Everyone has heard of flipping houses to make money but did you know that you can also make some serious money by flipping websites?

The principle is the same as house flipping. You build or buy a website and then improve it or simply sell it online to someone else. In reality it’s much simpler than flipping houses and the turnaround time can be very short which means more money into your account in a shorter time.

The skills you need are also pretty straightforward. You need to know what to look for and also a few basic internet marketing skills together with the desire to learn. There are plenty of upsides. Most websites resell for between 10 and 20 times their monthly profit. This means that a simple website which earns just $50 a month could fetch $1000!

The trick here is to find a website which has plenty of traffic but which does not earn very much. Websites like this are much more common than you think. Either the owner has not monetized the site correctly or they simply do not recognize what they have in terms of earning potential.

Once you find such a site, it’s then a matter of increasing the sites earnings. Remember that for each extra dollar the site earns its resale potential increases by between $10 and $20.

So let’s take a look in more detail at increasing a site’s earnings. Take a look at the site and check what type of traffic it is getting. Is it aimed at the young, the old, a particular type of skill or interest or even a specific gender? Irrespective of the intended audience there are some easy ways of increasing earnings.

Many sites use Adsense blindly because it is easy to use but Adsense only makes serious money for sites with large amounts of traffic. A better way is to write or have written for you a unique product such as an e-book or short report which the sites readership will find of interest. If you can write then this is simple to do yourself and if not then it’s also easy to sub-contract the job to a paid writer. Expect to pay between $0.02 and $0.05 per word for a decent writer whose first language is English and factor this into the selling price of your product.

Once the product is complete, you can offer it for sale on the site at a specific price point – or even give the product away in exchange for an email address. This is a rapid way to build a list of targeted buyers for the future. So if you choose to sell the product then it makes money from every sale – and therefore increases the sites value as previously described. If you choose to give it away then you build a list and it’s common to value such a list at $1 for each email address.

Many people choose to buy a site with low or no traffic and then set out to increase the amount traffic. In reality this can take a considerable amount of time and is often more difficult than simply improving a sites monetization. So….buy a poorly monetized site and improve it’s earning ability. Once you have done that, offer it for sale and bank that cash!