Super Affiliate Marketing Blog

The other day I was talking to my father, who owns a real estate development firm. Our discussions are always the same. He doesn’t quite understand WHAT I do exactly, but he knows I’m happy with it, and it’s made me a lot of money. Aside from that, he’s constantly asking when I’m going to join him in his ventures and immerse myself in the offline real estate world. The answer to that is probably in five or ten years from now, when I’m good and ready. But without drifting too far off topic here, he had called me and asked “what’s this internet real estate stuff one of these younger guys in the firm was talking about?”. Apparently, one of the newer guys in the firm gave a presentation about some new project they were going to be working on, and made a comparison to how profitable and easy internet real estate is to buying physical land and properties. It got me thinking. Are we really this far along now that the internet is ready for it’s first big cyber real estate boom? Will there be a rush, and has it already started? With these questions swirling around my head, and the fact that my father, the most anti-internet person I know has heard about it, I needed answers. So off to the land of research I went. For hours I pored over magazine articles, web articles, blogs, domain name forums, spoke to active domainers, etc. I finally came to a conclusion.

We are in fact in the midst of an internet real estate boom. It hasn’t peaked yet, and surprisingly so too. Usually everything on here moves at two million times per second. You’d think too, with some domains selling for over $7 Million, like Business.com did in the early days that, that was the trigger or peak even of the rush to buy up as many domains as possible. But it’s nowhere near over, nor is it even slowing down.

But what does this have to do with affiliate marketing? Since that is what I like to focus my topics on.. Well, for one let’s compare it to buying and flipping real estate. We’ll stick to residential real estate, because my father’s type is far too complex for me to get into now. So in residential real estate flipping, your goal is just like that of say arbitrage. Buy low, sell high. So you find a property in distress. Distress can mean it’s a total piece of shit on the inside or out, no one wants to live there, it needs a lot of annoying and sometimes expensive fixing up, the person who owns the mortgage on it has been late for god knows how many months. Whatever the case, you buy the house for $100k. You get a contractor to come over, and you pay them $30k to fix it up and make whatever additions you need. When it’s all said and done, let’s say the house was valued at the $100k you bought it for, well, after the fixing up, it’s now worth $250k. So in that month or two that it took you to fix it up, pay the contractor and his team of workers to do all of the labor and fixing up, maybe you painted it yourself and put a bunch of hours into it here and there, but when all is said and done, you sell the house at $250k, and you just made yourself a hefty profit of $100k-$120k (minus taxes and other crap) for very little work and effort. Pretty good you say eh? Well, that was just a quick example, I’m sure it depends on your location and whatnot, and let’s face it, this isn’t a real estate investment site either, but for argument’s sake, let’s take that same example and apply it to the internet.

You start looking for a distressed website property on a site like bizmp.com. I recommend using bizmp.com because instead of checking a bunch of different boards, it checks all of them at once for you, and lists the websites (properties) for sale with a little bit of extra information to boot and help you out. So you’re looking for a distressed property here, not something that will cost a boat load and will take a year to become profitable. You want something that has lots of potential, but the owners are either too lazy or just don’t have the time, patience, or best yet, know how to monetize it. When you finally pick something out that you like, you have two choices before you begin. Do you want to keep this site and add it to your arsenal of already profitable sites, or do you want to flip it in a month or two for some more cash? That choice is entirely up to you, but let’s pretend you chose flip it.

So how do we take a say, $500 site and turn it into a $3000 site? Well, we need three major parts to work out to make it more appealing to potential buyers.
The design. Is it too crappy to look at? Do you need to change it around? Chances are pretty good that you will need to make some alterations. Whether you should redo the whole thing is again, up to your taste and budget. Remember, you already spent $500 on this, and your goal is $3k, so you don’t want to go overboard with unnecessary beautification operations. Let the new buyers handle that. Make your site as physically appealing as possible, in the most minimal and cheapest way. All you have to do is stress the goal of the site with a little more than basic design.

Second on the list, usability. Is the site easy to use. Depending on the overall goal of the site, whether it’s selling a product, a service, or just providing information, your site needs to be fast, and it needs to get the end user to where they have to go on the site quickly and easily. This is also something that long term buyers look for, because no one wants to sit there and fumble with a script or CMS changes when they are waiting for a site to become profitable.

Last thing on the list, potential monetization. The site has to be profitable in some shape or form. Granted you may find someone that buys it and just likes to look at it all day long, but the chances of finding someone like that is nothing to hold your breath about. So your goal is how to monetize the site, or at least get it started so that when you put it back on the market, it looks flippin fantastic, literally. Do some SEO, whether basic or extensive is always up to you. But if it were me, I’d run a small linking campaign. Get some direct links to it, submit it to niche directories, get some relevant blog links to it. Maybe run a press release about it. Change the meta, title, content, and header tags too. Just give it a nice clean workout so that everything is there for the new owners to play around with and not have to hire some expert to do the work from scratch. Remember, that even though you are selling a property that doesn’t really interest you much in holding onto, you are selling it to someone who finds it as a good deal or investment, so you must treat it with respect, because this property may be someone’s baby sometime soon. Back to work though, put some contextual ads onto it if you like, get the stats program working again, collect as much real data as possible on the current situation of the site, and then make projections of 3, 6, 10 and 12 months. Base those numbers ONLY on the current situation of the site. If you just go off and make numbers up, they won’t buy anything else from you ever again, and you may also sabotage your reputation on your first deal, which can suck. So spend some cash and get that sucker onto the engines, get some traffic flowing in, if it’s selling a product, get some interest in it. Do whatever you can without spending much money to get the site to work like a well oiled machine.

Now that you’ve turned the property from a garbage site into a squeaky clean, working, and semi-profitable property, you can put it back onto the market. Don’t be afraid to tell people that you only owned it for a few months. It’s good to be honest with potential buyers and come straight out and say “I bought this as a fixerupper and I am flipping it”. You don’t necessarily have to mention your original price for it, but just let them know that you’ve invested time and money into it and it’s not just false hopes and promises that are tying this baby together. This would also be a great time to bust out those stats and projections on traffic and revenue figures and potentials. The more equipped you are with valid information, the better the site will look, and the more eager people will be to buy or bid.

So since this is pretend land, let’s pretend that your site sold after a week on the market. That was a pretty good turnaround. You spent about two months on it, put a little bit of cash into it, but mostly it was work (which can also be outsourced to another country if you like). You took this thing from zero to hero, and let’s say it sold for $3k. So you just made a $2k-$2.5k profit on it (minus expenses). That’s not too much, but look at it from this way, you just made it many more times profitable than the original owner ever had it at.

What you should do is after you make a few flips, you should constantly take notes on what fixing up methods have worked best to attract buyers, and then apply them to all of your new properties. As you buy and flip properties like this over and over again, you can start to establish yourself as someone who knows what they are doing, and send out a newsletter to all of the buyers and even potential buyers of your sites and let them know that if they ever need a new type of site, that you can find one for them and sell them a well working startup, instead of a crappy one.

This method is being used all over the place I’m sure. Although I’ve never read up on people doing it, maybe this post will convince more people to get up off their asses and take control and do what they need to do to make it big in the industry. There are soooooooooooooooo many distressed sites out there, and you can even start one up from scratch if you like. You can turn yourself into an established internet brokerage firm, or you can hire one to handle your properties for you.

This market is wide open and fairly untapped, and the buyers are always out there. So the ball is in your court now. Let’s see if you have what it takes to harness this information and use it to your benefit.

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