2 Simple Website Flipping Case Studies You Can Follow
I want to share some simple things you can do with buying and selling websites, without trying to blow your mind away with huge numbers.
They were successful flipping stories, and they’re something a novice can achieve. I’m not going to try and wow you with my biggest wins today, you’d probably end up too intimidated and give up before you’ve even taken the first steps.
So let’s talk about the first one. How I flipped a $500 website for $7,500.
This was a site I purchased for just $500. It already had some rankings and some traffic, but the previous owner was no longer paying much attention to the site and hadn’t monetized it properly. He was willing to let it go for a cheap price, because it was barely earning anything, and he just wanted to be rid of it.
Now for my part, I knew this site had potential. It was already top of Google for some search terms, and those terms were related to products sold on Amazon.com. But for some reason, the previous owner hadn’t used any Amazon affiliate links at all.
If you remember in lesson 1 (which you can download for free), I told you how easy it is to monetize a website with Amazon Associates.
The site was in the “Darts” niche and ranking highly in Google for terms like “Best soft tip darts”, so I figured it must be easy to make some money with it.
So, here’s what I did with this site:
- I added more Amazon affiliate links
- I added some comparison tables to help visitors make a buying decision
- I performed some SEO on the site to get it ranking highly in Google for even more terms, things like “Best electronic dartboard” for example.
- I watched the site’s income slowly increase.
Around six months later, the site was making $250 per month on average. Remember, I had only bought this site for $500, done a few hours worth of work to it, and now it was making me some pretty sweet profit.
I then sold it a few months later for around $7,500.
So in a year, I bought a site for $500, did minimal work to it, earned around $2,500 in commissions from Amazon, and then sold it for $7,500.
That’s a great turnaround, and something almost anyone can do, because it doesn’t cost much to get started.
Case Study Two
I had a similar result with a site I bought 18 months ago, although I haven’t sold this one yet.
In this case, I bought the site for $15,000, and it was earning around $500 per month. This one was getting some decent traffic and was monetized via Amazon, and Google Adsense (display adverts).
I increased the traffic to this one, so that it qualified for an advertising network that paid higher rates than Google Adsense.
I also submitted the site to a network that pays you to have sponsored posts on your website.
18 months later, that site is making close to $1,500 per month, so it is around a 3x increase in 1.5 years. I’m not selling it yet because it still has potential to grow a bit more, but if I did sell it now, it would fetch a price of around $45,000. So that’s $30k profit in 18 months, plus the money it earns me every month.
Both of these case studies are something you can achieve. The technical know-how is not particularly high with these two sites, the hardest part is getting them to earn in the first place..and we’re skipping that step by buying them once they’re already getting traffic and money.
And for $500 or $15,000, the barrier to entry isn’t too high either. It’s high enough to mean that not anybody can play though, which is great.
In my upcoming course, I’m going to teach you exactly how to find deals like this, and how to perform the same things that I did to grow the sites like this.