Image via CrunchBase

If you are in the business of  websites development, one of the easiest ways to make money by doing what you know is to flip them. In fact, you don’t necessarily need to know about the coding. If you are able to pick a theme and create a couple of good articles you could be flipping blogs without problem.

What’s a blog flipping?

Have you created a blog just to sell it? Well, that’s a flip. The price of a blog vary depending the quality of its theme and also, if the blog is established – with a couple of months, with loyal readers -  or not.

Things you need to consider

• Theme: you can either create your own theme, which will take you more effort, or you can pick a free/premium one. The second option will take you almost zero effort, but it has a difference: by taking a premium theme you could sell your site more expensive.
• Content: like the first point, you have two tracks here. If you are selling an established blog, I guess your content is original and unique. But if you are selling a non-established site – which means it is brand new, without loyal readers -  you could use re-purposed content that has been or may be reused on other sites. The kind of content also determines the price of the blog.
• Revenue: depending how much the blog you are selling makes a month, the price can be higher or lower.
• Traffic: this is kind of obvious but there’s people who ask how a blog can be sold for $60k. The higher the traffic a blog has, the higher the price. If your blog is not an established one, you cannot expect to receive thousands for it.

Try selecting a niche that converts when you are going to sell a blog. If you do not know how to recognize a good niche, so I invite you to check out this post and also, to stop by flippa’s marketplace so you can see what’s selling and what’s not.

If you think flipping sites is much trouble to you, so hire someone who makes the hard part. For example, you could hire an affordable copywriter to create 5 original articles at good forums such as DigitalPoint or Warrior. Also, you could hire someone to get an original logo.

Remember, the more is developed/customized a blog, the more you can ask for it. So you could hire someone to customize a theme so you could sell it for more. In fact, you could hire someone to make the whole work and then sell it for a higher amount so you can get a profit practically for free.

So, have you flipped websites? I’ve done it through Flippa and SiteDeal!

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Make Money by Flipping Blogs

As you can imagine, people’s behavior DOES follow a pattern too, and you can see this fact by analyzing a group of people… If you are a leader, you should know that usually the people you speak to tend to follow a kind of line, or at least most of them…

The thing become interesting when you find persons who stand out from the crowd! So then, by analyzing this kind of people – aka freaks – you can actually know more about what is happening in the environment and so then, improve it.

Have you seen bloggers changing their theme from time to time? may be the sidebar or the position of the links? Well, this is because they probably would be using heatmaps in order to study the behavior of the people who visit their blogs.

How a heatmap looks like?

A heatmap shows you where the visitors have been clicking on your website. With this awesome tool you can test the position of your ads, may be icon alternatives for subscribing to your blog etc etc… Use your imagination! This can be used when you need an input from your visitors, without letting them know.

One of the purposes I use heatmaps for is to analyze which landing page  “looks” – aka sells – better. Remember that your audience will probably think different than you, so don’t make any suppositions because you don’t know how they will react to certain graphic.

So as you can see, this is perfect for split tests among landing pages, which I will be talking about in future posts.

The Tool

To run heatmaps, I use the services of Crazy Egg. There should be lots of web services out there, but I like this one. So try it by yourself and tell me what do you think about it! It’s pretty easy to use, you just need to upload a script to your website and walah! – you will be catching every single click made on your website.

Input request - Are you using heatmaps? What for? Share what you know about this topic!

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Optimize Your Website by Tracking Clicks of Your Visitors

No matter what, the fact is that getting indexed and raking high on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others, is a must if you want to get tons of traffic through them.

As you may know, this is very related with the Meta Tags you use, something that I have explained in other post but I will retook in this post.

Submitting your website on Search Engines

The only way you will make money with your website is attracting visitors to it! Understanding by website a blog, forum, social media or anything else. You won’t magically get money with your website if people don’t see what you are offering. Of course you can attract visitors with PPC, paid advertising or blog reviews, but in this post we will deal with search engines.

There are 4 main search engines that you should submit your website on:

• Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2
• dmoz: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

I will tell you the truth, the only search engine which you should submit your site on is dmoz. If you use the form to apply for the other 3 ones you will be wasting your time. Why? Because everybody submits its websites through that forms and there are big lists of websites waiting months to be indexed. There are other way to get indexed by those search engines without using its forms .

For example, getting backlinks from websites that are already indexed can help you a lot, because all these search engines are constantly sending their spiders to scan every website they have indexed. So when they scan a website which is not listed in their databases, they have a mechanism that put you in automatically. So if you think to launch a new blog for example, try to get some backlinks from sites related with yours and this way, you will get indexed very fast. When I launch this blog, I applied the technique that I’m sharing with you know and I get indexed in less than 24 hours .

Build a Search Engine-Friendly site

The main difference of ranking among the millions of websites listed by search engines is because ones are more friendly than others to search engines. What do I mean by? Everything in your website has an impact on your ranking. Websites with many images and few text are terrible for SEO, how they pretend to be analyzed by search engines? I know they have complex algorithms but it’s not so advanced! In the other hand, websites with less dynamic structures and more rich text are easily indexed by search engines, websites with headers, the footers, xml feeds, alt tags on images, titles on their links and that kind of things.

Keep in mind that search engines cannot red the following information:

• Multimedia files like Flash or words within images.
• Content in frames.
• Content on dynamic pages.

The last point has changed a little with the passing of time, because if you think about the case of the blogs, unless you force them to create a static page, your content will be created on dynamic pages. Nevertheless, using static or dynamic pages your content will be read and recognized by search engines without problems.

In the case of images and links, remember to add an alt tag and a title, search engines register that kind of things when they send their spiders, also know as crawlers or robots.

Optimizing your website for Google

As we know, Google is constantly changing its algorithm to determine the rank of a website, and reason of that is simple. Among other reasons, they do this basically to prevent big sites from dominating results permanently. So as you can imagine, optimizing your website for Google could be a hard task because they are shaking the things constantly.

Google bases its algorithm starting from keywords. So I recommend you to check my preview post Finding Good Keywords For Your Website in order to know more about this topic. The fact is that PageRank equation is a big mystery, no one knows with exactitude which are the components which help you to have a higher rank, but there are some hints which appear to have an extra value on the formula:

• Inbound  Links from related sites with high PR.
• Inbound  Links from blogs.
• Inbound Links from .edu, .gov or .org.
• Outbound Links to high-ranked relevant websites.
• The size and quantity of information on your site.
• A Google Sitemap. You can generate one for WordPress by using this plugin, or by visiting this site.
• Updated content.
• Visible Title and Alt Tags.
• Using keywords on your Heading tags, bold and italicized words.
• Site traffic.

Optimizing your website for other search engines, such as Yahoo! or MSN

As you could see in the preview part of the post, Google focuses its attention mainly on inbound links, or links that point back to your site. In the case of Yahoo!, MSN or other search engines, they seem to emphasize on Meta Tags.

Meta Tags appear at the beginning of the source code of your website, in the <head> section. They provide information about your site to the browser and search engines, and the most important of them are:

• The Title
• Page Description
• Keywords

The Title can be set by using the HTML code <title> and it sets the title of your website, being this the text which the browser will display when someone visits your site.

The Page Description can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“description” content=“Your site description here” /> and basically this is the text that search engines will show when someone find your site through they.

By the way, the second one is the result showed by Yahoo! and It seems that it’s not updated…

The Keywords tag can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“keywords” content=“keyword1, keyword2, keyword 3…” /> and it lists the relevant terms for a website. Remember that it is really important to set only relevant keywords or you could get slapped by search engines! Also, I recommend you the following things in order to optimize your website for any search engine:

• Try to keep your keyword list under 20 elements. I know it could be hard, in fact I’m using like 40 now, but once you see which keywords are converting are which not, you should eliminate them from the list.
• Long Tail Keywords or keyword phrases are more useful that a single word. Basically this is because the competition and the macro-view, the more specific you are with your keywords the higher will be your rank.
• Do not include articles or prepositions ( a, an, the, on, from, by…). They are not necessary.
• Use lowercase in your keywords. If you capitalize them, capitalization will be required for match.
• Plural words include the singular ones when they are in the same root. For example, the keyword roots includes root, but companies does not include company.
• Phrases include the same words without spaces, i.e. make money online includes makemoneyonline but not vice versa.

Remember that when you use phrases, search engines try to match your keywords with the search manipulating your keyword, i.e. inverting it, mixing it…

What about dmoz?

This is The Open Directory Project from directory.mozilla.org, and it is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. It uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

It also feeds its results to Google, AOL and other directories of the web, spreading your website through many sites if you are listed there.

Once your submitted your site to dmoz it will be study. They don’t accept all the sites, you need to cover some requirements and possibly you will be rejected at the first time. Just remember to add your URL in the right category, this is a really important factor which helps you to get in, because if you are a little away from your path, you will be rejected automatically.

To Conclude

It is vital for a website to be indexed by search engines in order to get targeted traffic and attract new readers or customers. I encourage you to check my other post related with keywords and SEO in order to complement the extensive information provided in this post. I hope you like the tips! if you have any special thing that you want to share feel free to leave a comment!

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The Art Of Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines