It can be quite a rude awakening when you finally realise that your online million dollar bank account just isn’t materialising as fast as you’d like, and is also taking much more effort than you’d imagined. The sooner you move past the shock of that realisation the better.
So whilst you’re working on building strong businesses that can lead to the ultimate ‘passive income lifestyle’, you might have a need to generate some quick cash. Well there are many quick ways to make money online: writing articles, designing graphics or even programing if you have the skills.
Another way is flipping websites which is something I do. What are the pros and cons of website flipping though and where do you begin? Well you need to begin by recognising that site flipping doesn’t hold any guarantees unlike writing articles, for example, where usually payment is up front from the buyer or on delivery of the order.
Site flipping is typically a case of you buying a site cheap that you can make-over or building one yourself and then flipping it quickly in an auction style marketplace. Site flipping can be quite profitable and isn’t hard to get started in especially if you’re willing to put in plenty of effort and quality workmanship.
Have you flipped sites before to generate fast cash? If not have you considered it? If you have considered it then what’s holding you back?
There are three things that make me tend to shy away from flipping.
First is that most people, yourself included, talk about building sites using the WordPress model. Until very recently, I was using a host that had generous band with and an unlimited number of domains, but limited the number of MySql databases I could have. I’m not a fan of WordPress anyway. Getting support from a multitude of people for plug-ins that may or may not work when I update them just doesn’t sit well with me.
I guess I’d prefer to use the static HTML model if I try this but I don’t know if that’s a disadvantage in the marketplace.
The second obstacle is that I hesitate to invest in a reseller package.
The third is more psychological and that is I simply don’t trust I’ll get paid for my efforts. I have had less than stellar experiences with businesses on the internet including a consultant for Homeland Security that never paid me for spreadsheet work I completed.
I guess the synopsis of my concerns is that unless I can find my own streamlined model for creation and can protect my efforts, it really isn’t, “fast cash,” to me and I just take a pass on the idea for now and will re-evaluate the model in the future.
Oddly enough, I used to love building HTML websites. Perhaps I get too emotionally attached to the end product as well!
Edie I know what you mean about the plugin support. I tend to only buy premium themes and purchase plugins that others have tested…especially after recently using a free theme and discovering a link hidden in the footer php that I had to decode to see.
There are a lot of benefits to open source though too and I love the simplicity of WordPress. I’ve worked both html and WordPress and I find html cumbersome.
I’ve never been scammed when selling sites but it does happen. Just the nature of the beast.
As I always say, there are no guarantees so for those who don’t want to risk time or even small amounts of money then site flipping is probably not a good idea.
I know what you mean about getting attached to your sites. I’ve grown to love many sites I’ve built to sell, it happens to the best of us. I’ve never kept one of them though and out of them all there is only one I really regret selling but I’ll get over it.