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.