I’ve been more and more curious about trying my hand at flipping a website lately – I constantly am seeing sites that are terrible, but its got either quality content, or some sort of overriding big idea.

I think if I got my hands on it, I could find a way to take it from being under performing and actually elevate it to the point where I could make some passive income off of it – ultimately keeping the site on autopilot in the background for a while, and maybe re-selling it in the future.

I’ve Googled website flipping a lot lately, and read a lot of different blogs giving advice, tips and the how-to’s on flipping a website – and it doesn’t sound that hard. Here’s my simple understanding of the topic:

Pre-Flip: Starting the Journey

1. Find a website that looks flip-able. Something with low page rank but decent content – doesn’t hurt if its got a god-awful design to it… makes it even easier to improve.
2. Run the numbers. How much traffic do you estimate its getting/could get, how much revenue do you think you can make, how much will it cost to host, and most importantly, how much time can you invest?
3. Contact the owner and feel them out. Are they interested in selling? If so, what do THEY think its worth. Once you get an idea what THEY think its worth, negotiate back and forwards until you reach a fair price for both sides. Be careful not to throw a number out blindly, as you may pay more than they even think its worth – you may offer $1,000 – they may think only $250.
4. Confirm what you get for your $$$. Do you own everything, or are their licensing issues to take into account. Who owns the software, who owns the copy, who owns the images, who owns the templates, etc. Get it in writing acknowledging you bought it all, and all ownership has been transferred to you.

Its Your Website Now: Now what?

1. Once purchased, back everything up. You never know if the owner is going to give you issues, or it might get lost in the domain/hosting transfers. As well, be sure to save the email marketing list, existing advertisers contact information, any existing analytics, members database, etc.
2. As mentioned above, transfer hosting & domain to yourself. You don’t really own a website, until you own it on your terms – transfer domain ownership to your registrar, and move the entire website to your own hosting provider. This removes any chance the previous owners could mangle with your plans.

Now for the Hard Work: Flip that Website

1. Review the site in its entirety. Is it worth completely overhauling and rebuilding, or just giving a fresh coat of paint? The existing content and structure may be in good shape, but it may just lack the polish and love needed to grow the site.
2. Make a detailed plan. Go through the site page by page, and decide what needs to be done, including redesigning, changing the navigation order, optimizing for search engines, integrating advertising, adding social networking buttons, link building, etc – the list goes on.
3. Rank your detailed plan. Just because you write it down, doesn’t mean you have to do it, or if it even makes monetary sense. If your goal is to make money, you need to keep focusing on the goal. Changing the font colors may make the site look more visually appealing, but will it really grow advertising or resale dollars?
4. Put your plan to work. Start making your edits and changes to the website with a careful eye on the website metrics (oh, and install Google Analytics). As you optimize and promote your site, keep a good idea of where you’ve come from and where you’re at, and ultimately, where you want to go. This will help you figure out if you’re on track to reaching your goals. Clearly, this is easier said than done – could take days, weeks or months – or longer.

Flip Complete: Now What?

1. Figure out the website’s future. Simply put – do you want to keep it, or sell it? Look at it from a financial and time perspective – what are the pro’s and con’s of keeping the site, when you could make $5000 today, or 500$/month for the next 12 months?
2. Keeping the site? Set up a plan for continual updates – perhaps not nearly as much as you’ve done recently, but ongoing updates to keep your content fresh and your site friendly to search engines.
3. Selling it? Time to start looking for a buyer! The easiest way is to go to sites which actually sell websites (makes sense). List your site, and be prepared to show your website traffic, statistics, revenue, etc. Be sure to sell smart – know how much time and money you invested into flipping this site, and sell it for what its worth. Start on the high side and be prepared to negotiate.
4. Keep or Sell it – and pocket the money. Whether it’s a lump sum today, or a monthly pay out, enjoy the end results — or, re-invest into a better site, to flip for even higher value!

These sections cover the various points to flipping a website, broken down fairly simply. I’m going to aim to find a site to buy, flip, and hopefully resell (or keep) in the coming months. You can’t really learn until you try it yourself, I suppose.

Whether you’ve installed Wordpress for the first time or been using it for years, I’ve put together a list of the best free plugins I’ve come across and used over the past couple years. These are designed for optimizing, managing, and making money off your website and can be used all at once or one at a time. Best of all – they’re all free, and makes managing a blog way easier!

Search Engine Optimization Plugins

1. All in One SEO Pack: Easily optimize and override your default meta tags, or have it generate meta information automatically. This will also allow you to manage your meta-information on a page-by-page or side wide basis.
2. Google XML Sitemaps: Automatically generate a sitemap for your website on a daily basis, and have it sent to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

Social Media Plugins

1. Sociable: Adds social networking buttons to the bottom of each of your posts, allowing your visitors to one-click submit your site to over 50 social networking sites. Key sites include: Digg, Sphinn, del.icio.us, Facebook, Mixx, Google, and Technorati.
2. SphinnIt Button: Adds a big Sphinn button to each post in the positioning you choose — ideal for blog’s focusing on social media, SEO, online marketing, etc.
3. Lifestream: Let your readers know with a live feed exactly what your doing on Twitter, Hulu, Digg, Amazon, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Youtube and more.

Analytics Plugins

1. Google Analyticator: Adds in the necessary Google Analytics code automatically to your blog — all you have to do is enter your Analytic’s account number in the settings, and your site will start recording visits, page views, referring url’s, and more.

Ad Management Plugins

1. Adsense Manager: Easily manage the placement, sizes and locations of advertisements from various networks, include Google Adsense, Adbrite, Adroll, ComissionJunction, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Widgetbucks and more.

Wordpress Management Plugins

1. WP Super Cache: Speed up your page load times and reduce your server load, by forcing the cache version to reload in your visitors machines. Great for heavily-visited blogs.
2. Wordpress Automatic Upgrades: Let Wordpress do the work for you and upgrade itself automatically. Simply install, and vola — upgrading is a thing of the past.
3. Redirection: Do you have pages that have been moved or deleted? Set up proper redirects and error pages, which keep the spiders happy and bad links at bay.
4. Wordpress Database Backup: Back up your Wordpress database tables, entries, and records simply and easily with this one-click plugin.

Any others you recommend, or am I missing any? Let me know by commenting below.

This guy, Ignacio Pilotto, had the idea of combining the Rubix cube and a Pantone guide to make a Rubitone… cool idea.

I ended up taking the summer off from posting on here, just to re-evaluate what this site is for… I’ve decided to make this blog more or less about what I’m trying elsewhere, whether its with my niche blogs, online advertising, email marketing or interactive marketing — pretty much anything that’s new, innovative, cool, or just slightly interesting or amusing. Sounds like a good scope!

Since theres been traffic to this site for years, I figure its time to re-focus my random rantings, into something more coherent and useful… we’ll see.

Flag. Arrow. Bomb. Mailbox. Open mailbox.

Watch this — the font conference from College Humor:

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1823766

I spent the past couple months doing the Google Adwords Learning Center modules, with the goal of passing the test once my account reached the minimum requirements (90 days, managing over $1000 ad spend, and passing the test). After taking the vast majority of the online modules, I finally reached 88 days, and took the test…

Passed, first try with about 90%. I probably could have done better, but I took the majoirty of the lessons a month ago, and forgot a fair bit. Plus, there were some just real stupid questions. But with all that said, I now have the opportunity to display the Adwords logo wherever I please…. like… on this blog post.

For anyone wanting to learn more about Adwords, I really suggest checking out the learning center. Its quite thorough, and pretty relevant (and its even free). While there are some sections that are quite dull, for the most part, its great for anyone wanting to learn how to use PPC more effectively. (And the fundamentals definitely apply to MSN’s Adsense and Yahoo’s Search Marketing)

Summer finally hit the west coast… at least for a few days. Its nice being able to wander the water front to my home, read a book in the sun, or just head out for drinks on a warm night. Its been too long of crappy, rainy weather… glad summers finally here.

The only downer is, its not going to last, and I have to return to work tomorrow after a week long vacation.

At my day job, I’ve had the chance to experiment on Facebook advertising, with their Pay per Click advertisement model. I have to say… I’m not very impressed. Not only that, I had my first ad rejected under 3 different sections of their code of conduct – in reality, I think its because I capitalized one word.

But I spent more time playing with it, and crafted a new ad, which is generating page impressions… but conversions? Not so much.

What I’m Advertising:

I’m advertising an all inclusive vacation package, starting from $599. For those who have every looked at all-inclusive vacation packages – that’s a really good price! While this isn’t the most typical advertising offer on Facebook, I do think its an interesting science experiment.

Who I’m Targeting:

Facebook allows you to target people beyond their basic demographics. Instead of targeting based just on age, gender and location, you can take it to another degree.
I’ve chosen anyone 25+, who live in Canada, and who have expressed interested in travel, or traveling. This resulted in about 130,000 names. Small audience – but I have a small test budget anyways (about $20/day).. .and since they are targeted based on interest, they should be more receptive… right?

The Results:

Well… After running the campaign for just a few days, I can tell at first glance, it’s not doing very well. I’ve had over a quarter million impressions (great for branding!), but a whopping 50 clicks (not so great for clicks!).

Out of 250,000 impressions… I’ve had 0.02% clicks. In fact, I’m having trouble even spending my daily budget, where on Google I’m maxed out by early afternoon.

With more ‘traditional’ website banner advertising, clickthrougsh tend to range from 0.5% to 1.5% — and that tends not even targeted on behaviors. This leads me to think a few things:

1. No one is on Facebook looking to be marketed to… they’re there for everything else
2. The average time spent on a page is pretty low as it is
3. Maybe the demographic just isn’t right… maybe people who are on Facebook have other demographic and behaviors that are against the traditional internet user or offline customer

Future Thinking:

It might be that there are products better targeted for Facebook than all-inclusive vacations… Maybe cell phones and accessories? Online Dating? Nightclubs and Bars? Who knows? I’d be interested to see some results on different types of advertisements run on Facebook.

Also, Business Week ran an article last week and talked about how results this low isn’t abnormal with Facebook… Click here to read the article.

Here’s a shameless plug of a few sites that I’m currently working on. All are slowly growing in visitors, page views, and ad clicks… Close to 1,000 visitors/month total across the three sites:

West End Vancouver Guide
a comprehensive guide for Vancouver’s West End

myRobsonStreet
a comprehensive guide to Robson Street (see a trend?)

Email Marketing Weekly
a site dedicated to email marketing strategy, with a new post each week.

And thats how a shameless plug goes!

Yeah, so this blog is back… This will be about the same randomness as before — my outlook on life, the internet, work, or other sheer randomness that I find remotely interesting. Sounds fun, eh?