Eric Porat’s Expert Tips for Website Flipping: Part 1

How to get started making money from digital investments, the easy way.

Here at EricPorat.com, our goal is to share Eric Porat’s experiences and tips from nearly two decades of successful digital investment. The mistakes he’s made, the successes he’s achieved, and most importantly, what he’s learned from all of it along the way.

As you may know, Eric Porat went from starting a website from scratch in 2005 to selling it three years later with over 70,000 monthly visitors. Since then, he’s bought and sold over 70 websites for over half a million dollars.

Long story short, there’s something we can learn from Eric Porat, especially when it comes to digital investment. Here is Part 1 of his guide to website flipping, Expert Tips for Website Flipping.

Since this is Part 1 of our Five-Part Series, we’re going to start with the basics. 

So, who should invest in a website? Should you?

Website flipping isn’t for everyone. It’s one of the most lucrative ways to make money in the modern era, but it certainly isn’t easy.

It helps to think of buying and selling websites like we think about buying and selling real estate. Basically, instead of buying a piece of land, you’re buying a website. Then you’re farming the website or developing it, bringing forth its full potential. 

A website could be not utilizing its full potential simply because someone hasn’t tended the crops properly or built the right infrastructure on the land. (i.e. SEO, branding, design, content, etc). But it could also simply be because the land is inherently fallow or poorly located (i.e. the concept of the site itself is erroneous). So it’s important to realize that not all websites are viable investment opportunities. 

In fact, most aren’t.

That said, website investment, unlike real estate investment, has no real cap. The Internet is limitless. Even in terms of sheer users, we’re far from saturated. A recent study announced that only slightly over 50% of the planet has reliable Internet access. 

There are nearly 4 billion people out there just waiting to get online!

But like we said, website investment is not for everyone.  If you want to get into website investment, make sure you CAN do these things:

• You CAN invest at least $10K as an initial investment.
• You CAN hold onto a site for at least a year.
• You HAVE skills or resources to run and grow a site. (Or if not you have the means to hire professional help).

There are investment funds operating in the website investment niche. Where a third-party team works on growing a portfolio of sites and reselling for profit (thus creating a return for any investors), but that’s not really the best route for website investment, for a lot of reasons.

The best way to go about this is, as you probably already know, buying and selling a website directly! Either manage it yourself or build a team that can manage it for you. The web is much more user-friendly than it used to be, and even non-technical people have plenty of resources to learn the skills needed to manage a website on their own or hire help to do it.

First of all, we need to start with the basics.

What Are Digital Assets?

In short, a digital asset is exactly what it says it is. It’s a digital holding with financial worth. Everything from domains, mobile apps, and digital products are digital assets, but the most popular form of digital assets are online platforms with regular traffic that can be monetized.

By this we mean, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, Instagram profiles, and… WEBSITES.

Websites are the most popular form of digital assets, and the most lucrative by far, for a number of reasons, but primarily this is because websites are a hub. You can run and produce myriad side assets off a successful website.

If you have the traffic to your site, you can create social media profiles, YouTube channels, sponsored digital products, and more. You can run affiliate links, sponsored content, start a podcast with advertisers and sponsors, the list goes on.

You get the idea.

A successful website can be a jumping-off point for literally dozens of different digital assets, which is why websites are worth so much money and why website flipping can make you so much money.

The business of website flipping consists of…

3 STAGES

• Identify and Purchase

Here you find sites that are making a bit of money and have a bit of traffic but can be made much more profitable with a few improvements, and then buy them.

• Improve

You improve the site’s content, branding, SEO, design, and any other factors that can lead to higher traffic and thus higher monetization potential.

• Sell

Once the site has gone as far as you think it can under your wings (or at least as far as you’re prepared to take it), you sell it off to another investor for a much higher price tag than what you bought it for. Instead, you can also keep it for passive income.

This entire cycle takes at least a year in most cases, but typically can be done in under two years, if the site is viable and you have the technical and market savvy to properly upgrade and flip it.

You might be wondering…

Why do I need to buy a website when I can start one of my own for free?

The answer is in Eric Porat story. Remember that first site he started in 2005? That was in a much less competitive era, where website optimization was 1000x easier than it is today, and the Internet was still sparsely populated. 

It still took him three years of constant effort to grow it to 70,000 followers! 

And he got lucky even managing to do that. Plus, starting a site yourself and growing it to that level requires a fair bit of technical know-how.

While it may seem cheaper in the short run, it actually will very likely end up being more expensive, due to all the overhead and the team you’ll need to create to grow the site.

The faster and more effective route is to simply invest in a site that’s already performing well and only needs to be improved a bit!

In our next entry, Part 2 of Eric Porat Expert Tips for Website Flipping. We’ll go into detail and cover the three steps of the website flipping more extensively.

Click HERE for Part 2!