Selling Websites for a Living

When you are building and selling websites as a business model its extremely important that you get and keep organised.

Spread sheets are your friend in this business and I have one for every site I build. Not only are they necessary for tracking what you have done and what’s still to be done, they are appreciated by the new owner too and can increase value.

I have a folder called ‘websites’ and inside is another folder for each site I’ve built. Even blogs get a folder so I have somewhere to keep any graphics I use, spreadsheets I create etc.

It just makes life easier.

If you hope/expect to make some serious money from building and selling websites then you will need automation as well as organisation.

Does automation cost money? I was reading a thread in the warrior forum about SEnuke recently and the majority were complaining it was too expensive.

What they mean of course is that its too expensive for them. They aren’t yet making enough to justify the cost. The catch 22 is that with that mindset they probably never will.

Meanwhile me and the rest of Areeb’s clients continue to push him to raise the price so his system doesn’t get over abused.

The other day I was on a forum singing the praises of WP Syndicator which I had been beta testing prior to release on the 13th of this month. I received a PM asking me if a WordPress plugin could justify a price tag of nearly $50?

WP Syndicator takes 10 minutes to install and set up on your blog. After that, every post you make in the future will have a snippet posted on over 15 high traffic Web 2.0 sites.

Each snippet includes a link back to your post. These links are from sites such as WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr, TypePad, Blogger and Multiply.

All those great links mean instant indexing for your post, better rankings and longevity in the search results.

All done in the background and fully automated.

How can that not possibly be worth the price of a decent steak?

And that brings me to the 3rd thing you need if you are to succeed with this or any other ‘make money online’ business model – The Right Mindset.

You’re a self employed carpenter who’s lost his tools. The job is stood, the clients not happy but you can’t do a thing without the tools for the job.

Do you….

a. nip down the road to the hardware store and kit yourself out with some tools?

or

b. spend the next 7 days hanging around building sites so you can ask the builders what make of tools they use?

Choosing the first might not result in you owning the best tools available BUT it does mean you will be earning money that week. You can always buy better tools later or in our case, take them back because its rare nowadays to find an IM product without at least a 30 day no quibble guarantee.

Even worse than the above is the person who simply won’t spend any money on tools and insists on doing everything themselves.

There is nothing wrong with this when you first start but any money made needs to be reinvested so you can increase profits and grow your business. If you don’t treat it as a business your online ventures will always remain as nothing more than a way to make some extra beer money.