Site Flipping Madness – The Cherry Popping Report

Site Flipping MadnessI’m back and ready to rock!  I made a conscious effort to take this weekend to relax and unwind with Veronica, and we did just that.  Friday night we went with some friends to see a Bedouin Soundclash show, Saturday we spent the entire day in bed watching television, and Sunday we went out for a great lunch and impulsively bought another laptop.  Sweet!

Before I get into my site flip report, I just want to say how much Veronica and I appreciate the support from each and every one of you.  Your words of encouragement really kept me going over this last week, and a few of you even went as far as emailing me personally and sharing tips and tricks you’ve picked up through your own site flipping experiences.  I’m not going to mention names, but just know that I know who you are, and I want you to know that the kindness will be reciprocated at the first opportunity.  I never forget!

Time for the report…

If any of you are just tuning in, last week I challenged myself to generate $84.85 (the money Veronica and I spent on groceries) by the end of day September 15th – this was shortly after I posted a minor freakout with regards to never following through, and my fear of failure with making money online.  After a few adjustments I ended up taking the route of building a blog, getting it indexed in Goolge for a high search/low competition key phrase, and then posting it up on the Sitepoint Marketplace in hopes that someone would have an interest and purchase it.

After conducting some ninja research with the best keyword tool in the universe, Wordtracker, I decided I would base the site around the competitive, but super profitable Tattoo niche – with my golden key phrase being Russian Mafia Tattoos.  Why did I choose that key phrase?  Well to put it plainly, Wordtracker told me to.  That particular phrase has over 600 searches per day in Google, with less than 1100 competing websites listed in Google and this means two things – it won’t be too difficult to get on the front page of Google because the competition isn’t that fierce, and 600 searches per day is a great number in terms potential organic traffic should I get the number 1 spot.

So what happened?

I posted the auction up on Friday at 3:36 pm with a $0 minimum bid, a $97 reserve and a Buy Now price of $127 – which is higher than my initial $84.85 goal.  At 5:47 pm I received an email from Sitepoint notifying me that my auction had been won!  Not only did I sell the site in under 3 hours, it was purchased at the Buy Now price which means there was zero bidding going on.  I was so shocked when I got the email that I called Veronica, who was on her way home from work, and starting laughing frantically like a Priest who accidentally walked into the “little girls room” at Bible Camp.

(Insert uncomfortable pause for those who are sensitive)

Here is everything I did spread over 4 days, from beginning to finish:

Day ONE

  1. Logged into Wordtracker’s Keyword Researcher Tool and conducted a search using the keyword “Tattoos”
  2. Filtered the results to list from the highest to lowest KEI – or the most to the least profitable
  3. Chose the term “Russian Mafia Tattoos” which has the 3rd highest KEI, because my best friend Dmitri is Russian and I thought it would be fun to school him on his own history.
  4. Went to Godaddy.com and searched for RussianMafiaTattoos.com – it was available so I bought it and pointed the DNS servers to my Hostgator account.

Day TWO

  1. Called J-Weezy from SuiteJ.com, told him about the domain I purchased and asked him as many questions as I could regarding flipping sites, increasing value, transactional procedure and writing a killer sales letter/auction page – if you need to learn about site flipping go to his blog and get reading.
  2. Logged onto Skype and started trading links to old school hip hop videos with SutieJ via the instant messaging feature.
  3. 3 hours later I realized how unproductive we were being and told him I had to go get some work done.  Once he was finished crying I logged off of Skype and began searching for WordPress themes.
  4. After sifting through a few I decided to go with a super functional theme by Alexandru Cosmin.
  5. I logged into my cPanel admin and installed WordPress on RussianMafiaTattoos.com.  I uploaded the theme and all my ninja plug ins using Filezilla, activated everything, and configured the settings to my liking.
  6. I immediately began researching the Russian Mafia, and collecting Russian Mafia Tattoo images in a folder for use on the site.
  7. I wrote 12 key phrase focused posts for the site and post-dated the settings to publish two per day – one at 10 am and then again at 10 pm spread them out over the following 6 days.

Day THREE

  1. I wrote a 300+ word article, using my key phrase in the title and strategically throughout the content, and submitted it to 4 high traffic, high ranking article directories.
  2. I created a medium sized Squidoo lens based around my topic.
  3. Using Adobe Fireworks I created a custom logo, affiliate banner, and favicon icon for the site, and replaced the default images which were provided.
  4. I went to Clickbank, gathered my affiliate links and banners, and incorporated them skillfully throughout the site.  I also set up my adsense and incorporated the code into the posts and sidebar.
  5. I created a Myspace page for the site, and put a few posts in the blog section with links.
  6. I submitted the site to a handful of social bookmarking sites, and a few blog directories.  You can visit the sales page for more details on which ones.
  7. I found a few do-follow blogs in the same niche and spent some time commenting on their posts.

Day FOUR

  1. I realized I had the number 1, 2, and 5 spot on the first page in Google for “Russian Mafia Tattoos” in quotes and the number 5 and 6 spots for the same term without quotes.
  2. I created an account on Sitepoint.com, and started studying some auctions and sales pages that I liked and began to construct my own.
  3. I almost finished the best sales page ever written and accidentally clicked on a link that took me away from the page (which was saved) and I had to start all over again.
  4. I contemplated throwing my laptop through the window.
  5. I proceeded to finish the sales page, take the necessary screenshots, and post up the auction.

Wow, that was a lot longer than I anticipated.

I don’t feel like writing anymore.  I’ll finish up my thoughts later.

Cheers,

Elijah

25 thoughts on “Site Flipping Madness – The Cherry Popping Report”

  1. Nice report! Sounds like you were super busy during those 4 days.

    Once again, grats on the site selling so quickly, you did a superb job on it. I didn’t even know that you had created an article and a squidoo lens for it as well.

    When do you plan to do the next one?

    Jarrets last blog post..Week In Review – September 7-13

  2. Great job man. Nice run down. Keep that and make notes on it on how you can save time and flip two…then four…then 8..then 8 billion! bwahahahaha!

    LMAO@ number two and day two! That was fun!

    Thanks for the linkage, and congrats again. Let’s get together on one! 🙂

    Cheers!
    Jay

  5. @ Jarret – I was super busy, but it was also super necessary because I know know the process from A to Z, and like J said I can slowly start to trim things down and increase productivity = build more blogs = more money for Cousin Joe’s Sammich Truck.

    @ SuiteJ – I’m hyped up man. I’m gonna hit worktracker like crack in a pipe and get me some niches/domains today for the next week or so…

    @ Joe – You know what I’m sayin… I had to get some Pharcyde in my ears.. We were banging out some Roots, some Public Enemy… That’s vital stuff right there!

  7. Awesome post!

    It’s great to see the process broken down like this for anyone thinking of getting into siteflipping. Good old Jay helping you out too…what a star! You Canadians look after your own eh?

    How’s that wordtracker crack pipe treating you? What’s next up for you so far as flipping goes?

  9. elijah,

    that’s honestly pretty impressive, i’m amazed at how quickly you were able to flip that site and congratulations bro!

    i’m thinking about starting my own blog all about music 2.0 within the next couple of months, and i’m looking for someone to give me some tips and stuff, so make sure you keep in touch!

    harsh

  11. Nice post, Elijah!

    I have a couple of questions if you, or someone could answer. I have a few extra websites I wouldn’t mind selling, but how does the transfer work behind the scenese after a website is sold?

    For a WordPress blog, for example, do you email the buyer attachments for all of the files from your host?

    Do they need the same host, i.e., Hostgator, as you have?

    Thank you for any help.

    Dean

  14. For sure. I use Flickr for my images, and I always make sure to include “image courtesy of ….” in the caption, and when I can link the image to the original location. This way you have access to other peoples images, and if they see you are using them, unless specifically noted otherwise, they know you are not claiming the images for your own, in fact linking to them and giving them credit where due.

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  17. Hi, Elijah:
    Fantastic first flip. And great job on annotating EXACTLY how you did it.

    As for Jay, he is the man, one terribly helpful dude, and an ace flipper himself. His article on “adding value to flips” is a must read.

    I don’t know how, but you have managed to sell me on Wordtracker. Till now i have been using the keyword tool from Google for my research. And something about your post, just got the wheels turning as to the differences between them.

    You’ve also made me discover that i need to tweak a keyword/phrase i was targeting on a flip, as it is NOT high search/low competition. But more like low search/low competition. LoL.

    I popped my cherry on Sitepoint a few weeks ago, and that first sale is a HIGH for sure. Now i want more. I see you do, too.

    Great post. I’ve been by here before, but i don’t think i commented. Sorry ’bout that. Peace.

    Missy.

    P.S. Feel free to follow me on Twitter (i’m on there loads)
    http://www.twitter.com/m38967

    Missys last blog post..Image Host Website For Sale

  19. Hi Elijah

    Thanks for documenting the whole transaction. Are you going to keep up at this game?

    I’m still learning how to flip but was just thinking, if you made $127 in 4 days, that’s about $31.75/day not including domain purchase, sitepoint fees, hosting, and your time.

    Of course, learning and doing are what’s important in this case but how would you overall value the amount of time + costs to make $127 in 4 days?

    I’d be curious on your thoughts.

    Cheers and congrats on the flip!

    Scotts last blog post..Don’t Hesitate When Making An Insurance Claim

  20. @ Scott – Great point man, and it’s something that I’ve been talking about with my peers quite a bit.

    I’ve already earned enough this year that hosting was paid for quite a while ago.. so that’s out of the equation as far as I’m concerned. It cost under $20 for domain and hosting… so on that $127 transaction which took me 3 days of trial and error and maybe 1 day of actual “action” I made roughly $100 profit.

    $100 profit a day or $500 a week is where I’m aiming right now.. I’ve made $327 in the last few weeks off 2 flips.. but the amount of work that I’ve put in severely out weighs the money coming out of it… but that’s all part of the process.. I’m getting my design and theme defaults set, and checklist done to speed up the process…

    Elijahs last blog post..Blog Report For September 2008

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