Some people have been making good money building and selling websites. It’s a method of flipping. Flipping usually entails buying an asset and then quickly reselling it; but in this case the website is being built first, turned into an asset and then sold in website buy-sell marketplaces like the one found on sitepoint.com.

It can be a fun experience when you’re actually having success with it. With the going rate being 10 - 24x the profit a website makes per month, if you’re able to generate an income of $500 per month and the website you’re selling is in a niche where buyers happen to have an interest you could be looking at offers from $5000 - $12,000 for your website. You could sell just one website per month at that rate and still be making more per month than many people.

Of course, building the website and growing it to the point where it’s generating income consistently over several months can be the hard part. One of the reasons many people are selling their websites, among those who didn’t build the website initially with the intention of selling it, is that they can’t make the money off their website they had hoped they would be making; or else they are having trouble keeping up with the work involved in maintaining a website.

The majority of websites that get put for sale are sites that are causing the owners hassles in one way or another. It’s not as easy as 1-2-3 to build a website and get it to the point where it’s generating an income. That is probably the reason most people who are into website flipping buy the websites which they then flip immediately, rather than building and growing the website themselves. But the ones who actually build the sites, grow them and then sell them tend to get their sites sold more easily and for more money because they are selling true assets; whereas, the ‘buy and flip’ guys are generally selling liabilities (sites other people didn’t want because they were proving to be more trouble than they were worth).

Depending on the type of website, building a website can be fairly simple with all the software available to facilitate the process. It’s possible, for example, to start a dating site in as few minutes as it takes you to buy a domain name, buy dating software and install the dating software. In under an hour you can have a complete dating website. Likewise you can start a blog site, a classifieds website, a directory, an article site and other types of websites without knowing anything about web site development. So starting up a website is easy enough, but growing the website into an asset that can be sold for a profit, that’s not quite as simple.

However, if you’re able to sell 20 websites in a year each for $5000 - $12000, you’re looking at a 6-figure income for that year; so it might be worth it to look into the possibility of building and selling websites as a viable way of making money online.

For more information on how to do this you might review Tim Gorman’s Flipping Websites For Profit program. This is not an endorsement as I haven’t reviewed the product myself; but I do believe if you’re going to try building and selling websites for profit you should do a bit of research to find out at least the best types of websites, the best way to grow them, when to sell them etc.

Personally I have sold websites myself and I am in the process of growing additional sites that were built for the purpose of selling. My advice would be:

1. Pay attention to what sells.

2. If you don’t know anything about what you’re doing, hire someone who does know. For example, if you notice that tech blogs sell and you start a tech blog but you know nothing about technology, hire someone else to do the writing. Don’t try to do the writing yourself.

3. Don’t rush to sell a site that isn’t really ready to be sold.

4. Respect the buyer’s intelligence.

5. Be honest. Don’t go in and try to trick people by exaggerating what the site is making, the traffic the site gets and other stats. Buyers aren’t gullible. They’ll want proof of the income and the traffic.

6. Be reasonable. Don’t try to get $5000 for a site that you know isn’t even worth $500.

7. Be patient. It can take months, even years, before your site reaches the point where it can be considered an asset.

8. Do some research. Learning how to do something from people who are already doing it can help you avoid mistakes and provide you with ideas that make it easier for you to achieve your goals.