I was at a BBQ a couple days ago and a friend was asking me to explain how I made money  trading websites online.

He couldn’t get how one could honestly build and then trade a website. He believed I had to be selling one of those pyramid schemes. So I grabbed the number one BBQ stationary – the pen and napkin – and I detailed out the whole method for him.

Selling websites all takes off with research. Get that wrong and everything that follows is typically a waste of time. If you want to begin from scratch, you need to find a market. I recommend you look into Market Samurai, or if you do not want to spend any cash yet, Google’s free keyword tool will be fine.

The first step is decide on a market – something that you like – and just send that label into the software. The results you hope for are less than 60,000 competing pages and at the minimum 100 searches every day. That way, you see that you won’t be in a highly competitive market where you might struggle to get results, but here, there is enough interest to make some money.

The next step is to develop around three related keywords to support your key phrase. This will help with traffic and to get your primary keyword to list higher and faster in search engines.

Next register your key phrase as a domain. Use a service like godaddy or hostgator and go with finding if the dot com is available to register. If it is not available, try having a suffix or extension to the domain name, for example blog or site. Let’s pretend you were going for shoes but shoes dot com was not available, check on shoesblog dot com etc. till you come across a name that is right. Dot com is still the most valuable of domain extensions, but if you can’t find anything suitable, then move down to dot org. I don’t usually get down any longer to dot info or any other extensions.

When you have registered your domain, you then require hosting for your domain. This is the place your website will live and you can generally buy hosting by the same provider that sold you the domain in the first place, especially if you get one of the bigger hosting companies.

Now, you have to make a website. I would recommend you build your website with WordPress, and the simplest, most efficient way to install a WordPress blog is with WordPress Direct. WordPress Direct is fast and extremely basic to use for both setting up and developing your sites.

After your site is ready to go, you will need some content. To start off, check out six or so YouTube videos about your market. You can do that from inside WordPress Direct. For the video, write approx 100 words of a description in the post and there’s your original content.

The next thing is to be sure that Google and other search engines know you exist. The quickest way to ensure this is with social bookmarking. Submit your sites to sites including Digg, Mix, Propellor and Twitter. This will have the search engines see your site and let the world know it exists.

During the installation process, you install both Google Analytics and Google Adsense. Analytics will track all the statistics for your site and the latter is the adverts that visitors click on in your site and this garners gains. Both of these may be found with a simple Google search.

Now that you are up and running, you need visitors to push you up the search results to the first page of search results, where the fun starts.

This is a two part strategy and it consists of fresh content and backlinks. Content is the simple part; it is you writing articles, putting up videos and other content in your site on a regular basis. Backlinking is the procedure of having other websites linking back to your site. It’s essentially like a site telling Google that your site is good and that Google should tell others that they should check out your site too.

Now, when it comes to selling websites,the easiest process of acquiring backlinks is by leaving interesting comments on blogs and forums that are related to your market.

Just repeat that procedure for three to six months and you could have a site that ranks on the first page of search results and making a couple dollars every day at least.

You will then be ready to sell your site on flippa dot com.

I’ll explain all about trading websitesflipping websites] over dessert, let’s get back to the BBQ!

 

Tags: buying and selling websites, flippa, selling website, selling websites

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.