My ‘Money Now’ Experiment
I read lots of forums and attend a number of networking events and mastermind groups around Internet Marketing and it seems to me that most of the people selling IM products online, basically how to make money on the Internet fail to understand where most newbies are coming from and what they are looking for.
Judging by the questions I get asked, and by the conversations I have at networking events with newbies, the majority are in real financial difficulty and need to make money NOW. They don’t want to know about how to build an online business over the next 4 – 6 months – not right at this moment they don’t, right now they need to be able to make money to pay the bills this month.
When you’re pre-occupied with ‘paying the bills now’ it’s almost impossible to think in terms of building a business.
Now, I have to be honest here and admit that I spend a lot of my time concentrating on providing the tools and resources to help people build a business and haven’t given much thought to ways of making money now.
So, over the last few weeks I have been looking at ways that someone might be able to use the Internet to make money in the next week rather than in 3 or 6 months.
A lot of the people that I’ve talked to that are looking at how to make money now have tried some things online and more than often have one or more websites that aren’t generating any revenue. That got me to thinking about something I wrote about in a previous newsletter, which was about selling off your assets – websites, domain names etc.
I have lots of niche websites that I’ve created over the years that I haven’t put much time into so I decided to see what I could do to release some money from them now.
I knew that lots of people were using Flippa to make a good online income so I decided to start there. I was reasonably familiar with Flippa, I looked at it when it was first launched, but thought I was probably a bit rusty now and that things might have moved on since I last looked at it so I looked around for a guide to bring me up to date and get some useful tips from.
After a bit of research I found a product called Flippin Crusher from Mark Santiago. I’m glad I did actually because it showed my exactly how to list sites that had no revenue and no traffic so that they would make sensible money. There are a lot of people, I found, that were making regular sales of no traffic, no revenue sites and could see no reason why I couldn’t do the same and why anyone else couldn’t either.
I’ll write a more detailed account of how I went about selling some sites on Flippa which will be on my blog here.
This Is What I did
I signed up for Mark’s Flippin Crusher and worked through all of the step by step videos. This was very useful because he covers everything you need to know to get the best results from your sales. The way you lay out your listing is very important. I didn’t realize what a difference the way the listing looks makes to the eventual price you get. There are various bits of information that you need to include that give the potential buyer more confidence to bid higher.
If you have some traffic, providing a screenshot of your traffic stats for instance makes a big difference. Sites that have made even a small revenue, possibly Adsense, sell for lots more but I was concentrating on no revenue sites since that is what most of you would have.
3 Day Listing
One of the really important bits of information I got from Mark was that these no traffic, no revenue sites need to be placed on a 3 day listing. That really fitted in well with my criteria of making money now. If you have sites that you can sell it’s possible to make a few dollars in 3 days.
So far I’ve sold three sites, two of them made $80 each and one made $105. Most of the no traffic, no revenue sites make between $80 and $200. Some make more depending on the domain name and/or niche and older domain name sites make more than new ones.
You can also sell just domain names and some of those get really good prices. If you’re like me and have lots of domains that you ‘might’ use someday, you could generate some money now by flipping them
If this appeals to you, get onto Flippa and check out the just sold listings to see what prices sites are going for. Once you get a system going you can outsource all of the site building and increase the number of sites you sell each week.
You can run the numbers yourself but if you put one site up per day and it makes an average of $80 you could be looking at a minimum of $2400 a month which I think is very achievable. Bear in mind that there are some fees to come out of that but it is a very real way of generating money now.
