Flipping Pre-Made Domains

Posted by Grizzly on Aug 11th, 2008 | 44 comments

Most of you are familiar with Domain flipping. The practice has become quite popular over the past year and for good reason – there is money being made buying and selling used domains. The idea is a simple one. Buy an aged used domain and build up its PR, Traffic and yes RSS subscribers and then sell the domain for a decent profit. In my opinion the buyer in most cases pays far too much and in many cases really far too much. I have talked about  what I think a blog or website’s real worth is elsewhere (What is a Blog Really Worth) but to put it simply – it’s worth should be based on what it earns and not on it’s popularity. Many a buyer has learned this the hardway and yet the market continues to pay for style over substance.

In most cases the buyers believe that they can find a monetization package that will work for the purchased domain. This rarely happens though. Popular sites garner large buyouts because they seem to promise traffic and everyone knows that getting traffic is the hardest thing to get online. Get the traffic first and figure out how to make money from it second. Lots of people are losing a lot of money following this mantra.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the principle behind this thinking but I have always maintained that all traffic isn’t equal. Search traffic can be monetized. Social traffic is very hard to make money from. If you are buying a site and it doesn’t have steady search traffic then beware or you will pay too much.

There are lots of social sites for sale – what I don’t see are keyword SEO’d domains for sale. What I would really like is to be able to start a campaign on competitive niche and find 5 or 6 keyword relevant solid PR domains for sale. Oh and a consistent stream of search traffic even if small. This type of domain lends itself to Adsense income and has PR to pass which makes it far more useful than buying a popular social site.

And this brings me to this blog.

I want to see just what is necessary to produce a keyword optimized blog with solid PR in as few steps as possible. If a formula exists I want to find it and then duplicate it over and over in order to produce ready to use – income producing domains right out of the box. And then sell them.

I have not posted much on this new blog for a reason. I want to know what the trick is in avoiding the sandbox. Is it frequent posting? I’m thinking posting has little to do with it. Is it quality backlinks? This I’m thinking has a lot to do with it. So far this blog has not been sandboxed by G and the only factor that can account for this is the fact that I have accumulated a number of quality links from my friends. This is entirely white hat – all the links are legit and come from a variety of trusted sites. I was given a PR0 during the last update which could be seen as low but I see it from a different angle. The blog was less than a few weeks old with 2 posts on it in a highly spammed niche and yet G still ranked it – low yes but ranked none the less. I suspect that by next update all the high PR backlinks will be accounted for and credited to this blog resulting in a PR increase.

Now I don’t plan on selling this blog. I plan on using it to test my theories and once I have worked out the steps I intend to start producing ready made niche blogs for others to buy. In most cases I hope to find aged domains with the right keywords in the URL and then tweak the blogs and build links. Aged domains are preferrable as they don’t generally get sandboxed. In most cases however aged domains are not available and I will have to start the blogs from scratch without being sandboxed. This is not something I am doing alone. Terry from The Honest Way and I are working on this together. In time I expect that we will need the assistance of a number of other friends in our little network and of course everyone will share in the profits.

What would you pay for a site that pulls in $10.00 a day from Adsense? What would you pay for a site with 3000 RSS subscribers but only makes a few hundred dollars a month?

I believe there is a business model here that can work and should be relatively easy to accomplish given the fact that we have built up a community of quality bloggers. You can make money online going it alone but the real money is in the networks. Just how many pre-made domains do you think a small group of us could churn out using our existing blogs as the anchors?

If you have some quality sites with PR3 or better and are interested in pursuing this model please contact me and we can discuss this further. Any ideas you have are more than welcome.