This is a guest post by Mike Roosa from mikeroosa.com.
If I’ve learned anything over the last couple of months with regards to selling sites, it’s that REVENUE is King. Selling new startup sites on auction sites such as Flippa has become much harder and the return is not as good as it once was. The buyers have realized that it takes work to build a successful site, which means you need something to make the site more attractive. That something is revenue.
In order to maximize the sale for a new startup site, you need to take a little time to drive some traffic to the site and try to convert that traffic into cash. When selling your site, a potential buyer is much more likely to place a bid when you’ve already proven the concept by making some money.
The more revenue you are able to generate over a 30-60 or even a 90 day period the more likely it is that your sale will be successful.
While making a living online can be difficult and take many years, earning some money for a website is not all that hard, but does take some planning and a little luck. I don’t care what anyone says, there is some luck in getting ranked on page 1 of Google.
Here is the quickest and simplest way I know to get your site off on the right foot and earning money quickly.
It all starts with traffic and the traffic that a buyer wants to see is search engine traffic. I’m sure you’ve heard this a hundred times, but you need to find the right keywords with lots of searches and little competition.
When selecting a keyword, I like to find a 2 or 3 word keyword as my main keyword for the site I’m building and find an exact match domain name. For example, if my keyword is “glass french doors,” then the domain name should be glassfrenchdoors.com, glassfrenchdoors.net, glassfrenchdoors.org, or (hold your breath) glassfrenchdoors.info. Don’t be scared off by the .info domain as they will sell if you can show proof of earnings.
There are many other sites that tell you how to do keyword research so I’m not going to go into that here, but the keyword you select should get at least 5,000 searches a month, have less than 50,000 competing sites and have at least 2 page rank 0 sites on the first page of Google.
Try to come up with 4 or 5 similar keywords and incorporate those into your site as well so you can try to gain some additional search engine traffic.
Once you get the site built and optimize it for your keywords by creating some quality and unique content, then you need to get your site indexed.
You can wait for Google if you want, but I’m not that patient. I recently discovered a way to get a site indexed quickly and that is to go to http://www.ismysiteindexed.com and put in your url. Just by checking on your site, it will get indexed quickly, many times in the same day.
If you’ve done your keyword research correctly then you should be somewhere on page 1, if not then you are going to need to build some backlinks by writing articles for EzineArticles, GoArticles, Squidoo, Hubpages, or some other article directory or Web 2.0 site. You also should ping your site and submit some social bookmarks.
Hopefully, within a few days of adding some backlinks, your site can get enough juice to move up to page one where it can start earning some money.
The simplest way that I know of to make money with a startup website is with Adsense. You probably aren’t going to make a killing with Adsense, but you don’t have to. If you can show proof of $15.00 per month ($.50 a day) then you should have a sale between $200 and $300, and if your site is attractive and has some good content then you could make much more.
Like with keyword research, there are many guides to setting up Adsense, but here are my 3 tips.
First, less is more. I like having one Adsense block on the page and no links to external sites AT ALL. You want visitors to either click on an ad or link to an internal page which will also contain the Adsense block.
Second, your content text color should be light and your Adsense block a little darker so it draws attention to the ads.
Third, try your own thing. There are no rules when it comes to what works and doesn’t work. Any given site could have success with something that doesn’t work on another site, so don’t be afraid to try new things.
An added benefit of using Adsense is that it is one of the most watched tags on Flippa which means your site will get its share of views.
I hope that I have been able to shed a little light on what it takes to build a money making site so that your next flip is a profitable one.
What about you? What are the best ways you have for monetizing a site to bring in some money quickly?
Mike’s blog can be found at http://www.mikeroosa.com where he writes about such topics as internet marketing, site flipping, building niche sites, making money online, and general productivity among other things. You can also follow him on Twitter.
