Is Website Flipping Profitable? | 5 Most Profitable Types Of Sites To Sell

Website flipping is profitable when you buy an underperforming website, improve its SEO and earnings, and sell it later for more money.

Matt Diggity has been especially profitable flipping websites, earning over $600K on just one flip! In a YouTube case study, Matt discloses that he bought a website for $15,811 on the Empire Flippers platform. He invested an additional $42K to improve the website, $21,500 for 300 new articles and $20,500 for around 1,000 backlinks. He then sold the website on Empire Flippers for $625K, after earning $282,513 in affiliate commissions during his time owning the website.

There is money in flipping websites. The average flipped website sells for $2,500, according to We Can Track. Data from The Website Flip shows that approximately 10,000 websites are sold monthly across online marketplaces.

I’ve been creating and monetizing websites for over a decade. I’ve bought and sold quite a few of them to turn a profit. In the following article, I discuss how much you can make flipping websites and which types of websites are the most profitable to flip.

How Much Can You Make Flipping Websites?

You can make $500 - $1M+ flipping websites. A quick look at Flippa shows you how much people are currently selling websites for. There are websites selling for just a few hundred dollars and websites selling for millions. The amount you can make flipping websites depends on factors like how the website makes money and how much money the website makes.

In an interview with Business Insider, website flipper Rob Boirun discloses that he made over $178K in profit flipping a website in just one year. Rob bought a website generating $2K per month in cash flow for $52K in 2021. In 2022, he sold the site for $230K after growing the site to $13K per month in revenue.

How Much Does It Cost to Flip a Website?

It costs between $10 - $100K+ to flip a website. On the low end of the spectrum, you could simply buy a cheap domain name for $10 and sell it to a relevant business owner for a profit. At the other end, you could buy a full-fledged business, invest in increasing its revenue, and then sell it for a profit. The cost of flipping a website depends on factors like:

• Website domain cost: Web domains without content can cost between $10 - $6,000+ from domain registrars like Namecheap. Website domains that are already attached to functioning businesses can cost upwards of $1M or more.
• Website maintenance cost: Acquiring a website comes with ongoing maintenance costs like annual domain name renewal ($10 - $50/year), website hosting ($2 - $500+/month), and premium theme and plugin subscriptions ($10 - $100+/month).
• Website improvement costs: Flipping a website for a profit typically requires improving the website to make it more valuable. Adding relevant content and backlinks are two of the most common ways to add value to a website. A single web article can range from $25 - $6,000+ if outsourcing content creation to a content writer, according to Siege Media. Quality backlinks that increase a website’s authority in Google cost approximately $300 on average, according to Marketing Experts Hub. To know which content and backlinks to target, you typically need to employ the help of an SEO tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush ($110 - $500/month).
• Broker fees: Website flips are often coordinated by a broker who connects the two parties and processes the transaction safely. For example, Empire Flippers charges 15% for sales under $700,000, 8% on the amount between $700,000 and $5 million, and 2.5% on the amount above $5 million.

5 Most Profitable Types of Websites to Flip

1. Rank and rent websites - Sell for $12,000 - $108,000. These websites typically generate between $500 - $3,000 in revenue per month. They are often valued at 24 to 36 times their monthly rental income, according to Raven Tools. Rank and rent websites rank locally on Google for service business keywords.
2. Content websites - Sell for $16,000 - $160,000. Content websites like niche and authority sites usually earn between $500 - $5,000/month. They typically sell for 32 times their monthly earnings, according to Ahrefs. Content websites attract an audience around a specific niche by publishing high-quality content to promote related products and services.
3. Ecommerce websites - Sell for $25,200 - $90,300. Ecommerce websites can expect to generate between $6,000 - $21,500 per month in revenue. The average Shopify website earns $5,583 in monthly revenue, according to Oyova. Data from Flippa shows that mature Ecommerce websites earn an average monthly revenue of $21,497. Oyova notes that the average net profit margin for an Ecommerce business is 10%. 42x monthly profit is the average multiple that Ecommerce businesses sell for, according to Web Acquisition. Ecommerce websites make money by selling physical products online.
4. SaaS websites - Sell for $10,500,000 - $35,000,000. The average revenue for successful SaaS websites is approximately $296,000 per month, or $3,552,000 annually, according to Starter Story. Data from Flippa shows that private SaaS company websites typically sell for 3x - 10x annual revenue. SaaS websites sell subscriptions to software products that are hosted through the cloud and accessed over the internet.
5. Forums and community websites - Sell for $327,600 - $819,000. The average revenue for a successful community website is around $21,000 per month, or $252,000 per year, according to Starter Story. These sites can expect an average profit margin around 65%. Forum and community websites can sell for between 2x - 5x of the owners annual take home profit, according to SEO consultant Jase Rodley. Forum and community websites provide a free space for members who share common interests and generate income with ads, sponsored content, and premium features or partnerships.

How to Make a Profit by Flipping a Website?

1. Define your budget - You can start a new website for a few hundred dollars or you can buy a readymade business for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
2. Perform market research - Look for an opportunity to add more value to Google search results. This requires knowledge of SEO and consumer trends to identify how new website content could attract a larger audience. Verify performance of existing websites by using tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs. Request proof of revenue, such as seeing Stripe or AdSense reports.
3. Purchase a website domain - Buy a new website from a domain registrar like GoDaddy if you want to start from scratch or acquire the website from the current owner if you prefer to expand a current business.
4. Improve the website’s monetization ability - Use SEO tactics to get more traffic to the website, improve user experience to increase the conversion rate, and add additional revenue channels to optimize earnings.
5. Promote and sell the website - Once the website value has been increased because it’s generating more money, list the website for sale for a higher price than it was bought for.

Where to Flip Websites for Profit?

• Flippa - Best overall, brokers deals of any size
• Empire Flippers - Best for sites making at least $1,000/month
• FE International - Best for websites valued at 6 figures or higher
• Private buyers - Best for getting the highest profit as fees are avoided, but less security in the transaction and there’s no assistance marketing the site

What Is the Difference Between Website Flipping and Domain Flipping?

The difference between website flipping and domain flipping is that website flipping typically has an existing business that generates profit attached to the domain, while domain flipping is just buying and selling domains without a website attached. Website flipping is buying a website and actively working on the website to make it more valuable. Domain flipping is buying a website domain and passively waiting for an interested party to purchase it. For example, PayPal owned the domain X.com without a website attached until 2017, when it was bought by Elon Musk for an undisclosed amount estimated to be a few million dollars.

Domain flipping is still profitable. Successful website domain flippers earn an ROI of 30% to 150% per website flip, according to We Can Track. Some website flips can be much more profitable. For example, Business.com was purchased for just $7.5 million and then sold for $350 million a few years later, according to Wix.

Are Website Flipping and Land Flipping Similar?

Yes, website flipping and land flipping are similar. Website flipping entails acquiring and selling digital real estate while land flipping deals with physical real estate. The concept to make a profit is the same, sell the asset for more money than you bought it for. However, many find website flipping to be superior to land flipping because:

• It’s usually more affordable - Most websites cost a few thousand dollars to acquire and flip. The average cost of one acre of land in the United States is $16,000, according to Land Search.
• Everything can be done remotely online - Website flipping happens virtually online, but land flipping requires presence in a physical location for the buying and selling of the property.
• It’s often a cash flowing asset - Most website flips come with a cash flowing business. Land flipping is just buying a piece of land that doesn’t produce anything and waiting until a higher offer comes along after holding it for a few years.

Can SEO Make You Rich?

Yes, SEO can make you rich . Just look at James Dooley of PromoSEO and FatRank. James Dooley has an estimated worth of over $100 million dollars because of his rank and rent website business. Instead of flipping websites, he rents them to business owners who want to scale with more revenue. This is the same model I use to make over $50K per month.

Knowledge of SEO is what allows website owners to get their website in front of the right audience and make money. However, you can’t expect to get rich with SEO by getting an SEO job. The average salary for an SEO specialist is only about $62K in the United States, according to data from Indeed. If you want to get rich with SEO, you need to start your own SEO business. I prefer the rank and rent business model because of its uncapped scaling potential.

Conclusion: Is Website Flipping a Good Job?

Website flipping can be a good job for those who have the discipline to see projects through to completion without oversight from an employer. This job provides a lot of freedom as you can work from anywhere on your own time. Furthermore, it allows for uncapped income potential. Although there are many benefits to becoming a website flipper, it can also be risky. There’s no guarantee that you will increase a website’s value to earn a profit from the website.

Instead of flipping websites, I recommend creating and renting new websites using the rank and rent business model. This business model is much less competitive than website flipping and has lower risk. Rank and rent websites target local search queries. You only compete against a handful of small local service businesses owners to rank on Google. In contrast, other types of websites like content sites and Ecommerce sites compete internationally for traffic. This makes it much more time consuming and costly to rank because you compete against major companies with extensive resources instead of small businesses.

Rank and rent websites typically only cost a few hundred dollars to set up and rank on Google. As such, it’s less risky to get started and you can spread your risk out further by setting up many different sites instead of just putting all your eggs into one basket. You can certainly sell a rank and rent website if you want a lump sum of cash, but most people prefer to collect the $500 - $3,000/month these types of websites typically produce. If you want to learn how to earn online income with simple websites, check out our rank and rent program with over 7K students and counting.