In this post I’m going to show you an example of how to make money online from site flipping.

Working from home selling virtual real estate is one of many quick ways to make money, but it’s also a way to build a substantial income too.

The site in this particular example was one I built myself in a matter of hours and then sold for $250, pocketing $218 in profit. That’s $218USD which converted to around $280 Australian dollars at the time.

Variety

I flip a variety of sites but in this particular case I built a basic blog and matching Twitter account. Given the site was all about Twitter, I felt it made perfect sense to add a Twitter account to it.

So why did I decide to build a site about Twitter? If you’ve done any type of niche marketing you know there are opportunities to be found in new markets that are taking off. Twitter is becoming so popular that it seemed obvious to me that this was a niche worth considering.

If you’re considering building or buying a site to flip, then analysing the sites that are selling is a great way to get ideas of what markets to focus on.

After deciding on the market to build the site around I then needed to purchase the domain name. I won’t ever risk a trademark issue and would advise you not to either, although plenty of buyers and sellers don’t think twice about it. A little bit of creative thinking to avoid the word Twitter, and I came up with www.TweetChatter.com (the site could have changed since I sold it in mid 2009).

For a unique touch I built the site using Artisteer, created my own header graphic and purchased two images at $5 each; one I used in the graphics and the other for post images. If you’re looking for a great place to purchase images for your blog posts or graphics, you should check out Dreamstime, they’re my favourite and you can even get some images for free.

Setting up the Tweet Chatter Twitter account was quick and easy, and a few simple graphics added a nice touch to the entire package for sale. During the time from set up to the final sale I sent out a few tweets and followed other Twitter fans, this built up quite a nice following in a short time.

Offering for sale a virtual real estate package that is brimming with loads of extras can really help your sites stand out from the crowd.

To beef up the value of this site further I write my own ebook on Twitter for newbies. This took the most time out of the entire site build, around an hour and a half complete with graphics and images. For the ebook and blog posts content I did online research into Twitter for newbies and found some good subject matter in some PLR (private label rights) products I had access to. Lastly I added a few affiliate programs and free Twitter buttons.

Using a template I created for my auction listings, I edited the relevant parts such as the url and monetization methods, and placed the site up for sale. The site sold for its reserve price of $250, and was purchased by someone who had bought from me before.

Although it sounds ‘busy’, the above example was easy to do, over time you can become very efficient at building web property and flipping it too. Even better is when you can sell established sites; sites that are already getting traffic and making money.

Build Sell Cycle

You might see this type of money making like others often do; as no better than a typical job because it doesn’t seem to offer passive income, but rather like you just have to keep repeating the build, sell, build, sell cycle.

Well I talked about the whole dream of leading the passive income lifestyle in my Make Money From Home post, and how indeed it is great to build passive businesses. Meanwhile though, if you want a way to work from home earning money quickly, then to flip a site or two every week might be just what you need.

Perhaps you’ve lost your job and just need quick cash, or you need to prop up your online income a little while those more passive models grow; site flipping is a way to achieve that.

All that being said, there is a way to build passive income into site flipping, and also ways to make even greater profits with not too much more effort than I’ve outlined above.

Once you get a taste for the profits you can make from one site flip and the passive income streams at the back end, you could very well catch the site flip bug. If you’d like to explore site flipping then download my free QuikCash Convertor ebook here.