Website Flipping
Website flipping… Is that actually something you can make money off of? I am here to tell you that yes, it most definitely is. Going through this process reminded me so much of flipping real estate. This is essentially the same thing. You are flipping digital real estate. Pretty neat!
Related: 6 Ways to Invest in Real Estate
I purchased a few domains a while back and opened a some Shopify stores to try my hand at eCommerce a bit. My day job made it difficult to keep up with my drop shipping store as I had to manually fulfill orders each time someone purchased a product. After feeling a bit overwhelmed, I let it sit for some time. I started doing some research on the international database of Google on how to sell a pre-built website. Well what would you know, it’s a thing! There are website brokers and escrow companies out there, just like we have in the real estate world.
Where Do You Sell?
In my excitement after finding Flippa, I decided to look at different niche products and build a starter store to sell. I won’t go into too much specifics to protect my buyer. I even outsourced some of the building of the store on Fiverr. After getting the niche product set up as well as 24 others, I built the site and launched it to play around and see how it was. Made a few sales without much effort and knew this would be a good store for someone.
So, I wanted to get at least $500 for it… I listed it for $1,000. I received an offer for $500, but decided to negotiate a bit and countered with $750. After some negotiation, I sold it for $715 (675 on Flippa and $40 more on the Marketplace Exchange). Either way, I was happy about these results.
Can Be A Source of Steady Monthly Income
While pushing this transaction through, I found out about Shopify’s Partners program. You can legitimately build starter eCommerce stores and transfer ownership when complete. You can sell it to a buyer or even make one for a friend. Here is the awesome thing about building the store through Shopify partners. When the new owner takes over and starts paying for the Shopify plan, you receive a 20% commission of the monthly plan costs from Shopify. How cool is that?
This doesn’t just have to be Shopify. Maybe try building a blog on WordPress and helping someone start their new hobby or side hustle. You can even do this with social media accounts too. I was talking with someone at work who told me they knew a young entrepreneur in her 20s that was making an average of $18,000 a month flipping Instagram accounts. WHAT?! Yes… flipping social media accounts is also a thing. Wow! Keep thinking outside of the box and maybe you will find that little something that can turn into a big something.
Learn Something New
If you are stuck at home teleworking, or lost your job, consider learning just a small amount of CSS and HTML. You don’t need to know much, just enough to start making some of these Shopify stores through their partners program. If you build enough, you can have a nice monthly paycheck coming in for those efforts. Keep on being creative and coming up with ways to add value to yourself by learning new skills. Keep on learning and earning.
Bottom line, there is some decent money to made from a side hustle like this. Is it something I will pursue? Maybe, maybe not. I have many other projects I am working on, however, I can see this as a viable option as another source of income. I proved it can work and had a nice payday to show for it.
