Dave Hermansen, right, and his brother Mike buy and improve Web sites like InnovativeCages.com, redesigning them to drive up traffic before selling them.

By ABHA BHATTARAI

Dave Hermansen did not own a bird or a cage when he bought bird-cage.com, an online store, for $1,800 three years ago. He simply saw a Web site that was “very, very poorly done,” and begged the owners to sell it to him. He then redesigned the site, added advertising and drove up traffic. Last December, he sold it for $173,000.
Mr. Hermansen, 30, is among the latest wave of entrepreneurs who, like the day traders and real estate investors before them, are looking to make a lot of money without much effort.
They use little more than home computers and free software to buy Web sites that appeal to a small and specific niche. Then they fix up the sites with hopes of reselling them for far more than they paid.
But while their dreams are fueled by high-profile Internet deals - Conde Nast’s $25 million purchase of Wired News, People. com’s acquisition of Celebrity Baby Blog - these entrepreneurs have smaller ambitions for their sites. Many end up settling for just hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.
Some Web sites begin as labors of love. Take Celebrity Baby Blog, which Danielle Friedland, the creator, has said she created after reciting facts during the 2004 Golden Globes “about who was pregnant with twins or had recently given birth.” Four years later, People.com bought the Web site for an undisclosed sum that industry insiders speculate was in the low millions.
Most flippers aim a bit lower. They troll the Internet for sites that, according to Mike Lyon, an investment banker at Arbor Advisors, are “undervalued property” - poorly designed, with little visibility on the Web.
The changing economics of the Web have made it easier to find and exploit niche communities on the Internet. Free software and advertising systems like Google’s have lowered the cost of doing business.
Instead of selling goods and services, analysts said, most flippers are looking into the easiest way to make quick money, by tapping into specialized advertising.
Mr. Hermansen, of bird-cage.com, says he is always looking for areas on the Internet with high search volume and little competition. “Once I found the bird niche, I knew it was where I wanted to be,” he said.
Before bird cages, Mr. Hermansen owned - and sold - niche Web sites about paintball, remote-control toys and electric scooters. In 2005, he quit his job as a draftsman to flip Web sites full time.
“It used to be that if you had a site worth a million dollars, you’d hire an investment bank or a broker to sell it,” said Matt Mickiewicz, a founder of SitePoint, a forum where users can auction off Web sites. “But if you had one that generated less than that, you’d just have to sit on it. Now you can sell anything for any sort of profit, whether it’s $20 or $220,000.”
Creating the value, though, is the tricky part. Many Web site flippers said they begin by tweaking a site’s template and making other superficial changes like adjusting fonts and type sizes. After that, they manipulate a Web site’s structure, coding and presentation so it shows up more prominently in Web searches.
In an era when Web use is increasingly search-driven, making sure people find your site makes all the difference, Mr. Hermansen said. “Once you beef up traffic, everything else just happens,” he added.