5 Great Reasons to Start Flipping Sites

Chris is going to try site flipping and Jay has posted 5 Reasons Why Flipping New Sites Is Better Than Keeping Them.  Those are two good posts amongst all the noise about site flipping from people trying to sell you training programs on their “secret techniques,” and good posts are hard to find on this topic.

So as someone who’s both bought and held sites and bought and flipped them, I wanted to give you my perspective on site flipping.

Why To Start Flipping Sites Today

Low Entry/Low Risk

Depending on which technique you use, you can get into site flipping for little to no money at all, and the only thing you risk is your time.  Granted, the lower the investment and risk, the lower the potential payoff, but there’s a lot to be said for an opportunity that you can try with little to no risk — particularly when you’re just starting out.

Build Great Experience

You can read about how to do things for years and not learn as much as you would in just a week of actually doing it.  That’s why I say that you should just get started.  And not only are you learning, but building or refurbishing a site requires you to develop a breadth of skills.  The more you’re able to do on your own — without having to hire or partner with others — the faster you can move and the bigger your piece of the pie.

Discover New Niches

So much of your success is determined by two components of your site — the topic and the type of site.  We could all name several high-profit topics that are also way oversaturated, so flipping sites helps you test-drive new topics to see just how profitable they can be.

In the same way, flipping sites helps you try out different types of sites to figure out which you like best.  Do you like blogs?  Forums?  Review sites?  Classifieds?  Directories?  The list is enormous.  The low entry/low risk nature of flipping sites gives you the freedom to experiment and find what works best for you.

Build Your Network

One of the most important lessons I ever learned about making a living from the Internet is how crucial relationships are.  No one who has had great success online did it all alone, and you can make some great contacts in the process of flipping sites — contacts that will be very valuable later on.

Experience the Full Business Lifecycle

It’s enormously valuable to have followed a site from beginning to end — whether you bought the site or built it from scratch.  There are things you’ll learn during the process of selling a site that will forever change how you start the next one.  Businesses that once would have seemed like a great idea no longer seem so great when you’ve seen the finish line, and vice versa.

And The #1 Reason Not To

You’re never guaranteed a second success.  If you don’t go deep at some point and stop chasing quick profits, eventually the well will run dry and you’ll be left with nothing to show for all the work you’ve put in.  It will be a great run (don’t get me wrong, working for yourself is phenomenal) but you want to be thinking long-term, too.  How can you establish a firm foundation that will last beyond your ability to find the next success?

You don’t want to taste the good life only to have it taken away because you sold the goose that laid the golden eggs.