With websites, the process is similar. You can buy and “re-hab” an existing site, or you can build a brand-new site with the intention of selling it quickly. Some website flippers prefer to add content and backlinks so that their sites build in value over a period of a few months before selling them.

Like most things in life, it’s a little more difficult than it sounds. You’ll need to do some market research to find topics that people are willing to spend money on. If you don’t know how to set up a hosting account or register a domain name, you might want to start by building sites on free services like Weebly or Squidoo.

There are a number of sites on the Internet where you can buy and sell websites. A few are free; most charge a fee of some kind – either a listing fee or a success fee or both. Some of the sites make it extremely difficult to find out what fees are actually charged.

Here’s a short list:

• eBay.com – eBay is quite popular, although bid prices tend to be on the low side. Try the regional sites,eBay.co.uk, eBay.ca and eBay.com.au as well. eBay has a complicated system of listing fees and success fees, which I won’t get into here – there is no listing fee for the first 5 items in a 30-day period.
• DigitalPoint forumYou need to be a member for at least 14 days and have made 25 or more posts before you can post in the Buy,Sell or Trade Forum.
• The Warrior Forum has a sub-forum called Websites For Sale. There is a $20 listing fee and you must be a member of the WAR Room to post offers ($37 once-off).
• ViperSelling – geared towards selling viable online businesses older than 6 months. No listing fee, 10% success fee.
• SiteDeal – currently no listing or success fees.
• WebsiteAuctionHub
• Webmaster-TalkNo listing fees.
• WebmastersMarketplace – $5 listing fee, no success fees.
• WebsiteBroker.com – 90 day standard listing fee is $9.95. No success fee.
• Flippa – a spinoff from the SitePoint Marketplace. They charge a listing fee of $19.00 and a success fee of 5%, which can be split between the buyer and the seller.

Other resources:
SitePoint’s Ultimate Web Site Valuation Guide
Justin Brooke’s excellent (and free!) “Easy Website Flipping” report.

Website Flipping – What’s It All About? is a post from: Online Business Blog

Here are a couple of the methods that actually do work:

1. Create and sell your own information products. This is one of the best ways to make money, because you have complete control over all aspects of the process. You can decide what product to create, how much to sell it for and how to market it.

2. Affiliate marketing. A tried-and-tested way to make money, affiliate marketing generates huge incomes for those who have the time and the resources to do it properly.

3. Building Adsense websites. Adsense is still one of the most reliable and efficient ways to generate an income online. The key is to build sites which provide useful information, and build a steady stream of traffic.

4. Generating and selling leads. In the current economic climate, many businesses are desperate for a constant source of qualified business leads. Internet marketing techniques provide an efficient and inexpensive way to generate these leads.

5. Membership sites. A well-designed membership site is an exceptionally effective way to share your expertise, and get paid for it.

You can read a good deal more about these methods, and 10 more, in my free report“15 Powerful Internet Business Models”.All I ask in exchange is your name and email address!

5 Ways to Make Money Online is a post from: Online Business Blog

Some business owners are even starting to understand that it’s not really about the amount of traffic they get to their website, but about the number of visitors who convert into buyers.

And a standard Internet marketing tool, the autoresponder, provides an excellent way for any business to follow up with its customers – whether they’ve just bought a swimming pool or a can of paint.

What kind of services can you sell? Well, search engine optimization is a service which many websites desperately need. Increasing traffic through link building – article marketing, social media, bookmarking – is another useful service to offer. Copywriting, tracking and testing, and newsletter management are also in demand.

Business owners are interested in getting the Internet to work for them, but as a general rule they aren’t interested enough to do it themselves. They’d rather employ someone who has the knowledge and understanding of online marketing to handle their website promotion. And that’s where you come in.

At some point, you’ll probably find yourself explaining what it is you can do for your new small business client. Because they don’t have the background knowledge you have, it’s easy to lose them and be confronted by blank stares.

I’ve put together a short video training course aimed at small business owners, which is intended to give them a basic understanding of what Internet marketing is about. It’s pure information – no pitchfest here.

Take a look – hopefully you’ll learn something too!

It’s called eMarketing Essentials and there’s no charge – not even an opt-in.

Let me know what you think!

Selling Services to Local Businesses is a post from: Online Business Blog

With most paid advertising, once you stop paying, the traffic dries up.

On the other hand, with many of the ‘free’ traffic methods, the traffic keeps on coming once you’ve done the work – sometimes for months or years on end.

Article marketing is a great example. If you can get your articles distributed to a large number of other peoples’ sites, complete with links back to your website, they can provide traffic for a long time to come.

There are a number of article distribution services, such as ArticleMarketer and iSnare, which will distribute your articles to hundreds or even thousands of publishers. Some services, like Unique Article Wizard and ArticleMarketingAutomation, even allow you to create ’spinnable’ articles, so that each publisher receives a unique version of each article.

But these services are not cheap. UAW is $67 a month now.

So I was quite surprised and excited to find a pretty good free article distribution service – Free Traffic System. This service distributes your spinnable articles to 30 keyword-targeted blogs.

The interesting thing about Free TrafficSystem is that it’s really free – there’s no upsell or premium service. They offer an affiliate program, but no money changes hands – you get extra link credits for each new member you bring in.

You also get credits for every WordPress blog you add to the system.

I have a couple of minor quibbles – the article spinning system is a bit clunky, and the process of selecting which blogs you want to distribute an article to is even clunkier (although most of the paid services don’t give you this much control).

But hell, it’s free.

Free Traffic is a post from: Online Business Blog

In the first six issues of my “Serious Income Secrets” newsletter, I’ll take you step-by-step through the process of building an online business – not a fly-by-night, “get rich quick” scheme, but a real, sustainable business which will generate an income for you for many years.

There’s nothing held back. I show you how to develop a plan, how to decide what to sell and who to sell it to and how to craft a sales letter for your product. I show you how to get traffic to your web page, and how to create a list of subscribers who’re eager to read what you have to say.

You can sign up for my newsletter by going to SeriousIncomeSecrets.com.
You’ll also get a copy of Terry Dean’s report, “Live The Internet Lifestyle – Retire Young and Wealthy”. Terry claims it’s worth $10.00, but I’ve paid more than that for ebooks which contained a lot less useful information. And you’re getting it for nothing. Bargain!

Serious Income Secrets is a post from: Online Business Blog

One way to solve this problem is for the business owner to identify the tasks which they do not want to do themselves – the repetitive, boring jobs which need to be performed consistently every day – and to get someone else to do them. In a brick and mortar business, this might mean hiring an employee. For online businesses, it usually means finding someone online.

Outsourcing repetitive Internet marketing tasks to someone thousands of miles away is easier than ever, thanks to websites like Elance.com, Guru.com and RentACoder.com.

I’m interested in learning about your outsourcing experience – maybe you could take a few minutes to fill in a quick survey for me, at OutsourceFreedom.com.

Does Outsourcing Work For You? is a post from: Online Business Blog

Thanks to Peter du Toit for finding this…

Winner – Best Narrative Short, Cleveland Int’l Film Festival,
Winner – Jury Award, Gen Art Chicago Film Festival,
Winner – Audience Award, Hawaii Int’l Film Festival,
Winner – Best Short Comedy, Breckenridge Festival of Film,
Winner – Crystal Heart Award, Best Short Film & Audience Award, Heartland Film Festival,
Winner – Christopher & Dana Reeve Audience Award, Williamstown Film Festival,
Winner – Best Comedy, Dam Short Film Festival,
Winner – Best Short Film, Sedona Int’l Film Festival.

This should make you smile… is a post from: Online Business Blog

WP 2.7 has a number of changes which I really like. For starters, you will be able to upgrade to the next version from within the admin panel. I have been using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin for a couple of months now, and it’s made life a lot easier. But having the upgrade function built into WordPress should be an improvement.

Modules – many of the functions on the edit screens (like ‘Categories’, ‘Tags’ and ‘Custom Fields’) have been changed to modules, which you can move around as you like. You can also decide which ones to show, using the new ‘Screen options’ tab.

Quick Edit – this allows you to edit most of the meta data for a post or page (the title, author, tags etc) without having to load the full edit page. This functionality is based on the Manageable plugin by Aaron Harp (which I discovered a month ago!)

Comments – comments can now be paginated (split into multiple pages) and can be threaded (a commenter can reply to a specific comment in its own thread).

Built-in Plugin Browser – you can now search for and install plugins from within the admin panel.

There’s a complete list of the changes on the WordPress site.

Upgrading to WordPress 2.7 is a post from: Online Business Blog

Lee is based in the UK, and until 18 months ago was a high school teacher. He now makes a full-time living online, mainly by teaching others how to do what he did.

His 32-page free report lists 13 ways to increase your profits from any online business. Most of the methods are pretty simple, even obvious, and if you have any experience with Internet marketing you’ll already know that you should be doing them! The report serves as a great reminder about the ways you may be “leaving money on the table”.

I particularly liked Lee’s story about buying a soft drink at his local shop and being offered an up-sell. As he says, “If you truly believe in the quality of your products then you have a duty to give your customers the opportunity to benefit by buying them.”

You can download the report here:

“Profit 13 Ways: 13 Ways To Increase Your Profits Fast”.

There’s no opt-in or one time offer, just the report.

Oh, and Lee has an excellent free newsletter – subscribe here.

13 Ways To Increase Your Profits is a post from: Online Business Blog

Thanks to Garry Conn for finding this, and Google’s recently released Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. If you want to learn about SEO, you could do worse than reading what Google themselves have to say!

Matt Cutts Explains Google is a post from: Online Business Blog