But a nice custom designed site, with say 10 articles on a good niche subject will sell for good money. You can hire article writers on elance, constant-content or forums like digitalpoint. Articles don’t cost much, some people charge per word, but 10 x 500 word articles won’t set you back any more than $10. Add in a custom design and logo, maybe another $20. A good domain name – $9. So that’s a total of about $39, you should have no problem selling the site (when it’s all finished) for $50+.

Of course, if you’re really on the ball you can design a site and write content yourself. I myself created a site, designed a header for it, then added about 5 small articles. Sold it for $30, and that was a pretty poor day at the office, it should have gotten $50+, but all it cost me was $8.99 (for the domain name), so I made over $21 just from that one site which probably took two hours in total to set up and write/design.

Had I got the full site designed and added more content, I probably could have sold the site for triple what I got. Laziness stood in the way however.

A custom designed site will sell for more than a standard one using a free template. A custom script will sell for more than a free one. A custom or unique idea, will get more traffic than a cloned one.

So if you outsource design and programming for a site, you have instantly raised the value of your website. Why not outsource the writing a content too…

You have just created a niche site which will have potential buyers falling over themselves to get their hands on it.

Whether it be a custom designed and programmed image hosting site or celebrity rating site, if some of it is custom built, that instantly adds value.

The key is of course to keep the costs down. Don’t pay a designer $100 to design a site for you. Start a thread on a popular forum asking who can design a site for you for x amount. You may get slammed by top designers, but screw them – there are guys out there who will work for peanuts and be more than happy to design a site for $10 – a quality design too. Let people fight it out in a price war whilst you wait for a quote you can afford.

Same with programming… head over to elance or rentacoder and post your request. Cheapest quote wins (provided of course they have a decent reputation). Combine the design, programming and domain name and you have almost certainly created a site you can sell for at least double what it cost you