What’s a developed blog, in the Blog Flipping Business?

Well, the short answer is, a blog that’s been indexed, ismore than two months old, has Google analytics installed with a history, is seo optimized,has a email (newsletter) list, monetization …………the characteristics are almost endless.

The point is, these are not difficult things to do, if you include them in the initial planning and building of the blog you’ll eventually sell.

Instead of just throwing up some PLR onto to the same old theme, spend a minimal amount of time planning each blog to flip.

Here is a very basic blog building blueprint things yuo can do. Remember, this technique requires a two month aging process for the site.

Niche Research and Keyword Research

I’m going to assume you have your niche picked out, but if you don’t there are ways of finding niches that are still growing and have low barriers of entry. A tool I use a lot is Micro Niche Finder. But you can do it without software also, it just takes more time.

Check what’s hot on Amazon

Check what’s trending on Google Insights, it gives you a better longterm view than Google Trends

Run a search on Google for “top searched terms May, 2010″

For Keywords you want to look for low competition in the AllinTitle Google search operator, preferably less than 10,000 results. This will make it easier to rank for your selected keywords, which in turn adds value to your blog.

When researching keywords, especially longtail, consider all search results, broad “phrase” and [exact]. Don’t get stuck in the “only [exact] match” hysteria.

Theme Selection

Here you need to balance aesthetics and seo friendly code. This isn’t always easy, especially with free themes. If you can buy a developers license on a couple of premium themes you like, as you can see this site is on a very basic Thesis Theme set up. Premium themes are almost always more seo friendly and give great design flexibility for the artsy type of blog flipping entrepreneur.

Make sure there is ample space for ads, even if you don’t intend to utilize all of it, your buyer might want to.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

This is where you can start adding digits to your eventual asking price.

If you can legitimately claim the the blog for sale, ranks on at least the first twp pages of Google search results for certain keywords (first page would be better), then your buyer knows they will be getting some free tartgeted traffic, the best kind there is.

On site SEO is just as important as off site, with off site basically consisting of just building links back to your own site and pages within.

I’ll have a more detailed SEO post ready in a few days…….now start building those blogs

Using SEO to add value to to your Blog Flipping

Note: I haven’t posted for a while and I apologize. I’ve been working on starting an seo consulting service for offline businesses, helping them manage their online presence, basically an online marketing management service.

Anyway, it made me think about why I prefer to hold sites for at least a month or two, you get the chance to have them rank for some related keywords. The concept of SEO should be taken into account if you’re in the blog flipping business. If you have enough income or money to live on, or you have a full time job, and flipping blogs and sites is a part time venture, holding them for a while is a great way of making more money.

The amount of value and subsequently, higher selling prices, by having sites indexed, building some backlinks, 50 -100, its not that hard when you have a couple of months to work with, and ranking for relevant keywords.

How can 2 months of SEO accomplish anything?

Well, first you need a plan to build sites that have many related longtail keywords that have less than 5,000 monthly [exact] searches, at least those are the number I use. While your main keyword can be more competitive and harder to rank for in two months, it is enough time to get on page one of Google’s search results, even number one, for the longer tail less searched keywords.

When you decide to flip this blog or website you’ll immediately be able to add a lot of value by having it already indexed, ranking and getting free organic traffic to the site.

Simple SEO Tips to Rank a new site

1. Find your highest search volume longtail keyword, and try to be an exact domain match, stick with a dot com, net or org. If you must go with a dot info, make sure to register it for 2 years minimum. I’ve heard that Google can actually spider this info from your registrar and if they see a dot info register for less than 2 years, they just assume its for an affiliate site. While Google will of course not admit this, this is what I have found in my experience .

2. On page seo or on site SEO is part of optimization that can be easily and quickly done while designing and creating your blog or site.

A) Rename your “Home Page” to your keyword in your exact match domain, or if you want, your main high competition keyword. The reason for this is because each post or page that has a “home” tab or link on it, will now have a link pointing to that keyword, helping inner posts and pages rank for that keyword as well as telling them what the main site is about.

B) Correct use of H1 tags, meta description, Keyword density, anchor text and good flowing content help blogs and sites rank without haviing any backlinks.

In the next artcle I’ll talk about how use can easilybuild fast natural backlinks to help your site rank even higher, and add more value to your blog flipping business.

Blog Flipping and WebSite Flipping:

Flipping blogs and flipping websites, that you have just created, can be a relatively fast way of making some nice money. The my problem I’ve found with this method is that while speed is important to volume production, there seems to always be one problem, content.

Specifically “unique content”. Why just unique and not original? Well, if you are using the “Build and Sell It ASAP” model for you website flipping and blog flipping business, you really don’t have the time to write original articles and do keyword research, site design and initial seo, among other things? Most people employing this model, which by the way I used to, but had 90% of the worked outsources, however, with the prices paid for “newly created site’ dropping, it no longer became a viable model for me.

But for many it could be, as long as they can find content that Google with classify as unique. I have personally begun to try out Jon Leger’s The Best Spinner to create hundreds of unique pieces of content, that I might now be able to affordably add to newly created sites. This in turn would mean I could start sell newly created sites and see if the business model would now work better.

Check on the Video from Youtube

My cost for unique content just dropped through the floor. Instead of spending $Hundeds of dollars each month outsourcing article re writes, now I outsource the creation of on tenth the amount of articles and have them given to me in spinnable format or I could spend the 15 mins to create the spinnable format and 1 minute to spin them myself.

Now I have unique Copyscape Passable (depending on how much you spin) content. This alone will add some value to your new site, but its certainly better than using straight PLR that has been used 40 or 50 times already, this actually detracts from the value of your new site.

So the economics become very simple. What does the Best Spinner cost compared to farming out 10 rewrites on 10 articles. Now when I talk about re writes I’m talking about quality human rewritten articles of 500+ words. For quality, I mean real quality, you pay $2 or more an article.

So in the above example those 50 articles (10 articles X 10 re writes) will cost me $100. By using the Best Spinner product I pay $77 for the year to use it and I can easily get 10 quality re writes. So right off the bat I’m adding $23 to my profit just from this one site, (assuming you use 80 articles for automatic submission article marketing, which takes very little time and really increases value big time, if you wait a week for those backlinks to get indexed. Then every site after that, the content is free, you probably already got your $77 back on the sale of the first site.

I’m going to try the “newly created site” model again, except with the best spinner software and see if it can turn a complete business model a loser to a winner.

I’ll keep every body up to date how this old blog flipping and website flipping business model works with this new technology.