Small-scale property developers have been doing it for years: buy a run-down house, do it up, and sell it at a decent profit. But it seems that in America, where most internet trends begin, they’re doing the same with websites.

For most people involved in the business, there’s no reason to think it won’t work. After all, big online takeovers are happening all the time. Just a few weeks ago, Guardian News & Media (www.gmgplc.co.uk ) picked up American blog specialists ContentNext (www.contentnext.com ) for a reported $30m.

To have a recently acquired site taken over for that kind of money is every small entrepreneur’s dream. And it has happened.

When the founders of YouTube (www.youtube.com ) started their business in a garage, they never imagined that one day it would be snapped up by Google (www.google.com ) for megabucks.

But on the whole, this new breed of web entrepreneurs has more modest ambitions.

According to eBay (www.ebay.com ), the number of websites and associated businesses being sold has doubled in the last few months. SitePoint (http://marketplace.sitepoint.co ), which is essentially a marketplace for websites, puts the figure at double that. This is where the so-called “site flippers” pick up the bargains that they hope will turn them a quick profit.

What they look for is a poorly designed site that does not rank highly on the major search engines. But here’s the important part: it must be in a niche market, which makes it potentially attractive to advertisers who are trying to reach that market.

One example is www.birdcage.com . It was bought for $1,800 a few years ago by a site flipper called Dave Hermansen.

He later sold it for $173,000. The same year, he bought a domain name for just $200 and flipped it within six months for $60,000. The key to the process is that the business attached to the site must be low maintenance. Flippers are not looking for a CD retailing site, for example, where they might have to send out thousands of discs the moment the site becomes even moderately successful. The main aim is to build up a community, make the site more visible on the search engines and finally attract advertising.

Critics say this is just the internet version of the perennial get-rich-quick scheme. To be fair, there are people who are less than scrupulous who have already jumped on the bandwagon, attempting to turn a profit on sites whose income figures have been falsely inflated and whose search engine rankings have been tampered with.

But it would be wrong to judge everyone involved in this phenomenon by those standards.

Many new websites and blogs about flipping have started up recently. They include http://siteflip.blogspot.com and http://flippingwebsites.com . The former gives a good outline of how long it takes, how much it costs and how much people are making.

The important thing to remember is the niche. A few years ago, Danielle Friedland impressed those who attended the Golden Globes awards with her encyclopaedic knowledge about celebrity mothers and their babies. She subsequently decided to set up a website, www.celebrity-babies.com . This May, it was sold to

People magazine (www.people.com ). Some estimates of the selling price put it at around $14m. When I checked the site a few moments ago, the top item on the front page was the fact that People had pictures of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and their new twins. The biggest audience is young mothers or expectant mothers, so the content — and advertising — is geared towards them. Most flippers won’t make a fortune, but many make a comfortable living — and the their only outlay is a laptop and some software.

Bill Law has over 30 years’ experience in IT and currently works as a consultant in the industry. He can be contacted at bill.law@talktalk.net