03 Nov How to Flip A Website… Or At Least Be Ready To…

Flipping a website generally depends on proving a revenue source.  Sites are normally sold for an average of 3x its yearly revenue, but can be more or less depending on the growth projections or relevance to a certain niche.

For this example, I look at a website that I put up called:  http://www.GeorgiaGovernor2010.com.

The website traffic was up at the time of the election on 11/2/2010:

and surrounding key election dates, the traffic was as much as 8,000 visits and social participation was measured on the number of blog comments and referrals.

To prepare this site for flip, the following information had to be gathered:

• Net Profit and projected lifetime revenue opportunity
• Target market for potential buyers
• Traffic analysis and proven statistics

Revenue Calculation

Gross Revenue

• If you cannot see the image below, my Adsense report shows 229,252 Adsense impressions with 2,208 Click Throughs.  So about 0.96% was the click through.
• This click through rate generated $1,156.57 to date.


Costs

• Domain Name Purchase: $10
• WordPress Blog Installation, Customization, and Content Ingestion for auto pilot updates:  4 hours at $25/hour
• Hosting over 6 months:  1/30th the cost of a $14.95 shared server with unlimited space and domains & 30 other sites.  Let’s just say $0.50/month –>  Total $3

Net Profit:  $1156.57 – $113 –>  $1043.57 or a 923.51% Percent Increase for ROI

• If you cannot see the image below, my Adsense report shows 229,252 Adsense impressions with 2,208 Click Throughs. So about 0.96% was the click through.
• This click through rate generated $1,156.57 to date.

So as we can see, this site has a lifetime that depends on the year… 2010, the election, which in temporal terms, is only a once in a 4 year process.

Target Demographic & Site Positioning/Promotion

It did have a target sale demographic of Governor candidates or those wanting to use its number 2 spot in Google for “Georgia Governor race”

and it did have a number 1 spot out of 8.6 Million results for “Georgia Governor 2010”

Wrap up

And if I did further assessments, I could have taken the average CPC for PPC campaigns for keywords that I was number 1 for, and projected a valued savings for the buyer based on saved PPC costs.

Further monetization efforts could have involved Sponsorships for key candidates.  This would have involved coming up with a fair CPM, in which we would price the cost of displaying per thousand impressions.

In conclusion, the site made revenue based on a $113 investment, natural organic positioning, and will most likely continue to make revenue based on keywords that the site ranks for.

Traffic will die down, and Google Adsense bidding will decrease.

However, the key thing to learn is:

Good Domain name + Good Niche+ Good SEO + Strategic Promotions or Advertising creates a site worth selling for that Flip