I know you might have heard about website flipping but are still wondering how it can be done, especially from Nigeria. You might even be wondering if it’s possible to make money by selling websites.
The truth is that anything that has value can be sold, including websites. The concept of website flipping is simply making a website valuable so much that someone can buy it from you and pay you some cash.
As someone who has sold a website before, I can tell you emphatically that the business is a very profitable one. I daresay that flipping websites from Nigeria and earning in dollars is a more profitable business than selling real estates in Nigeria.
You know why? Because it is way easier to build and sell a website than to buy and sell real estate in Nigeria. If you have the required skills and resources, you could build a website with as low as 10,000 Naira and sell it for millions. The same cannot be said of buying and selling real estate properties. While anyone can start flipping websites in Nigeria and making millions, only a few rich individuals can buy and sell properties in Nigeria.
So, what am I saying?
I want to buttress the point that flipping websites is a very profitable venture in Nigeria, but only a few have the required knowledge to do it successfully. If more people in Nigeria have the knowledge of flipping websites, then there is the potential to lift millions of youth out of poverty.
In this post, I will detail how I built and sold my blog for over 2 million Naira right from my bedroom. I will also show the simple steps and decisions I took, which I believe anyone out there can do as well.
How I Built My Blog From Scratch
So, around the end of 2015, I decided to work on this idea that I have been procrastinating for so long. I remember doing some keyword research, when I came across a golden niche which I thought people would be interested in. But since then, I had been too lazy to put the idea to work.
Finally, I went to work and started building the blog for the idea. That was late 2015.
I built it cheaply for less than 5,000 Naira. I remember I bought the domain name for 1,200 Naira and then used Blogger free hosting to host the blog. Back then, only few people knew how to do free hosting via Google’s blogger, but I was among the privileged few who knew the trick.
So, my total expenses in building the blog was 1,200 Naira.
You see why I said that foran average joe, flipping websites is easier to do and more profitable than flipping properties in Nigeria?
Well, let’s continue. I started adding articles to the blog once in a while, when I was less busy. The blog was kind of a side project that I wanted to test out and see if the findings during my keyword research were true.
I wasn’t taking the blog too seriously until after 6 months when I checked the Analytics stats and saw that the site traffic has spiked. I was getting almost 300k views per month on a 6-month old blog. Phewww!!
After that event, I started taking it seriously and adding more content to it. I even hired 3 people to work on finding more keywords and writing contents on the blog. I also dusted my old adsense account and plugged it into the blog.
It wasn’t long before I started receiving adsense payments. My first adsense payment came in the month of April 2016 and was around $150. By the end of that year, the adsense earnings had gone up to $470 ish.
For a blog I launched with just 1,200 Naira to be earning over 200k Naira per month was a dream! I had cracked the passive income code, and the earnings were coming in thick and fast.
I even had companies calling me for partnerships and sponsored adverts. I was able to get a company to pay me $300 for 3 months in a short partnership deal.
All these were happening until I decided it was time to flip the blog. It was time to sell it and move on to the next adventure.
Why I Decided To Flip My Blog
To many people, it didn’t make sense to sell a blog that makes over 200k Naira per month. On the surface, the economics doesn’t add up, but I would give some reasons why I decided to sell the blog.
A Trendy Niche With High Competition
The niche was a trendy niche which I thought was on the decline. This decline may affect the site traffic and the earnings in the future. Also, the niche had a lot of competition especially from India, and they were ready to play dirty seeing that my domain is a keyword-rich domain. I already caught and disavowed some malicious links targeted at my blog. I didn’t have the time to fight dirty or to even keep these dirty competitors away from my blog. I knew it was only a matter of time before they won this dirty game. So, I wanted out.
Poor Adsense CPM (Cost Per Impression)
Safe to say that the niche had a poor Adsense CPM which affected my earnings. CPM is how much you earn per 1,000 readers that come to your blog. Coupled with the fact that most of my audience are from Nigeria, which is notorious for very low Ad CPM. I was making 200k per month because I had a hell of a traffic coming to my blog. If I had that same traffic numbers in the technology niche and most of my audience from the U.S, I would be making millions monthly.
Lack Of Growth Opportunities
Also, I didn’t see any other way to pivot the blog for growth. It was in a limited niche with mostly people who didn’t want to buy anything. I tried selling some products and even had a few sales partnerships that did poorly.
Lack Of Dedication On My Part
Since I didn’t see much future prospect in the blog, I was unwilling to dedicate my time and effort on the blog. I wanted to give it to someone who would appreciate it more than I did.
Needed Some Cash For A Project
To be honest, at that time, I also needed some cash for a real estate project. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity, so I had to find all the cash I could get my hands on. The blog happened to provide some of that cash.
How I Flipped My Blog
So, there I was. I had finally decided to flip the blog for cash. I had in mind to sell it for nothing less than $10,000 but I knew it would be left for the market to decide.
To sell my blog I needed a platform where there were site buyers willing to buy a blog like the one I had. There were many such sites, but I chose Flippa.
Flippa was, and still is the biggest platform for selling websites and domain names anywhere in the world.
To sell my blog on Flippa, I had to list it on the Flippa Auction for a fee. As at then, I paid $29 to get the site listed on the Flippa Auction.
So, I paid and got my blog on the Flippa Auction. Before long, I started getting some bids on my auction.
Then I got this email from someone at Flippa:
Apparently, he thought my blog could be eligible for Flippa Editor’s Choice, which comes with massive exposure to Flippa’s network of buyers.
The premium listing would come with additional fee which will be deducted from the final sale earnings. I agreed to go with it because it was a no brainer. More exposure would mean more bids on the auction, and potentially higher sales revenue.
As a premium listing, flippa would also give more visibility to my auction by email blasting the auction link to over 5,000 Nigerian buyers on their platform. It wasn’t long before I started getting a flurry of emails and private messages about selling my blog.
The number of private enquiries and back-door deals I received was even more that the 80+ bids that happened on the live auction.
Finally, the auction was completed and the highest bidder won the bid to buy my blog at a price of $4950.
I had to send the buyer the site assets which were the domain name, the blog .xml file, the blog’s email list, and the blog app .apk file. The blog actually had a hybrid android app which I had built but yet to deploy. That shows the level of laxity I had towards managing the blog.
Conclusion
After transacting with the buyer and paying the Flippa success fee, I finally had the cash in hand. The final amount I received was $4084.
I remember then it was President Buhari’s first tenure and the dollar was scarce at the time. I exchanged my earnings at 480 Naira per dollar and got almost 2 million Naira in cash.
So, that was how I turned 1,200 into 2 million Naira in just 1 year.
If I could do this even when I wasn’t even taking the blog seriously, then anyone who is serious about making money and puts genuine effort into the work can do it.
It is possible for anyone to start flipping websites as a career. You just need a little research skills, know the tech involved and work patiently towards your goal.