Live Case Study: Watch Me Build A Website From Scratch And Flip It For Profit

I have seen this done across many forums and since no one has started it on here I have decided to take on the mantle and be the first. I will update this post at least once a month and whenever there is a major update or breakthrough So stick around peeps and subscribe to this thread to receive all my updates.

THE PLAN
I am going to build a new site up from scratch and hopefully flip it for some profit. I have decided to go into an alcohol niche just because I think it will be fun. I have built up sites in the past and flipped them but I want to do something different this time, I want to build up the website as a BRAND.

I have picked up an old aged domain to use for this experiment due to the fact that google has placed 30/45 days sandbox fliter to newly produced websites and because the domain I have gone for is very brandable to the niche. Since I want this to be an authority website I have decided that quality over quantity so each posts will be meaty long form posts that can easily go viral and at least publish one content a month and maximum four posts a month. I will focus my entire traffic generating strategy on social media and completely ignore SEO for now.

Website's CMS will be wordpress because I have extensive knowledge with it and it has so many plugins available for social media promotion.

That is it so far so good for now. Will update you guys soon.

 

UPDATE

Not much has happened since last week. I did a bit of research and found a lot of long tail keywords that I can easily rank for. These keywords can easily go viral on social media too where I plan to get most of my traffic.

Writing work has been commissioned to @ifeanyi egede a member of this forum and an excellent writer.

Site is set up, theme installed, social media accounts all up and running. So all that is left now is posting contents and promoting them.

Stay tuned

 

Very interesting. I have never seen this done post an action thread like this one.

I hope that I'm not being rude, but how much did you pay for the aged domain? I have never purchased an aged domain because I assumed the price would be outrageous. Perhaps I should rethink that.

 

This looks really cool, I've seen a lot of these threads, but many of them die within a few weeks. You said that you flipped sites in the past? Just curious as to how much you sold them for. I know that there are some people out there who will pay big money for particular sites, in the five figures area, but I could never understand why someone would make so much of an investment on a website. I guess the idea is that it's a brand, and since you won't be relying on SEO as your prime traffic source, you won't have to worry about the dreaded Google updates.

 

The domain name was cheap! PR2 expired and I paid $10 for it

 

Hopefully I can keep this going till the end. This is something I do and enjoy doing so should be fun. I have nver sold sites in xx,xxx range. My strategy has always been mid and high end x,xxx. It takes less work and easier to sell. But with the increasing complexity of search algo it is becoming trickier to spin out these sites and like you righlty mentioned, google updates are more frequent now and harsher.

I used social media in the past for one of my sites and I think on a large scale it can proof a better ROI than SEO. I will update you guys as it goes.

 

UPDATE

Nothing much has happened in the past few days. I have been concentrating on coming up with the content. What I am doing is simple. I go on popular sites in the niche, find a post that did well, put my spin on it and make it better. When I have like 10 posts on the site, I will start social media promotion but for now it is all about getting the content ready for social media addicts to share!

 

I'm a member of a forum where guy does this for a living. he claims to have sold sites for $30,000, which seems unbelievable to me. He says that he builds them up as a brand though, so he doesn't rely of only getting traffic from Google, or any other search engines. I just think it's so risky to pay so much ($30,000) for a website, and even though it's not relying on search engine traffic, it's just a website. But, what do I know, there are people out there who do this stuff for a living.

Good luck, I'll be watching.

 

Really?! I pay that much for a brand new domain. I assumed that expired domains were expensive. I guess I was wrong. I'm sure that there are some pricey ones, but I should never assume.

 

Haven't watched the video yet. I do think this is an interesting concept though. Would probably be hard to pull off though. It's a tough way to make a living, flipping websites. I do know that building a website from scratch and then selling it once it becomes popular can make just about anyone, really, really rich.

 

I love watching topics like these. It's so nice that we can all come together and share our success. That's one thing I love about IM, is that people are so eager to share their success and how it can be replicated. IMO, this is the best way I learn. To watch, step by step, how someone else does something.

Obviously, if you want to make it in IM, you shouldn't just go from technique to technique copying step by step what you see other people do. It's a good place to start, but, from there, you should use that knowledge, put your own twist on it, and start banking on your original ideas. Then hopefully you can be like the OP and share your ideas.

Looking forward to seeing how this ends up for you. Sorry if you already mentioned this, but, in the past, how have you generally sold the sites? Do you go through flippa, or something else?

 

I use flippa and private list I have from old buyers. Some send me emails asking if I have any new site for sale. My best sites don't always make it on to flippa listing.

 

UPDATE:

The first batch of articles are ready. Over 25k words of meaty content ready to be published. I am going to schedule all the posts to go out once a week but don't plan to auto post to social media yet.

I will be using a wordpress plugin to remove dates from my blog posts to stop the dates showing in serps and social posts. So far so good, I am moving at a very good pace.

No real promotion has started.

Stay tuned..

 

@ Samuel Is there any update on this?

 

Moving to thailand at the end of the year so I have everything on hold at the moment until i complete my move.

So far though, I have the posts created and are all evergreen posts, I am currently talking with two content marketing companies to help amplify the posts. Since this relies on paid promotion I need to go with a company that offers a very good ROI on the CPC campaigns.

 

Wow, Thailand. Congratulations, it must be exciting. Are you moving from the US?

 

From the UK. Just need to move stuff into storage and finalise a few other personal stuff.
Exciting!

 

I bet! I've always dreamed about doing something similar, especially because I'm in Canada and it's winter right now, but I'd miss my family too much. Hope you have a smooth move.

 

cheers mate

 

I have finally settled in Chiang mai north of thailand and can resume my experiments. Sorry guys for the delay and lack of communication.