One of the most important concepts I discuss in my book is monetizing your flips before selling the domain. Monetizing your name usually means adding Google AdSense or any advertisement of your choice on your pages and most importantly – getting people to visit your domain.
I have heard from a lot of new flippers say that they are disappointed to find that all of their domains aren’t worth thousands of dollars. A domain name is an asset, and domain flipping, just like house flipping is making the name attractive to potential buyers.
If you look at the two elements that make-up just about 95% of a domain’s value the first is name-value. Is it a name that will get traffic purely from people typing the domain name into their browser. Websites like cars.com and investing.com are great examples of names with incredible name value. It might sound like I’m stating the obvious but it’s important to understand why these names are so valuable. Cars.com is valuable because it is most likely what people would type into their browser when looking for a car online. This not only gives the name a high-volume of traffic but also gives targeted traffic. Targeted traffic is the only traffic that matters as this translates directly into dollars.
The second element of a domain’s value is traffic. You might be thinking this is just the same as name-value, but it’s not. This is where domain flipping comes in. A name like ILoveToSki.com has terrible name value. Nobody in their right mind is going to enter this into their browser window. Thus you can expect this small gem to get 0 hits a month.
Here is where I think there is a lot of confusion about domain flipping. Just putting a website on a name like this will not suffice, you need to go further. I have heard from so many people frustrated with spending a lot of time building a website on a domain only to find-out that nobody would pay for it. You need to get organic traffic coming to your flipped sites and provide content that makes users want to come back for more. This is why flipping is a whole lot different from parking. You can park hundreds of pages in an afternoon, but flipping more than one name at once is a big project.
I usually only flip one name at a time and this process can take anywhere from one week to a month. In the end though I like to emerge with a domain that can generate hundreds, if not thousands of hits a month. This takes time. It’s that simple, the time window for a typical flip should be between 3-4 months, not 3-4 days. A site that has a regular user-base, links in all the major search engines, an ALEXA rating and new unique visitors turn your domain name into an asset.
For those trying to make a quick buck, this might be heartbreaking news. For investors like myself this is the only way I have ever found you can make over 1000% ROI in 3 months time. Unlike stock investing, or house flipping, domain flipping does not require a lot of cash up front. Instead domain flipping uses a much more valuable asset, your time. Remember the famous quote from Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." Well build it and bring in those visitors, it’s time to flip!
