How to Create, Build and Sell a Five Figure Web Site
I think it’s safe to say that I’m a huge fan of Flippa. Since joining the site a few years back, I’ve had over $100,000 in buys and sells through the site, and even wrote a whole guide on how to “flip websites” using Flippa as your launch pad. There is no other online market place that can provide so much value and opportunity to site and business owners of all sizes.
With all of that said, I thought it would be a great idea to write a post about what it takes to go from having a simple idea, to creating a high authority web site that you could then end up selling on Flippa for five to six figures.
The Creation Phase
One of the biggest problems that most people have when trying to make money online, is not knowing where to start. You simply can’t just buy a domain, throw some content together and hope for the best. You need to plan ahead and know what you are trying to achieve before you start. Of course it helps when you already have a good understanding of how internet marketing and sites work, but it’s also about putting your ideas and thought process into action.
A few years back I came across the opportunity to secure the domain name PPC.ORG. It’s an amazing three letter domain name, and one of the best I’ve ever had. I knew I just had to have it! After waiting for the domain name to be released, go through the auction process and finally securing the domain name, it was well worth the thousands of dollars it cost to acquire it.
For non-internet marketing related people, “PPC” might not mean anything special and seem like a generic three letter domain. For anyone who does know internet marketing, it most definitely means “Pay Per Click”, which is one of the most sought after search terms when it comes to online marketing.
Now that the domain was secured, I had a niche focus in mind and it was time to start implementing my ideas and put everything into motion.
Building Your Dream Site
It’s never easy to start a site from scratch, but that is what I was going to have to do with PPC.ORG. Right when you start a site or blog, everything is slow and at times it can be very un-motivating. Your site isn’t in the search engines, no one is reading your content and you are quite far from seeing profits any time soon. But isn’t this how almost every business starts out?
The best way to avoid these problems is to just get started and know what you need to do. Create a site/blog, build a custom theme, create a logo for your brand identity and focus on your content. All of these factors play a huge part in creating the perfect foundation for your new site and business.
Working with the Right People
Building a successful authority site on your own is no easy task. When I first started PPC.ORG, I was fine with writing a few articles here and there for myself, but I quickly found that I couldn’t create quality content fast enough or grow out the site as I would like to. All of this was going on while I was still managing all of my other sites and day to day operations. It was at this time that I partnered up with a good friend of mine, John Rampton, who is also a master at pay per click and online marketing.
Together we would continue to create original content for the site, hire other writers who knew what they were talking about and also promote the heck out of the site and write about it wherever we could. From top internet marketing blogs like Forbes, PPCHero, Search Engine Watch, SEOMoz, Search Engine Journal… we made it a mission to get PPC.org linked up with great content from every where possible.
Knowing Your Business & Target Audience
We have the domain name, the content, the writing team and the love and support from the major search engines… now we just needed to keep our focus and content tight.
The site is obviously named PPC.ORG and we knew our audience and what they wanted… everything relating to ppc and internet marketing.
As the owners of the site, it was also important for us to understand and know everything there is to know about the industry. This not only made it easier to write content and know what to focus the site on, but we also understood the power of “business to business” marketing and how valuable a site like PPC.ORG could be to any seo, search or online marketing company should we decide to ever sell.
Going for the BIG Sale
Fast forward a year and several months and now PPC.org is an extremely well established site with a Page Rank 5 and also contains over 1,000 pages of original content. As much as we would like to continue to build out the site with even more content and create our own pay per click tracking software and members area, we have found ourselves extremely committed to our latest project at Blogging.org.
However, this still works out successfully for the business of PPC.ORG and it’s future owner. This post isn’t about trying to gain attention and bidders for the site, but instead to walk you through the thought and action process of how to come up with an idea for a site, go after a domain name and business model that works, implement it with a team and then eventually sell for profit.
That was a good article and i have a question for you Zac, what are the criteria for selling site and can somebody sell blog too.
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It really depends on what you want to do with the site and why you are selling. The biggest factors when selling a site is getting it established and building a loyal following. Profit is also key too. It's also very important that there is a demand for your blog, as it's really only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
Zac, thank you so much this information. to be sincere, i've had some challenges recently and i hope this solves them
Thanks, glad you like the article!
I enjoyed this article. I can always come here for inspiration and interesting articles. Thanks Zac!
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I think the finite price will be around 30-40 K.
I'll monitor it, it's ok if I'm wrong and the price will be higher))
Good article! PPC play an important role for developed business very fastly.
Zac,
How do you personally transfer a newly sold website to a client?
I need a guide on this.
Mark
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Inspirational and a very interesting article
these tips are very cool Target Audience and Building Your Dream Site are very important point i m going to use these tips thx for this.
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It certainly not easy to build a site and make it successful. And its far harder if in the beginning you are planning to sell the site anytime in the future.
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Zac once again you wrote awesome article.
Thanks, well done article! I like the blogging.org tip, I'm heading there to check it out now. I hadn't known about that site before.
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These tips look simple enough to follow. Thank you for the great article.
Thank you for the advice. I think that working with the right people has to be the most crucial step to anything. How can you get anywhere if your associates do nothing but bring you down, right? Great share.
Yeah ! I thinks now a days people have not time to wait for results thats why he or she wants fast responce in his business. So i think PPC is higher suitable than Seo or Smo.