The Perfect Selling Websites Guide

August 30th, 2010

I went to a BBQ the other day and a friend was asking me to tell him how I made money trading websites online.

He couldn’t understand how one could honestly build and then trade a website. He believed I had to be selling one of those pyramid schemes. So I grabbed the number one BBQ stationary – the pen and napkin – and I mapped out the complete method for him.

Buying and selling websites all takes off with research. Get this part wrong and everything that follows is usually a waste of time. If you plan to begin from scratch, you have to get a market. I recommend you use Market Samurai, or if you do not want to spend any money at this point, Google’s free keyword tool works fine.

The first thing to do is decide on a market – can be anything that you like – and just pitch that phrase into the software. The results you hope for are under 60,000 competing pages and at minimum 100 searches a day. That way, you see that you won’t be in high-pressure market where you will struggle to get results, but still, there is sufficient popularity to make some gains.

The second step is to develop around three related keywords to bolster your key phrase. This will work with site traffic and to move your top keyword to list higher and faster in results for searches.

The next step is to register your main phrase as a domain. Use a service like godaddy or hostgator and begin with seeing if the dot com is available to register. If it isn’t available, try having a suffix or extension to the domain name, for example blog or site. Let’s pretend you are going for shoes but shoes dot com was not available, check on shoesblog dot com etc. till you find a combo that is right for you. Dot com is still the most prized of domain extensions, but if you can’t get anything suitable, then move on to dot org. I don’t typically drill down any more to dot info or the other extensions.

After you find your domain, you then require hosting for your new site. This is where your website will sit and you can generally purchase hosting by the same provider that sold you the domain in the second step, even more so if you get one of the bigger hosting companies.

Now, you need a website. I would recommend you build your website with WordPress, and the quickest, most expedient way to build a WordPress blog is by using WordPress Direct. WordPress Direct is quick and extremely easy to manage for both setting up and developing your sites.

After your site is up and running, you will need some content. To start, find six or so YouTube videos from your market. You can do this from inside WordPress Direct. For each video, write around 100 words of a description for the post and there’s your original content.

The next step is to let that Google and any other search engines know your website exists. The fastest way to do this is by social bookmarking. Submit your sites to sites including Digg, Mix, Propellor and Twitter. This will ensure that the search engines locate your site and tell the world it is there.

In the installation process, you install both Google Analytics and Google Adsense. Google Analytics will chase all the numbers from your site and Adsense is the ads that visitors click on in your site and this garners gains. Both of these are brought up with a normal Google search.

Now that you are ready, you have to get visitors to get you up the search results to the first page of results, where all the fun is.

This is a two part method and it requires fresh content and backlinks. Content is the simple part; it involves you writing articles, putting up videos and other content in your site often. Backlinking is the strategy of seeing other websites linking back to your site. It’s basically like a site showing Google that your site is a good one and that Google should tell others that they must visit your site too.

Now, when it comes to selling websites,the simplest process of acquiring backlinks is to leave pertinent comments on blogs and forums that are related to your market.

All you have to do is repeat the above process for three to six months and you could have a site that is ranked on the first page of results and getting you a handful of dollars each day at the least.

You are now ready to sell off your site on flippa dot com.

I’ll explain all about trading websites] over dessert, time to return to the BBQ!