sports niche and I remembered back to my snowboard instructor years where I used to see a few people cruising down the mountain on what appeared to be mini skis. So I did some research to find out what the official term for the sport is and found out it's called SkiBoarding. Using the Keyword Suggestion Tool I searched for all of the related terms to this sport, Skiboards, Skiboarding, Snow Blades, Ski Blades etc. etc. now while this is just an estimate - there were about 100+ daily searches for those related terms so I decided this would be a decent niche to try and build a product review site around.

Picking the Domain

Because the sport is officially called Skiboarding although many people confuse it with SnowBlading (Snow Blades is a Saloman trademark) I decided to pick a domain based off of the term Skiboarding. After some research on GoDaddy I bought SkiBoardReviews.com which is a great .com name for a Ski Board Reviews site.

Building the Site

Because I was going for a product review site and I'm already so familiar with Wordpress, I decided to purchase the WPReviewSite plugin and build a Wordpress powered review website. I had to pay for the $299 developer license because you need a developer license if you intend to sell a site along with the plugin. I already use the plugin on a few of my other websites so I just decided to pay the extra $100 in case I sold any of the sites I had it running on. They do have a $97 single site license and $199 multi site license as well though. In any case, because the plugin comes with a customized Wordpress theme that has the various aspects of the review plugin already incorporated I decided to use that theme to build the site. I then found skiboards on Amazon.com, used their descriptions to get some place holder text about the products. I also used an affiliate link to Amazon to buy the product if a visitor decided they liked the product (See an example review here) I repeated the process for each manufacturer and skiboard until I had everything Amazon offered. I also incorporated a little Adsense module at the top of the page as well.

Listing the Site

I have previously sold websites through Digital Point, but I decided to try listing this one on SitePoint instead to target a larger audience. The listing process was very easy and only cost $10. View the listing here.

Conclusion:

I listed the site for 10 days with a $1 starting price, a reserve of $50 and a buy out option of $150. I estimate the time I spent finding a niche, building the site and then listing the site to be about 4 hours. So I thought if it sold for $150 that would have been a decent wage of $37.50 an hour. For those that checked out the listing in the earlier link you can see that unfortunately the site did not sell and in fact it never even got a single bid ... (Yah that deserved a double frowny face).

I'm not that upset about the outcome because it was my first flip attempt and I was working against my urge to build a really great site and sit on it for 6+ months before considering to sell; however, I do know there were a couple things I did wrong on this flip attempt:

1. The niche was a little too small
2. The site was too bland
3. The site had no traffic (brand new)
4. I had no previous seller feedback

I could have tried to sell this website through digital point like I've done before; however, I wanted to try doing it on Sitepoint as a brand new user trying to flip a brand new site like anyone else would be that first stepped into site flipping.

My opinion on site flipping has remained somewhat the same. Even if I did sell the site for $150 at the end of the day I'm still working for only $37.50 an hour. Which means I'd have to keep selling sites for an average of $150 each (if it took me 4 hours to build) which still works out to about $72,000 a year pre tax without benefits. Yah if I cut the production time down and sold for more this figure could grow, but can you honestly keep hitting homeruns everytime? Maybe, but for me I believe it's still too risky for me to ever jump into when I'm the only one working while my wife is getting her master's degree. Besides, I'd get bored of doing that.

Future Flips Outlook

Going forward I don't think I'll try to do quick flips again. Because if I believe I've spent some time researching, found a good domain for a nice niche than I certainly don't want to build a site only to list it up for auction a day later. If your site truly is great why not wait for a few months after it's built for the traffic and income to start flowing in so that you can prove it to a potential buyer? I believe you can make more money building sites this way and flipping them several months down the road rather than building something quickly and casting it aside as soon as possible like the worthless piece of junk it probably is.

Thoughts? Anyone want to buy my site hah hah?

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