Forum Site Flipping

The first site flipping strategy that I want to talk to you about is extremely powerful and can really be used for a wide variety of purposes.

The whole idea here is to essentially generate hype over a website and eventually find a buyer for it. However, you can really replace “website” with almost anything else that you want to sell or promote (like “product”, “service” or “person”).

Think about your target buyer - who is most likely to want to buy what you are selling? Then, find an online community where these people hang out.

For Amazon affiliate sites, other marketers and affiliates are your target buyer. For this reason, the Warrior Forum actually makes a good candidate: http://www.warriorforum.com/

This is the forum that I used for this tactic, but I also want to emphasize that this isn't the only option. You can definitely look on Google to find other candidates, especially if you want to try this tactic to sell something other than a website (ie, you could actually use this same strategy to generate traffic for your Amazon site, but you would want a forum with your target niche customer for that purpose).

One single post on the Warrior Forum back in 2010 actually led to the sale of DogCrateSizes.com for $3,000 just six weeks after registering the domain name. In fact, this one post also led to me developing commercial WordPress plugins and coaching other Amazon affiliates!

The key is to use a forum that is popular and also allows you to have a link in the signature of your posts.

On the Warrior Forum, just follow these steps:

1. Find a popular thread about Amazon affiliate sites - the best ones were often created multiple days ago and are still near the top of the list because people keep posting to it (this just indicates it is an active thread).

2. Casually chime in to the thread with a useful post and simply share your Amazon site with others. This site should be something special that the average affiliate doesn't see - in-depth content or something else creative about it that helps it stand out.

3. Follow-up with responses on the thread. Assuming you get interest and some hype generated about the site, you can proceed to the final step.

4. Add a link to your forum signature. This should point to either a sales page for the domain or a page for them to contact you. Going for contact with the person can often be better, as this gives you a chance to sell the site to them by email, which can often be much more successful than with a direct sales page (especially since you can get interested buyers to contact you without disclosing a price in public).

The whole idea here is to share the site, generate interest in it among other Amazon affiliates, and eventually find one of those affiliates that is interested in buying the site directly from you.

With this tactic, you can likely sell a site for a nice price based on the monthly earnings, especially if there is something unique about the site. You may even get affiliates interested in learning more from you about your site building process!

If you decide to do something like this on a regular basis, you may even want to get people to sign up for a newsletter list to get in contact with you or to find out about other sites of yours. You could simply ask people to join to find out about future sites you have to sell. This allows you to build a newsletter list of potential buyers that you can continually grow with each new site being sold, which will often make it easier to sell future sites since you will have a list of customers that you can promote the sale to.

So you can see exactly what I said, here is that post on the Warrior Forum:

You can see that post in person by visiting the link below:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/220802-amazon-affiliates-you-seriously-making-money-10.html#post2803972

 This particular post has received almost 119,000 views to date, although that number obviously didn't view this thread before my site had sold (it was in the 40,000 view neighborhood then):

Notice how I didn't even chime into this thread until the 10th page, but I certainly got a lot of people talking about my site after that point.

First of all, even if this tactic fails to sell the site, you're still building a targeted backlink that Google will pick up when you link to the site in your post. Use your primary keyword phrase, the name of the site, or even a short keyword for your product niche (I could've used “dog crates” for my link text).

At the bottom of that picture, you can see my signature links. The one that I used to sell the website is not pictured here, since I removed that years ago right after the site sold. However, I simply put a text link that said “Want to own DogCrateSizes.com? Click here to learn more.”.

It was such a simple yet clever text link. With my post and the posts of others in the thread, I easily built name recognition for my site among those that were reading the thread. Then, they see the text link and are obviously drawn to it because who wouldn't want to own the awesome Amazon site that everyone is talking about in the thread?

Once you get someone to click on your signature link, I recommend landing them on a page on your own website that will give them some brief information.

Something like “Since my Amazon product website, DogCrateSizes.com, has received such an overwhelming response from other internet marketers I have decided to give one lucky person the chance to OWN DogCrateSizes.com!”. Then, proceed to give them a summary of how the site is doing - traffic, sales, Google rankings, etc. You could then provide a contact form to reach you to get more information, or you could also add a newsletter sign up form here and provide more info including your contact info to those that join the newsletter.

I highly recommend that you browse through the link that I provided above for that post. Read through the thread starting with that post to see how people reacted to my site and also see my responses.

I originally made that first post on November 1st, 2010. I didn't post the offer to sell the website until December 1st, 2010, and I had a completed sale with $3,000 in my Paypal account on December 3rd, 2010!

What I actually did on December 1st to generate even more interest for the site was to make a standalone post with that link in my signature.

Here is a link to that standalone post:

http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/294342-how-find-niche-market-guide-finding-new-amazon-product-niche-markets.html

This extra attention for the site also contributed to me becoming a product developer for other marketers, since I realized then that a lot of people could benefit from the knowledge that I have learned over the years after this post.

This particular post has received almost 24,000 views to date and even gets random posts to it still because it gets Google traffic now:

Although I decided to include this particular strategy because it can help you sell an Amazon site, there is really much more that this strategy can do. I would encourage you to read through my posts on those threads to get a better sense of how to pull off something like this on your own and potentially for something completely different from selling Amazon sites. You can honestly build followers and customer lists using this method for basically any niche.