Savvy business people used to make a fortune buying and selling stocks, then buying and selling real estate (flipping). Now website flipping of virtual real estate is quickly becoming one of the new things that will make many smart people very wealthy. Here’s an overview of website flipping and you can become a flipper.

The concept is pretty simple: Website flipping involves creating websites that make money with then selling them for a large profit (6-12 months worth of income). Websites of all kinds and in all niches can be flipped, the results of course vary from site to site and will also depend on the uniqueness of the site and if there’s any custom programming, graphics or other things.

As in all types of flipping the main idea is to get in, improve it, and get out as quickly as possible.

There are two ways to obtain a website to flip. Either buy an existing site and then imprve the design, content, SEO and ultimately traffic and income. Or start from scratch and buy a domain, then set to work on all the items I just mentioned. Doing all these things will up the PageRank, improve the site’s traffic, income and its appeal to a buyer.

To decide what kind of site you want to create to flip a bit of research is in order. It’s important to find a site that will be marketable. The easiest way to decide what to make is to see what people are buying. Check out sites like Sitepoint.com where websites are sold and see what types are popular.

Some keyword research will also help you narrow down the latest popular niches. As always, look for keywords with lots of searches but low competition. Looking at the ads in Google search results vs. organic results can be a great indicator of popularity and competition.

If you can get the keywords you choose into the domain name that you buy you’re well on your way. Also, make sure the domain you get for your flip is a .com as it will have a much higher selling value than any of the other options.

Another thing you might want to consider, is if you can create an authority site in a popular niche, it can often sell for several years worth or monthly income.

Once you have your domain set up on a hosting account, you want to get to work making it a great as you can, as quickly and easily as you can. This includes putting up a nice site design, adding content and monetizing it as best you can.

There are tons of free website templates floating around so in the beginning you won’t need to pay for this, but once you start earning an income and before you flip it, you’ll want something custom.

Then you want to let the world know about it. The quicker you can get it indexed in Google and linked to on the net, the quicker you can sell it for good money. It’s also a good idea to drive traffic to the page, be it by free or paid methods.

Before you sell your site, make sure you’re getting a price that is worth the effort and investment you put into creating the site. This includes all your costs (domain name, hosting, any parts that you outsourced such as article writing, driving traffic to the page, etc) and your time.

A good way to decide if a site is worth selling at the price you’ve been offered is to deduct all your costs, then divide the amount left by the amount of hours you put into it. If this hourly wage is too low, you’re not getting enough for the site to make it worthwhile. At this point you might want to try improving the site, or just scrapping it al together.

Once you’ve got some content on a nice looking site (i.e. clean Web 2.0 style.) and it’s getting traffic and making money, you can put it up for sale. There are plenty of sites where you can list it for sale. A good one is SitePoint.com as I mentioned earlier where it will cost less than $20. You can also go to eBay, or even approach private parties who might be interested.

Here are a few flipping tips:

Website flipping is really not all that hard to get started in and with a little practice, it can make you a lot of money. Happy flipping!