When I talk to small business owners it always amazes me how they all pretty much have the same story. They worked for another small business, saw that the company was making a ton of money and realized that they could do just as good if not a much better job. So they left the company they worked for and started their own business.

The reason I bring this up is because these successful business owners saw an opportunity and let it be the source of revenue for their business. So what does this have to do with internet marketing?

If you are like me you have new make money on the internet ideas all the time. It is unrealistic to pursue all of them even when they all seem legitimate. You poor your heart and soul into building up a web business and even start making money. Emotionally you are completely attached to the business.

You need to be flexible. What if an opportunity presented itself to you that you weren’t expecting, and maybe had no interest in but you could make way more money than your business is making. Should you break the emotional attachment from your other business and pursue this more lucrative opportunity? The Answer Is YES.

Don’t forget that your ultimate goal is to make money on the internet. To replace your 9-5 job with a full time income online. So your going to make that money in a way you didn’t expect, who cares. Take the money and be happy for the blessings.

The original idea I had for an internet business has been by far the least lucrative. I learned a lot while working on it and it has made good money, but if I would have pushed away the other opportunities that came to me over the next several years I would have been a lot less successful.

Since Prosperly’s inception, I have been a proponent of Flippa, formerly Sitepoint Marketplace. Flippa is the main website where people go to buy and sell websites. Whenever I have sold websites in the past I have always dealt directly with the buyer and never used Flippa to sell before. I finally decided to try them out to see how it would turn out for me. That is when I realized they have many flaws I couldn’t overlook.

Before I go into those flaws let me just report that I did reach an agreement on a purchase price for the site only to have to deal fall through over the next several weeks.

1. Buyers on Flippa expect to get a steal on a website. The seemingly going rate on the site is 10 months of net revenue. I’m not sure where or how this came to be but in the real business world that ratio is laughable. Most businesses sell for 2-3 years net revenue. I sold a website last year for a 7 year net revenue. Why 10 months? Because you don’t want to have to pay for a business what it is worth?

I think the main problem is sellers are putting their site out on display showing everyone exactly how your website makes money and exactly how much money you’re making. This is a problem because in the internet world the barrier to entry is almost non-existent. Any Joe Shmoe can buy a domain for $8, then go get a free WordPress template and be up and running in 10 minutes. Their thought process is since it is so easy why should they pay a 2 year multiple for a website. Inevitably most people that start these quick websites never achieve the traffic nor the money that the site for sell is doing but it just creates a problem where the market of buyers at a real business price is not there.

2. The fee structure is ridiculous. One of the problems I had with Flippa was the bookend fees they charged. They charge you to list your site for sale with all kinds of listing upgrades. You can easily end up spending $40-$50 to list your site for sale. I have no problem with them doing this. It is normal for businesses to charge listing fees.

On top of the listing fee is the purchase price fee. I can’t remember what that percentage is (I want to say 5%) but they cap you out at $499. That is where my site fell, the $499 cap. So I had to pay $40-$50 to list and then they wanted me to pay $499 once the deal had gone through. I agreed to this reluctantly because I knew Flippa could provide me with an audience. I just think you should make it one or the other. Charge me a listing fee, charge me a final sale fee, but don’t be greedy and charge me both.

3. If a deal falls through your out of luck and money. This one is the flaw that inspired this post. After I reached the agreement with the buyer he gave me the run around for a couple of weeks. During this time Flippa kept emailing me reminding me that I needed to pay the final transaction fee. I ignored the emails because I was still waiting to get paid for the site. It soon became apparent that the guy was not really going to put forth the money and so I moved on with my life.

Well I still kept getting emails from Flippa saying I needed to pay the final fee. I finally emailed them back saying the deal fell through and I never sold the site. I realized that I had taken the risk to pay the money to list the site for sale and since the deal fell through I was out the listing fee. I had no problem with that. But you can imagine my surprise when they emailed me and told me that even though the deal fell through I was still obligated to pay the final transaction fee (in this instance I had set it up to be split between me and the buyer) of $250.

So Flippa was demanding that I pay $250 for essentially nothing. I told them that it was ridiculous to ask me to pay the fee when I never received any money for the site but they kept demanding it and threatened to suspend my account. I told them to go ahead and suspend the account because I had and have no intention of ever paying the made up fee.

Congratulations Flippa! Not only did you lose one customer with your horrible fee policies, but I’m a guy with an audience and I will make sure they know about it too.

Flippa Alternative

If you want to find out where I go to find websites to buy click here.

So where do we go to find good buyers of websites. I have a few suggestions.

The first is a forum I recently found out about called Experienced People. I’m not sure why it’s named the way it is but it is a forum of people with money that like to buy and sell websites. It is a much more mature crowd than at Flippa.

The next Flippa alternative I would suggest when you are looking to sell a site is to contact your competitors. Remember, your competition is not your enemy. They can be some of your most valuable assets. If one of my competitors contacted me about buying their site I would be very interested. I have even tried to buy out my competition before.

Another option is to go directly to a business broker. I would only do this if your website is making over $3k a month. Their fees are high but they will also get you top dollar for your business.

The best option is to wait for someone to come to you. If you build an awesome website with great SEO rankings it won’t be long before people are contacting you about buying your site. This puts you in the driver seat. For example, on the site I sold for the 7 year multiple I had already received an offer for just over a 1 year multiple. The amount didn’t excite me so I passed. I fixed up the site more and got even higher rankings and then sold it for the 7 years of net revenue. That did excite me.

A couple of months ago I decided to explore my farming roots and raise some chickens. I bought 6 chicks and built them a nice home complete with fenced in yard and chicken coop. I spent the next couple of months feeding them and watering them and eventually I started letting them out in the yard to walk around and develop their natural hunting instincts.

I have spent several hundred dollars raising these chickens, waiting for them to finally pay off and start laying good quality eggs. Well a couple of days ago I finally got my first egg. Several more have come since then and soon I will be getting 4-6 eggs a day. It was hard being patient waiting for these chickens to start laying eggs especially since all they were doing up until then was costing me money.

As I thought about this process I realized that it is very similar to starting an internet business. You first start your site and you have to put money into it either to buy it or have it developed. Then you care for it building up its rankings and adding content to it waiting for the big payoff. You wait and work patiently for the “eggs” to come. Then you get your first sale and your excited. Then you get a couple more sales. Pretty soon your making money every day.

The key to this process is active patience. You work hard while you wait. If you are doing the right things to your website the eggs will come.

Installing WordPress

Now that you’ve set up your domain and hosting, you’re now ready start building your own unique website.

While there are many ways to build a website, we are looking to create a professional looking website in the most efficient way possible.  For beginners and veterans alike, we suggest using a content management system (CMS) called WordPress.  WordPress is basically an online publishing application that you’ll use to create your website (everything from it’s appearance to actually adding the content).

WordPress is a fantastic CMS with tons of extensibility and limitless customization.  It’s very SEO (search engine optimization) friendly and extremely robust.  Also, with the vast number of themes available for WordPress, you can be up and running with a professional looking website in no time.

Being that we strongly recommend using WordPress (referred to hereafter as WP), the rest of the instructions about how to build your website are given based on the assumption that you’re using WP.

The following tutorial will walk you through how to install WP on your website using HostGator.

Installing WordPress: 2 Options

Since we are using HostGator as our hosting company, we have two options when installing WordPress on to our website:

Option 1:  Use the Fantastico application in HostGator’s cPanel.

Option 2:  Install WordPress manually by using FTP.

We’ll go over just option 1 in the following tutorials because it is much easier.

Using Fantastico to Install WordPress

Fantastico is a software application that automatically installs WordPress onto your website.  If this option is available (which it will be if you use HostGator), than this is by far the easiest way to install WP.

Step 1: While in your cPanel, scroll down towards to bottom of the screen until you find the Software/Services section.

Click the Fantastico De Luxe icon.

Step 2: Click on the WordPress link in the left sidebar.

Step 3: Click on New Installation.

Step 4: Input the following information into their respective areas:

Install on domain:                    Select the domain on which you’re installing WP
Install in directory:                   Leave blank
Administrator-username:       admin
Password:                                   Your desired password
Admin nickname:                     Your desired nickname
Admin email:                             Your desired email address
Site name:                                   Your website’s name
Description:                               Description of what your website’s all about

Click Install WordPress.

Step 5: The following screen notifies you that it’s creating a database and database user to be used for WordPress.

Click Finish Installation.

Step 6: Take a final note of your WordPress username (should be “admin”) and your password.

Either bookmark or make a note of the URL that’s give here (yourdomain.com/wp-admin). This is the web address that you’ll type in to access the WordPress interface (to manage virtually everything on your site).

It may also be a good idea to enter your currently used email to receive a copy of the installation details.

Click Back to WordPress overview.

Step 7: Open a new tab or window in your web browser.  Type in your site’s admin URL that was given in the previous step (our example was: prosperlybeginners.com/wp-admin). Hit Enter.

Step 8: Input your username (admin) and password that you selected during the WordPress Install.  Click Log In.

Step 9: Welcome to WordPress!  You can consider this the “backend” of your website.  Here you will add pages and posts, alter the appearance of your website, add plugins, and more.

Over time you will become very well acquainted with the WordPress Admin interface, but feel free to take a few moments to browse around and get familiar with it.

Step 10: In a new tab or window in your web browser, type in the URL of your new website (e.g. prosperlybeginners.com).   Your new website should look like this:

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed WordPress on your new website!

*If you still see the default HostGator webpage, you may need to delete the default.html file on your website’s directory.  You can skip the following section if your screen matches the website screenshot above.

Change Your DNS Settings

The first thing we must do is to change our DNS settings to point to HostGator.

Shortly after completing your purchase of the hosting, you should receive an email from HostGator with some instructions on how to get started.   The most important section of the email is where they list your name servers.

Step 1: Make a note of the two name servers given in the email.

Step 2: Go to Name.com and log in to your account. *These instructions assume that you registered your domain with Name.com as was shown in the Buying a Domain tutorial.

Step 3: Click on Account at the top of the page.

Step 4: Click on the domain name for which you are setting up hosting.

Step 5: Click Edit Name Servers under Control Panel on the right side of the page.

Step 6: In the box under “Add Name Server,” type in the first name server (e.g. ns1929.hostgator.com) that HostGator provided you in your email.

Click Add.  Then do the same thing for the second name server.

Step 7: Click (Remove) next to each of the first four default name servers to take them off of the list.

The only name servers that should now be listed are the new ones for your HostGator account.

Welcome to Your New Website

Believe it or not, your website is now live and running.*  In a new window or tab, type in your domain name.  You should see a screen like this one:

This is HostGator’s default page for a newly hosted website.  It’s appearing because we haven’t uploaded any of our files to create our own web pages yet (don’t worry, that’s coming up).

There are a number of good resources for you here, particularly the Getting Starting and Video Tutorials links.

The first item on the screen is the cPanel Login.  The cPanel is basically the control panel for your hosting.  You will use it to perform various actions including creating a database, managing emails, adding other domains, and more.

If you’d like to check it out now, simply click on the cPanel Login link or type in “yourdomain.com/cpanel” in your web browser (replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name).  This is how you will access the cPanel from now on (you may want to bookmark it).

*HostGator says to allow 24-48 hours for the DNS change to propagate worldwide, so don’t be surprised if it’s taking a bit to see your website (or rather, HostGator’s default page).

Check out the next post in the series on how to install WordPress on your site.