PLUS: Flipping websites and domain names for quick and easy profits

PLUS: Build niche mini-sites for fast and healthy profits

Hello again! May I take this opportunity to wish you a very happy and supremely profitable New Year from all of us at Canonbury Publishing. With my colleagues I will do all I can to help you succeed in 2016, beginning with today’s eletter.

Handmade issues and a rapidly developing marketplace for you to profit from…

There’s talk of one of the world’s most highly respected websites – Etsy – suffering significant problems recently, prompted mainly by an influx of new and possibly bigger competitors in the market for handmade and artist-created products.

At a time when few people realised a growing interest in buying handmade goods, Etsy emerged as the place for talented artists and craftspeople to sell their wares online to an international audience, and for several years Etsy remained on top.

Quality of goods was high and many very gifted creators sold exclusively at the site, leading to high profits both for the artisans and for the company behind the site.

Then, as happens for most good things, the competition got wind of an easy way to make money, by simply mediating between people good at making things and others good at selling them.

Today, Etsy’s main rivals are eBay and Amazon, each with its own developing platform for handmade and artisan-created goods, and presenting a major threat to Etsy’s survival.

But for people like us, the result is a proven product and plenty of places to market goods you and I don’t have to create and won’t even have to pay for in advance of selling them on sites like eBay and Amazon and, hopefully, Etsy too.

All we have to do is find artists and craftworkers – people typically good at making things and lousy at selling them – and offering to represent them online.

It’s all so easy, I’ve done it many times myself and, as soon as Amazon and eBay have all their ducks in a row, we’ll take a close look at making money ourselves from other people’s hard work and creative genius.

Until then, keep watching this space!

Flipping websites and domain names for quick and easy profits

Some of us do it with houses, some of us do it with cars, and some of us do it with websites. We buy those things, improve their appearance, add a few exciting new features, then we sell up for a few thousand pounds easy profit and maybe a great deal more.

It’s called ‘flipping’ and it represents one of the easiest, most profitable ventures of all – as this article shows.

‘Flipping’ is the term commonly applied to the exciting business of buying and selling domain names and developing new or existing websites.

Really spectacular profits can come from buying a domain name inexpensively in one location and reselling it for a profit elsewhere, such as by purchasing it from an inexperienced buyer on eBay and reselling it where more knowledgeable buyers congregate, in Internet marketing forums, for example, and companies mediating between domain name and website buyers and sellers, such as GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com), Flippa (http://www.flippa.com) and Sedo (http://www.sedo.com).

Many full-time flippers buy sites inexpensively, with or without a domain name, and focus on growing value in a site by adding content, for example, and monetising it with AdSense or Clickbank promotions and growing traffic from articles and blog postings, before finally offloading the whole caboodle to the highest bidder on one of those middleman sites just mentioned.

Website-flipping, and also domain-name-flipping, is one of few businesses known to survive and even thrive in an economic downturn, mainly because flippers are targeting up-market buyers: people with money to spend and wanting to buy websites that are already receiving traffic and generating income.

They pay those high prices to avoid having to develop websites themselves, or drive traffic, or identify profitable niches.

Those big-price buyers also like the risk-free element of buying an already profitable site, as opposed to paying website designers to create sites for them and having to wait months to see if their new site is profitable or a total flop. So they’ll spend heavily on a site that’s already making money, sometimes spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds/whatever currency for a site and domain name that probably cost very little to obtain in the first place.

A lot of money can be made in very short time, even by people without web design experience and having little or no technical ability, and tales are told of new and experienced flippers buying existing sites for a few hundred dollars (most sales take place on American sites) and offloading them days or weeks later for ten or twenty times more.

Build niche mini-sites for fast and healthy profits

‘Mini-site’ is a commonly used term in the world of making money online: it has a variety of definitions, but always meaning ‘small’, hence the term ‘mini’.

So a mini-site might comprise ten pages or just one, but rarely will ‘mini’ be applied to a site containing hundreds of pages or focusing on more than one tight niche market or product.

Very often a mini-site is a one page site comprising a sales letter for one product: its aim is to convert visitors into paying customers.

Because it contains just one or a few pages at most, the site can be highly focused and created in a couple of hours and begin making sales and growing a mailing list very soon afterwards.

And because they are so small and usually tightly focused, mini-sites can be grown quickly around a small number of commonly used search keywords and phrases and can quickly begin driving traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.

To illustrate, for a high-frequency phrase like ‘train a dog to heel’, it’s very easy to write content for one-to-ten website pages containing that term, but very difficult to create several hundred articles based on that term for an authority site with hundreds or even thousands of pages.

These are the main steps involved in creating a high profit mini-site…

• Find a popular niche, one that is searched for hundreds or, better still, thousands of times every day. The greater the number of searches made for the subject of your site, the more people will ultimately visit your site and the more money you are likely to make.

• Find a product or service to promote at your site. Choosing a niche is just one step on the way to making a living from mini-sites and arguably the most important early step.

But regardless of how good a niche you pick and how many people are interested in the subject of your mini-site, you’ll still not make money unless there are products at the site for people to buy, or advertising links for them to click on to generate commissions for you.

So we’re looking at finding products to promote from the likes of Clickbank and Amazon, and commission-generating links from Google AdSense and similar pay-per-click promoters.

• Create content for your mini-site. Content is information designed to interest potential buyers for whatever products or promotions feature at your site.

It’s keywords and phrases used in articles and blog postings that tempt Google and other search engines to lift your sites higher in search-engine returns than sites based on similar niches but without useful information to benefit Google customers.

So you need quality articles based on words and phrases that are commonly keyed into search engines to locate sites similar to your own.

• Design a landing page for your site. Your landing page is that part of your site where people arrive as a result of your chosen traffic-generating techniques.

It’s called a ‘landing’ page because that is where people ‘land’ immediately when they decide to visit your site. Your landing page can be a simple sales page or somewhere for people to sign up to join your mailing list for news of current and future product offers.

Upload your site to the Internet, determine what traffic-generating techniques will best attract potential buyers and pay-per-click users to your site, and develop a plan for attracting as much traffic as possible to begin making money for you.

Job done!

That’s it for today, backed with my promise to do all I can to research and reveal new and exciting ways for you to make money online in 2016, not only on eBay, but also on Amazon, Etsy, and in countless other ways.