real blogging tips

Recently you may or may not have been witness to some very exciting events in the blogosphere which pertained to site flipping. Our friend Bryan over at siteflipu.com accepted a challenge which gave him 24 hours in which he would have to obtain 5 domain names, research the niches and create a site and effectively monetize these sites for a quick flip at sitepoint.com. Many would think this an impossible task because honestly creating that much content for a start up site to be worth enough to net any real monies is quite a task. Bryan did outsource a bit of the content work and he did have on hand some premium themes which made part of the process quicker and less expensive. Keep in mind Bryan is a professional, all I have to say is OneMansGoal.com.

While Bryan did complete the challenge successfully and even nabbed home an amazing $1k + off the five sites I was curious. How hard could it be to just flip a startup site without the special themes, outsourced content, ebooks or even keyword research? This inspired me to my own 24 hour challenge.

First, What Is A Site Flip?

Site Flipping is the act of taking a web site, blog, or even a forum and revitalizing it to a much higher level than it may have enjoyed in the past and selling it for (hopefully) more than the total investment made. This will probably remind many of real estate flipping as those types of shows have gained popularity as of late. The concept is the same though, spend as little as possible on the initial investment, and then revitalize key areas that retain the highest value per dollar invested. After this it gets redressed and put on parade, and hopefully sold for a profit.

Big Ben Patton’s 24 Hour Site Flip Personal Challenge

First I asked “How hard could this really be?”. I have run a few sites in the past and with this blog and my email marketing escapades I figured I could give this a shot. What entailed in the next 24 hours was actually rather fun and definitely a change of pace. The challenge I issued myself was this: Spend as little as possible to produce a quality site with domain and content and make back what I spent and then net a profit. This is a tall order considering I have not really read anything on how to be successful at site flipping, or even really thought about any of the logistics before this moment in time.

First you need an idea, domain and some direction!

First things first I use Godaddy.com as a name register and with the coupon code OYH3 I get my domains for $7.15 or so out the door. As far as I know this is as cheap as it gets for a dot com url.

I played with godaddy for a bit with some names for niche sites that I had been thinking about and most that would be considered at all on key for subject were taken, so I shifted my efforts to SEO KEYWORD TOOLS and GOOGLE TRENDS. Now I know the pro’s are using much better pay per use keyword research tools and methods, but to keep the costs of a first timers first outing down I stayed 100% free on this. Now their will be certain niches and subject material that will always be popular. Golf, Exercise, Self-Help, Yachting. Niches who’s patrons are usually not frugal but instead eager to spend and are usually going to net you the quickest turn around. While I have no experience besides this single flip I relied on my internet marketing intuition to guide me through this phase of preparation.

Eureka! An Idea!

It seems since Tiger Woods is out for this season that golf has had a lot of headlines and not just the same old spectacular domination by the man. He is out recouping from another round of knee surgery, which opens the field for everyone. This being said the search terms, and trends indicated to me this would be a great break out subject for my first site flip.

Next I needed a domain, and let me tell you this gets harder every day, and I can see that having domains on hand and ready will probably be the best bet if you plan to do this on more than one occasion. While I do have a hand full of domains I did not have any that would fit this project so I headed back to godaddy and starting playing around with many different combination’s of keywords that would be popular. I have to admit now I did caddy for a summer in between middle and high school at the local municipal golf course. I called upon this experience for terms that would be popular for the people who I was targeting. After about thirty minutes I finally had struck gold.

And so TheAceGolfer.com was born.

Now What?

Now I have plenty of ideas for content and even a domain. As stated earlier I am using my own hosting for this, but if I am to do this again in the future I will more than likely start off with a new account on hostgator provided by my own affiliate link. Why? Because handing over a whole account will be much much easier than exporting the site, or even setting up a proper ftp for the new tentant of the prospective site. I will explain this a bit more in detail later, but wanted to highlight it here as well. For the initial costs you can use a coupon code to start up a host gator account for .01$.

So now your domain is pointing at the right name servers and your staring at a parked page. The next question is Are you creating a forum? a blog? or a static site? Each has its own set of values and bonuses, but for this project I took the course of a word press blog. These are what appears to be Google’s favorite sites to index for one, and word press is the most powerful blogging platform available in my opinion. With this platform I am not limited in what I want to do or create.

Word press also makes it much easier with its capability for just about any plugin you could imagine, and the ability to add a theme to the site that can make it unique.

Now I at this point I am staring at an empty default, but up to date word press bog, whats next?

Design, Operation and Deployment

No one is going to buy (don’t quote me) a default content less word press blog about golf, so now the real work begins.

First I figured I would get things started by finding a theme that would play into my theme, and as I suspected their are quite a few free and premium golf themes. I downloaded a hand full of them and examined which would fit the bill if I were looking to buy a turnkey blog. I ended up choosing one and editing the header for a more web 2.0 look.

After this I knew that I should use my experience as a blogger to make sure that this blog had every plug in it would need to make its next owners job easy and the site that much more fantastic. Look for a post later this week about plug ins, this project inspired me to go hunting again, and  would add another 2000 words if I start telling you exactly which ones I grabbed. Needless to say it had everything it would need. That is with exception to OIO Publisher. That being said this made the next phase a little more annoying, but by no means impossible.

At this point I took a break and started setting up all the side accounts which would be needed in order to run this site. Twitter, Plurk, EC, FeedBurner, mail accounts, ftp, and wp-admin. I customized each made the ad’s and icons for it all, and then deployed them to the theme accordingly. A little image editing here and there and that was done. Next was monetization.

And tomorrow we will delve into monetization and the rest of the project as well. Go get something cold to drink and relax all will be revealed in good time friends.

Part 2 can be found HERE

Related posts:

1. Case Study: Newbie Site Flip Part 2
2. A Day Off, And A New Site-Flip Project Underway
3. $5 A Day Adsense Site: Case Study – Part 2
4. $5 A Day Adsense Site: Case Study – Part 1
5. $5 A Day Adsense Site: Case Study – Part 4