|pros • per • ly|

This is from a site we purchased in November of 2008.  We bought Holly for $,2500 (our most expensive acquisition at the time) because we saw serious potential:

1) Increase the site’s rankings (0bviously).  More visitors means more money.

2) Improve the site’s design.  We saw this as seriously low-hanging fruit and you’ll know why when you see the original site.  So…here’s the original:

You see what the site’s lacking?  Focus.

What is the visitor supposed to do when they land on this page?  Click on Adsense? Click on one of those cities listed below?  Try and find a hotel reservation through that form?  And why is there that welcome text there?  Visitors know what they want to do when they’re searching for hotel reservations…they want to make a reservation.  They don’t care about your site.  It’s obvious that the previous owner was adding that content for SEO purposes, but they put it in one of the most prominent spots on the site…bad new.

So here was our first pass with a redesign:

Notice a few things.  Now answer this question in two seconds:  What do we want the visitor to do?

The site is monetized by doing lead generation for hotel reservations.  We’re using the a second-tier middleman.  What this means is that we’re generating leads for Middleman 2, who is paid by Middleman 1, who is paid by the hotels.  It’s obvious where we’ll go once we have traffic worth bragging about:  Middleman 1 (and perhaps a few deals wit specific hotels that would be very lucrative — those types of relationships are profitable, but that’s for a different post all together).

Anyway.  We offer some quick links to cities which sends them to the same page except it has the City form field already filled in.

What’s the real key here?  Giving the user what they want.  Anything else is much less profitable.

Our final design once we ironed out some kinks:

We took out the city bit in the form (it was distracting) and moved the familiar logos (familiarity is key when getting conversion from visitors) to the top.

What about content for SEO?  That’s all where I put the big black box.  What about other content?  Writers are adding content constantly, but the content always plays second-fiddle to the action we desire our users to take:  get a reservation.

What Have the Results Been Like?

Since we purchased the site, traffic is up 1,303%.  But that doesn’t tell us how well the new design is doing.  Here’s the key stat.  Before we purchased the site, revenue per visitor was two cents.  Our revenue per visitor for the prior 30 days is twenty-six cents.  A 1,200% increase.  We can’t wait to get our traffic higher so we can negotiate with a more profitable affiliate provider.

At any rate, do you see what a bit of design does to help you make money?  Instantly?  This is what makes flipping websites so unbelievably valuable.  If you buy the site for $2,500 and then turn around and increase its earnings by 1,200%… (remember, that increase can be attributed directly to the redesign itself, which took us three hours) what is the site now worth?  $30,000.

I know I am jumping ahead in the sequence of how we find a website to buy, fix it up and then sell it but there is information in the middle that we are not ready to share just yet.

People often ask us how we find buyers for the websites we sell. The simple answer to that question is we don’t.

In fact, when we first got started in internet marketing, flipping websites never even entered our brains as a possible business model. It all sort of happened by accident as many new business ideas do.

Our goal was to have 12 websites that all made $300 a day by the end of 2009. That would have been about $1.3 million a year. As we were building up the websites we owned we had people inquire about buying our biggest websites within a two month time span.

We weren’t looking to sell but they really wanted to buy the sites. So after selling the first one and seeing how much we made ($250k) we realized that we were on the right track with the type of websites we were running.

Then as mentioned we received offers for two more of our sites. One buyer wanted both sites. One of these sites was our biggest money maker and we were hesitant at first and then finally conceded to sell. (Keep in mind that at this point flipping websites was not our business model)

Two days before the sale of the websites our big site lost most of its rankings. The buyer backed out with the agreement that if we got the rankings back he would still buy.

That is when we realized that flipping websites was the right business model for us. We saw how quickly the rug could be pulled out from underneath us and realized that selling a website at its peak is the best method. Take a website, fix it up, the site makes money, then you sell for a hearty profit. Repeat.

Why did these people want to buy our sites so bad? Because these sites receive all of their traffic through search engines so we didn’t have to spend money to make money.

Also the sites run themselves (see Prosperly Way). You really can buy one of these and make money without adding much time at all to your work schedule.

You build a good site like this and you will have people asking you to buy. It has happened to us over and over again. We have never put one of our sites on the market and yet we flip websites for a living. Build Prosperly style websites and you will be able to dictate when you sell your websites.

All right I have finally decided to post this. I apologize for making you all wait this long but we had very good reasons which I will not go into here. Considering how much you are paying for the info I knew you would understand. :-)

Now that you have chosen your industry and found out that there is real potential to see if you could make money in that industry, the next step is to go out and find a website that will work for you.

This is when you need to make the decision on whether to buy a website or build one from scratch. In my estimation it is always better to buy an established website rather that build a new one. You let someone else do all of the grunt work and then you step in a make the necessary changes and increase the value of the site quickly.

The only time I would say that it makes sense to build a website from scratch is when you are entering an industry where nobody really knows SEO that well and you are confident that you can quickly enter and move up in the rankings quickly.

The only other reason would be if you look and look and just can’t find a suitable website to buy in that industry and still want to get started.

I have created a video that explains one of the ways we actually go about looking for websites to buy. There are other ways than the one I talk about here but it will give you a good start.

Before I show you the video I need to tell you that we have been contemplating long and hard on whether or not to even continue with this series. We know that some people have begun to abuse the information we have given out and that has disappointed and demotivated us in our efforts to teach others.

The information on internet marketing and website flipping is valid and valuable. We really do want to help others succeed online but there are always those few who ruin it for everyone else.

We have decided to create a Prosperly membership and allow only members to access the video for step 3. The membership is free but we need to be in complete control of who gets access to this free information.

If you still wish to proceed and don’t mind becoming a member at Prosperly then click on the link below:

Watch step 3 video

All right, you should have your list completed from Step 1. Now that you have decided the areas you want pursue we need to find out if there is any money to be made in those industries. For example if collecting donkey socks made your list, there may not be a market for that online right now.

So in order to make sure that all of your internet marketing efforts don’t go to waste we have created a video that explains some of the things we do to evaluate whether there is demand in a certain niche and if it is worth our time to pursue it.

Check out the video below and leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Don’t Buy Into The Hype - You Can Still Make Good Money

I don’t watch the news. Partly because I don’t have time but mostly because I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I’m so sick of hearing the doom and gloom of our economy. What I have realized that it is the hip thing to say “Well the economy is down so…” or “we couldn’t do this or that because of the down economy.”

Honestly the more I hear it the more I think people say it because it is the thing to say. Here is a newsflash…the economy is not down in internet marketing. Jesse and I have created a business model that has proven to work over and over again even in this “down” economy.

I’m not denying that things are bad for many people in many industries, the point I am making is that you don’t have to submit to the idea that it is impossible to make money in 2009. I can tell you with 100% confidence that 2009 is going to be my best year financially ever…in fact it already is guaranteed to be so.

So how in this “fledgling” economy can I have my best year ever? Like I have mentioned  before in previous posts, we have a great system in place that allows us to acquire websites, fix them up, take home the revenue increase and eventually sell the site.

How To Make Money Flipping Websites

When people ask Jesse and I what we do we always say “we flip websites”. Then when they realize they didn’t mishear us, they give us an “I don’t get it” look and we explain that it is like flipping real estate only with websites.

I have seen alot of programs out there that supposedly teach you how to flip websites but the tactics they teach are short-term minded and the profit is minimal (in the hundreds of dollars) per transaction. Our system takes a more long term approach and has allowed us to do things like buy a website for $500, spend time increasing it’s value and about a year later flip it for $150,000. That’s the kind of increase that we have experienced over and over again.

Website Flipping Tools That Work

Now I will say that we are at an advantage because we have created some awesome website flipping tools that allow us to quickly evaluate websites, find hidden gems on the verge of being big money makers, and tools to help us optimize and increase rankings of websites we buy.

Whenever I show friends these tools the first thing they say is “can you send me the link to that?” We have never made these tools available to anyone else because we never really thought we should and because we have been too busy developing them and using them to make money flipping websites.

You Can Get Access To The Prosperly Tools

Now that we see how useful these website flipping tools are and how much success we have had using them we are seriously thinking about making these available to all of you in the near future.

If this is something you would be interested in, enter your email below and we will let you know when we are ready to make them available to you.

Also, after you sign up I will immediately send you the report we wrote entitled “Striking Internet Oil” where we tell you exactly how we took a website we paid $150 for and in less than 2 years sold it for $250,000. (see “Clarence” in our portfolio)

One other thing - we hate spam as much if not more than you do. Your email is only going to be used to let you know when we have the tools ready.