The following is an excerpt from Flip This Web Site, a new eBook by Zac Johnson on how to make big money buying and selling websites. The book is on sale at 50% off right now. But you have until midnight Thursday to take advantage of it.
Before jumping into the process of buying and selling on Flippa, and what you should look for in a winning auction, you will first need to decide for yourself whether you want to build your own website from scratch or purchase an established website?
Let’s say you have $10,000 to spend on a new business venture. You are deciding on whether you would like to build a brand new site or simply takeover an existing website. I will list a few different methods below and you can weigh your options to see which path is right for you.
What is Your Time Worth?
When starting any business or new venture, you have to measure what your time is worth and what you can actually accomplish in the free time that you have. When starting a new website, you will have a lot of work ahead of you. From simple things like buying a domain, setting up hosting and designing a web site to more complex areas like search engine optimization, getting traffic to your web site and building a revenue model, you will need to decide on what this is worth to you.
What is Your Website Plan?
If you are planning on purchasing an established website, everything is laid out right in front of you and you know what you are getting at the time of purchase. When starting a website from scratch, you will have a long road ahead of you. The difference between the two is that you are putting a lot of money up for what is there and established, versus putting in a lot of time and effort toward something that may not be where you would like it to be a few months down the road.
Buying an Established Web Site, Then Outsourcing
When looking at all of the complications involved in starting a new website, it can seem quite overwhelming. Purchasing an established website, then outsourcing the management, link building and content creation for the site is a great option. Later on in the guide I will cover different methods for web site monetization and outsourcing. If you have the funds necessary to purchase a website and hire an outsourced team, you can still do very well just overseeing your website projects and making sure they continually grow.
If You Have Little Money to Invest, But Lots of Time
On the flip side of many of the points above, there are also many of us who have little investment money, but a lot of time on our hands. This is when it might be a good time to learn how to create a website from scratch, but you can still use Flippa as a learning tool to see how others are successfully building sites and understand how they are making money. Should your website grow into a part-time or even full-time revenue source, you could always list your site on Flippa and potentially earn 10-30x your monthly earnings.