How To Buy and Sell Websites | Best Strategies To Double Their Value

This Post: How To Buy and Sell Websites | Best Strategies To Double Their Value

was put together by our team of editors who are Business Review Consultants that give their expert recommendations, on the latest business software & tools that have been launched onto the market.

When we publish the latest money making opportunity or business software review on buy website,

 
we will give you our complete analysis on the most popular software product tools. We will expose the most profitable online systems that top internet marketers don't want to share with you.

 

We reveal some of the most Powerful web programs  That have recently been launched onto the market that will help those starting an online enterprise or setting up new revenue streams.
We will test these software apps, to examine every feature of the tool, making sure its delivering results.      

All the videos we post on our constantly updated blog,

just like How To Buy and Sell Websites | Best Strategies To Double Their Value that your about to watch,

will give you the competitive edge in your online business ventures,

that are targeted towards those interested in using the best tools on the market, that will help you start an online enterprise or run a profitable Home Based Business Franchise, using the most powerful web tools.

welcome to the digital journey pipette every successful online business entrepreneur has an incredible story to share about their journey to success listen and learn from top digital mavericks and online business insiders as they shared their secrets so you can live the lifestyle you deserve your pilot’s for today’s journey Rob Courtney and Nick diamond welcome aboard passengers the digital journey begins now welcome to the digital journey podcast navigating your online business voyage I’m Rob Fortney from the Amazon gorillas and my partner Nick Neiman here with his sexy bald head sexy bald head that’s the first time that I’ve had my bald head called sexy go ahead and mark that Walmart today down in history if this is your first time listening thanks for coming if you’re returning nice to see you again the digital journey podcast is produced every week for your enjoyment feel free to add the podcast to your favorite RSS feed so you don’t miss any info nuggets that may be a game changer for you and your digital business and if you want to see the video version of this podcast go to our website digital journey podcast calm our guests for today’s show is Ken Roberts and he comes from the USA we’ve had a lot of guests from around the world lately so he comes from Providence Rhode Island and he’s a website investor and an SEO expert and Ken’s gonna share with us today listen to this how to buy website and double the value of it and sell it and before we get into that I want to let you know that the digital journey podcast is brought to you by our friends at Empire flippers comm Empire flippers is the number one curated marketplace for buying and selling established profitable online businesses visit their website at Empire flippers calm and see what businesses are for sale or if you already own a business there’s a great place on their website where you can get your business evaluated and see how much it’s worth let’s get this journey started welcome Ken how are you doing pretty good welcome to Chiang Mai Island you’ve been here a week now how’s it going it’s incredible I want to move here already yeah this is kind of a bug that seems to happen like people will come and they’ll you know get a chance to hang out with everybody and see the environment and see the culture and all that stuff and they’re like hey figure out how to get back here you’ll find as the amount of people that you’ve met this week I mean they’re here all the time like you know though obviously the SEO conference earlier this week there’s a lot of people in town but right now people are just flying out of the woodwork there’s ten different meetings a week and 50 60 entrepreneurs there’s just unbelievable amount of connections that you’re able to make here so absolutely I connected somebody that I’d actually been working on a website with in a coffee shop had no idea he was sitting next to me I’ve been talking hundreds of miles away the last few months now if you’re sitting there in a coffee shop hey where are you I’m at this coffee shop yeah me too oh my god right so one of the things we like to start with is kind of the basics which is just tell us your backstory like we come from and we started out what kind of jobs you had prior to this and this is kind of a set up before you started your digital journey sure so I moved to Providence Rhode Island to go to college went to business school up at Bryant University there and right out of school got a job at a marketing agency so this was a startup and we were just three employees so I was doing all the marketing for this company we had a web designer and a developer and ended up growing that company to over 1.5 million dollars in revenue and 20 employees so that was pretty exciting but I got really burnt out doing it been there for maybe four years and I was looking for a way to escape that life you know constantly on client calls and just working 24/7 so I started thinking is there a way that I could do what I’m doing but make a passive income doing it and I started doing some research on Google’s stumble across Empire flippers and read their blog posts that’s really where I got started and began thinking why am i applying these marketing skills and SEO knowledge that I have to client sites when I could be doing them on my own right so that’s really how I got started well that’s pretty good way to get started yeah absolutely it is so tell us a little bit about your business background it I mean so how did you get that first job like did you go to I mean you went to college and that was the kind of degree you god I mean how did you start there sure I did a few internships actually worked at Slater Technology foam which was a VC fund just an internship and that really got me networking with other people in the area got the connection to the marketing agency after that and worked with another startup accelerator in between so everybody was in the same network there is saying hey this agency is working on some of our our startups and you should consider applying here I’m gonna fast-forward this a little bit into the actual purchase that you made with Empire flippers because I’m curious to know about that as well so you mentioned that you started on the path as far as you know why am i applying this knowledge here when I could be applying it to something that I’m doing and then you found the Empire flippers vlog and then you started kind of building onto things from there so as far as educating yourself on what site that you should buy and going through that process tell us a little bit about that like when when you started looking around the marketplace and saying okay I need to find a site that’s good for me a site that that I think is worth my investment what was the thought process and how did you actually go about making a decision well I knew I wanted a site that had really strong backlinks and SEO profile because that was my expertise and that was something that I knew I could build upon and go through edit the content and find other opportunities there I really didn’t want a starter site because I knew creating starter sites is really difficult that takes months to go and build that content so I was looking for something that I could hit the ground running with and that’s that’s why I made the decision to go to Empire and find something that would be already a bit established I knew it I wanted it to be making some money already I wanted it to have some traffic so that that’s really what I was looking for the particular site that I found was in the design niche which was perfect because I done some website design before I’m in the industry and that was a great fit for me I’m a little hesitant about going into something that I don’t know about but what I’ve discovered talking to other people it’s really not a problem because if you’re not the expert you can find somebody that’s the expert and now that that have done it once and something I’m familiar with on being a bit more adventurous and looking into other niches as well exciting is that when you decided hey I’m going to get this design site so the actual process itself so you went to the Empire flippers blog and then you started looking around their marketplace like when you were looking around the marketplace was there anything that you had to do in order to actually get access to where you could see you know where their backlinks were coming from and you could see all of that stuff like is like what was that process like for people that have never been through the process of buying a website sure so initially you can see all the listings on there but you can’t see the URL for privacy reasons so you put down a refundable deposit and then you can see the URL and I should found the site fairly quickly I didn’t have to spend too much time searching so I think I was pretty fortunate in that sense and I was looking at sites for for maybe a month before I found this one put the deposit down and then I was able to get access to Google Analytics and all of the due diligence process that Empire does so that that let me see a report of where the income was coming from and analytics so I could really dig in and see oh this page is getting a lot of visitors maybe we can monetize it by adding an affiliate program or adding a product to this page and then really digging into the opportunities on that site so I didn’t want to just find a site that was making a bunch of money passively there had to be some offered room for a girl sure yeah what is it that that made you the most comfortable about getting a site through Empire flippers or getting that particular site that you that you ended up getting what what was it that that made you say you know what this is this is it I’m comfortable enough because you know I mean how much did you pay for that for the site so it was 9k okay so ladies so you put out 9000 or so so you know that’s a decent investment on a digital property what was it that made you comfortable enough to actually be willing to invest that kind of money into the site sure so I would say it is the verifications like buyer verification and escrow that Empire does I noticed on some other sites they don’t actually check the analytics or check the traffic in revenue so I was really nervous about doing a private sale or doing a sale on some of the other marketplaces because that stuff isn’t verified and it was worried I might get ripped off sure so with with Empire I felt a lot more comfortable you’re buying a site with them because they go through that back process of you know hey not only do we have access to their stuff what we’re gonna give you access to it so you can actually research it yourself and see what you can actually brainstorm on as far as how to amplify what’s going on with this site absolutely and everybody should do their own due diligence you’re looking at sites so I I did a lot of due diligence on the site before buying it and for those not familiar that’s going through and verifying that the you know the traffic is real and the owner is real checking that everything adds up and it’s kind of like mystery so you’re a detective and you’re looking to see if there’s any any clues that might be provided where you can grow the website or clues where you know something just doesn’t add up there and what I’ve found is just working with Empire there was a huge time saver for me when they’ve already asked most of the initial questions that I would ask they’ve already checked the analytics so I could really dig in to more granular level and it was a big time saver very nice nice so what kind of money sees paid $9,000 and how did they come how did you feel like that was the value of it like what did you do I mean they put a price on it but how did you come up with your value and you know be able to apply okay that’s worth nine thousand dollars to me so what was the monthly revenue and how did you come up with that valuation or so so for the valuation I looked at what the opportunities were in Google Analytics and said okay this page is getting 10,000 visitors there’s no monetization on it and then I would do some research and say okay what if we just put simple ads on this page how much would we make from those ads and that’s all public data so you can see okay I would get two cents of click from these ads and this is how many people usually click on it but then is there an even better way that we can monetize that page can we put an affiliate and get a commission from that you know send people to somebody else that has a product or can we even offer our own products on that site so you’re really looking at the opportunity there and how much upside I made a little spreadsheet so I could calculate how much I thought the potential of the site was to earn and I really think that’s the best way to do it is is data-driven because numbers don’t lie numbers don’t lie and real numbers don’t lie yeah I mean I loved how it was based on revenue it’s not like these crazy domain sales you see where I think my domain is worth a million dollars sure and there’s no evidence to back that up so that was something that’s really determined what the price was is how much is it making was the potential for it to make all right so how much was it making when you purchased it I think it was making $300 or $400 a month and that was really only coming from sponsor posts and advertisements and that was a big opportunity I saw was I can add more methods of monetization that I can add affiliates I can change the ad networks and test different ones the owner had never tested different ad networks and I was really looking for product market fit sigh you know I put myself in the shoes of a designer and I said like as a designer as an agency what do I need I need you know Photoshop to run my business I need stock photos I need various software so those were things that were missing on the site and you could see other people in the ad selling these things so you know why not offer those directly sorry so so at this point even the bottom line I think one of the things that let’s assume you didn’t improve it right let’s just assume you kept maintaining it you’re still talking about getting your money out in two years yeah exactly because the multiples are increasing Rob and so they keep getting more but I mean you’re starting out with an investment that you get all your money back in two years okay there’s nothing on the planet that’s gonna double your money get all your money back and then be a hundred percent liquid after two years and that’s if you do nothing if you never improve it you never do anything now obviously you couldn’t do nothing to maintain it but yeah the point would be is is you know you create up other ways if you just kept growing down that field and you know just kept your SEO up and done it you know you you you would still get your money back out regardless yeah I think if I did nothing it was still gonna have a twenty or thirty percent return annually right you know before taxes and stuff so I was looking at the alternative something oh I could put money in the stock market which was like flat right here I bought it was two years ago so it was zero zero growth and even now it’s like doing ten twenty percent so I was like wow this is something where I have control over it and that was big for me as an entrepreneur was being able to affect what the the revenue is and if I did want to make the decision to sell it I could I didn’t have to wait until I was 65 to cash out higher okay to get my investment back so that was really nice once you started putting the work into it so so basically you you purchased the website the actual purchase process itself basically if you can run us through that really quick before I get on to the next question about what you actually did specifically to to ramp everything up so so if you can run us through the actual purchase process how that went down yes so put my deposit down checked out the information and then asked a few questions to the owner it was mainly about how are you monetizing how much content are you publishing things like things like that and then after I knew I wanted to buy it I put an offer in I went a little bit lower but they ended up asking for the full price I was happy to pay it because I knew it was undervalued anyone so sent over the money in escrow and then we transferred over all the assets so it was really easy in this case because I took control the hosting he just gave me all the passwords to everything if you have your own hosting I know Empire migrates it for you so they actually have a developer that will work to to move all the assets over to your server but in this case I didn’t have my own server so it was easier to just have them taken over passwords then we transferred the passwords I changed everything he introduced me to any key advertisers they had because they had a few people in the sidebar advertising and then after everything was transferred I just sent up our email and let them know everything was good and I was receiving the revenue my bank account and they released the payment from escrow to the seller nice nice so a easy process how long did that process take it was actually less than a week so I was surprised how fast it was just because dealing with clients launching new sites it had taken months sometimes to do that but when it’s just you and a seller with somebody really helping that conversation move along that process goes much faster nice so so once you’ve got the site in your hands you got it under your control then you started applying you know you started looking for different ways to monetize it and things like that how fast were you able to let’s say double the monthly income on it so initially it was going kind of slow when I first got it because I was busy not really working that much on it and did you start to worry at all I’d start to worry a little bit I was like oh man that but then I looked back okay I haven’t really put that much effort into it I’ve just been kind of sitting there holding it so I said I’m gonna take a serious look at the competitors and do all the things that I found in the initial due diligence and and start testing those those items so we I think we really hit an inflection point when we added more methods of monetization and started publishing more content that that was the two levers that really pulled to increase the revenue nice you know it seems like you know doesn’t matter what what it is that you’re going if you’re doing websites if you’re doing videos if you’re doing even tweets or whatever just more content seems to be the answer in a lot of cases as far as you know really ramping things up is more and more more moral in content for people to consume so do you have writers that are writing for you I mean where did you get your register now I mean obviously we’ll talk about in a minute what you’re doing now besides your websites but so where were you getting your content how did you pull your tools together for that point you know to make that happen so initially the seller was doing everything himself he was writing himself and I tried to do that a huge mistake because that’s why I didn’t see any growth in the first six months is I wasn’t outsourcing anything I’m a very slow writer so it was taking forever to write these articles and also just the format of the articles wasn’t really driving any traffic you know they looked nice but it wasn’t actually getting visitors so I went to upwork.com and hired some writers on there and what I found was design students and people that really wanted to get into the industry but they weren’t necessarily experienced writers were perfect for this because with design it’s very visual and you know they had a good portfolio then that was something that they could share so I like doing logo roundups and tutorials that was really capitalizing on what those students were learning in design and if you hire outside the u.s. like other english-speaking countries like Canada you can find some pretty good writers or look for students in the US that are just trying to get their start so a lot of people go in and they set all their filters and up work I want a five-star writer and they have to have a hundred hours billed and made this much but you’re gonna end up paying through the roof for that and there’s all these amazing writers that are just getting their start on there even people that have master’s degrees and PhDs but they just don’t have any reviews so I really try and look for those and get them early on that it’s smart I love gift so early so what what do you what do you normally pay for listen cuz you mentioned you do tutorials and things like that what do you normally pay if you don’t mind you know disclosing what do you normally pay for for one up work writer to do a post for you that includes like a video tutorial um so I didn’t really have them doing videos you taught us but those would be a bit more expensive but you could expect anywhere from two cents of work to five cents a word on the high end okay on those if you buy more posts and or buy more content and it’s a new writer you can get away with some pretty good deals like I think the most ridiculous one was I got ten articles for like 100 bucks a lot of bucks in ten bucks an article they’re not what’s the length of them they’re like 750 words 2,000 words so because those people were just trying to build their portfolio and that that was really good and then after they did that initial project if they were successful I would give them a raise and pay them a bit more on that interns are another great way as well if you contact some of those design schools and universities but that applies for any niche like it doesn’t have to be designed but if you’re looking for business students you know they are looking to build their resume and that’s a great way to to get them in there just you know offer them an internship give them a stipend for a fixed cost and they can really learn a lot about the end of from you so you’ve now you you’ve got some content going were there any big setbacks that you had getting started like did you did you obviously you first you didn’t put the work in it but were there any big setbacks that got in the way big setbacks we had trying to think about that I sure was going down viruses anything I did have a server go down yet we were on this like really odd server but it was pretty fast I was a VPS and it went down I had an advertiser actually emailed me which is really embarrassing on sakano the websites down so I ended up finding a freelance developer just to switch it over to a digital ocean which was a lot faster and better we ended up doing some caching and so on some WordPress plugins to increase the site speed on there and that really helped out so yeah I would say that was a big setback I had an advertiser with a broken link mmm one of their ads so it was on there for a while and actually I think the previous owner had put it up so they emailed me and they were all angry and I offered them a few months free apologized profusely and everything ended up being okay with them fortunately and actually they ended up renewing and I was able to increase the prices of the ads because the traffic was going up nice I noticed the owner hadn’t increased the prices since he started the site so it was that was a big opportunity to it’s just increasing the prices so I guess a great tip for that would be to make sure if you buy a website or even if you’re running your own website to to make sure that all your links work like regards you know your affiliate links are working you know all of your contact winks are working your advertising links are working all that stuff yeah you don’t want you don’t want that email I’ve seen affiliate sites where they have like a link broken on their top page yeah and they just have no idea because they’re never clicked on it yeah so I actually hire people to go through this at my site like here’s your job to go check make sure every you know every email opt-in works every single thing like act as if he showed up and I want to go through every single page which I think it’s a good helpful tip because what happens is you become blind kind of what’s going on because you’re looking at it all the time and oh I remember I me and it doesn’t even matter you may have sometimes these links I don’t even know how they change or what happens or you know something gets weird and next thing you know it’s like I know that worked yesterday I know it worked so you know I’ve been I’m finishing the site right now that I have been telling you I keep going back and I find links and it’s like oh my gosh you know I can’t believe this it’s not working again and it’s an affiliate link you know so now you’ve been going through the process you’ve got the revenue going the right direction so like talk to me a little bit about how that revenue increases over so how long did you have the site because what ultimately happened here is is you got this site started making it make more money and then ultimately you resold it back on Empire flippers and we’ll talk about how great that was and how much money that that turned out but so let’s start going through even the process of so now you’ve got new content coming on you’re adding and you’ve got some new marketing some new advertisers affiliate stuff and so hike tell us how the money kind of breaks down on a site like that so how much is in like Adsense how much is in affiliates and what kind of affiliate like you know it may be so specific on the digital stuff but like when you’re saying affiliate kind of given into that like where did you find the affiliate that you’re talking about doing it as a like a travel thing or is it specific to the industry that you’re in sure so the revenue breakdown was 50% advertisers and sponsored posts and a sponsor post is essentially when you create a post for a company and maybe it’s helpful informational but it might talk about the company in their link to the company that has another helpful blog post on their website so we only that also gives you a backlink as well yeah it gives gives you a backlink and it really was something where we weren’t gonna accept just straight up advertisements because we knew our users wouldn’t write like that but it will is more helpful tutorials like if somebody wanted to teach you how to create a logo for your travel business then that was a post where we would let them publish and they could mention themselves in the article in link back so they would pay us between 100 and 200 dollars for one of those and that was where 50% of the revenue is coming from occasionally they buy a banner ad or something but really the money was in the sponsor post not the banner ads and then on the other 50% we were doing that with affiliates so affiliates is a great model there because every time somebody clicked that link and signed up for the products we would get a commission and to find those affiliates we just kind of thought about what software are people using checked out the competitors you know what are they writing about what we realized there’s a lot of these tutorials like you need some sort of image editing software to do it or you need to buy some stock photos to create this sort of graphic design or maybe some textures and fonts to create so you just put all those on there and start selling them yeah exactly and that that’s pretty much how we were were able to grow that and now all of a sudden the site that was only making money off of ads was generating that you were shown the revenue on affiliates and it was much more consistent than the advertisers because if I’m an advertiser maybe I buy one sponsored post today and then another three months later so we saw the revenue instead of mountains and Peaks we saw it starting to just consistently go up month over month and how did you so how do you find these people who you’re finding to get sponsored posts like how are you reaching out to them how did you find somebody says okay I’m yeah I would definitely like to put a hundred dollars into you making a post for me how did you find those guys a lot of them were actually inbound because we had a page on our website that said great for us so that’s a easy way to get free content you’re asking how do I get content so that’s one way besides paying for it on up work but just put up a page right for us and then you’ll get people actually contacting you and doing searches you know great for us design design blogs to write for and a lot of those are actually agencies and businesses that are looking to write for blogs so if if we knew that they were you know just a student we would let them write without charging but if we knew there were business and they were gonna make a profit off of this post then we would charge them for that you’ve got it monetized you see the income rising how long did you hold on to the site so we held on for a year and a half because we wanted to show what the revenue looked like the year before and the increase in that and also that’s something that shows we had some history with the site and it was earning consistently so where did you end up like your earnings wise so you work on it over the first let’s say six months so we’re yeah at month six after owning the site so start out about three four or five hundred bucks a month where you had a month six it’s funny because month six we were probably the same as when we bought it and then that’s a we talked about her toes I mean to me going in you’ve been working on a site for six months and doing and the money still stays the same that’s a whole lot of money for I was nervous yeah but it was 100% my fault for not hustling on day well so you held onto it for six months and just knows how much now I was like yeah this is pretty cool you know what did you do what did you do like meaning so you just basically just kind of roll for that six months yeah so once you once you started applying different tactics to it how long did it take you to to start let’s say to double it to double your income sure so the you know at month six actually the traffic was going down and then we switched the content strategy and we said we’re gonna add some more advertisers more affiliates on there and try some different things out start experimenting with that so we started seeing the traffic increase I think was going up about three to five percent every month after publishing more of this helpful long-form content publishing more of these local roundups and design examples that that really helped out on the site so with SEO in general you’re gonna see the content go it can take two to three months if you’re a brand new site this site happened to have a lot of authority already so I would see content ranking as quick as a week later oh no which was really really cool so you’ve held on to it you’ve raised the money up you hold on to it for a year and a half or somebody sinned and then what happens so you’re like okay we’ve held on to a revenues up now let’s sell it so let’s walk back through the process and now you being on the other side which is you go back to Empire flippers you’re like hey I’ve got a site here’s the income I want to sell it so let’s start out right there so you make a contact back to Empire flippers and you say I want to sell my site so what’s the first thing that happens when that goes down so there’s a free website valuation tool and I put it through that to see what it was being evaluated on and actually I probably put it through six months before I even sold it so I could kind of figure out what were the biggest levers I could pull to increase the the price there and some things that we found were making sure that you aren’t spending on any unnecessary software you know we had a bunch of plugins that I realized weren’t doing anything for us so we caught those expenses on there and you know just checking to make sure that everything is as so Pete it’s as easy as possible for the next seller to take over because we had added more monetization we had more processes and content ordering processes so those are some things that we did before you know preparing to sell six months before so now you’ve so you put it in the thing it says well this is I mean that’s a smart idea to kind of go okay what is the process I mean I’ve also had advantage of you went in evaluating the process so you had a lot of that inside of you just because you went and looked at the site to begin with this idle this is how I can do it so now okay you put your site up for sale as they say okay great you put the set up for sale how did you come up with your valuation of where you were at then so for that I believe they took the last ten trilling ten months because that’s when we started adding the affiliates and additional monetization and that’s where the valuation came from I think I initially asked for six months and then they said twelve and then we met in the middle at ten so that was kind of the negotiation that went on with the valuation so you can play with the time period that it’s being evaluated on to kind of help out with that multiple so you know that’s kind of where we were so you went in and now it’s evaluated people start making on how long before you get an offer when it initially went live they send out an email on Mondays right I get it every week just like sends it out got one yesterday I got one yesterday six or seven new businesses in their several FBA businesses ranging from I don’t know it was 25,000 or 1.3 million so there’s a lot of them in there this week so there was just a flurry of activity when that email went out I think we had 10 people contact us for Google Analytics access and prior to that we prepared all the screenshots of revenue and answered all the questions that Empire had had asked us so they got access to that Dropbox folder with all the questions and then I also manually added them to Google Analytics so they can take a look at the site and see the traffic so how how long did that process take you know just you coming up and getting them the information and how was that process like you know I mean was it multiple emails you talked to him on the phone you know they said or did they give you a checklist say hey this is the information we need how did that part of the process go as far as actually submitting it to them yes so they gave us a Google Doc with a bunch of questions and it filled those out and then also give us a template to put all our revenue in luckily had to ask them six months prior what template they were using so that I could be tracking my revenue like that every month in the format they wanted because I found it’s it’s gonna be a big to-do going back and trying to figure out what was I making like right February’s working then 2016 so that that just really helped out already having that template prepared I definitely recommend you know contacting them prior if you are thinking of selling so that you can get all the ducks in a row beforehand it made it really quick for us to add people and get on the newsletter for that the valuation could have been even faster if I had taken all the screenshots of income and I’m new before but I took me a little while to do that so if I had done that prior we would have gone even faster I think the total time was three weeks before we were actually live and on the email that’s pretty fast yeah yeah I’m really fast I mean you know you had a lot of preparation of course but that part of the process was really fast yeah that’s cool and it’s funny if you ever sold a business with physical assets it can take six months two years to sell that so three weeks you’re kind of thinking in this digital world I want it now but that’s actually really nice for selling a business it’s incredibly fast yeah and so then you you created your SOPs for them so that is one of the things that I know that helps a lot with when you’re selling a website is is the ease of the transformation so like when I get it I know all the details and having that SOP stuff really in line helps with people feeling there’s value in it that’s where you can definitely add some dollar value into what you’re doing by going this is exactly the process here’s the people organize the stuff so did you prepare that so we’ve prepared the SOPs and also made some videos which are really helpful I show people because it’s one thing to talk about it but to actually see those items on there so that helped out and then gave them also a bunch of posts that they could publish so we had our writer over the over the course of the six months I think we have 50 or 100 posts that were already ready and queued up oh wow and that was that was that Salyut yeah that’s huge value because now you walk in you don’t have to let go okay I gotta get a writer or I gotta go talk to his writers yeah you got time to deal with it Wow yeah you’re 70 posts ready to go and then for them that’s great because they know their traffic’s gonna continue to to increase if we had published all of those right before we sold like probably wouldn’t even seen that much benefit from it anyway because it would take a few months for Google to rank it and I think that was a huge value add just off the seller so they they could just go focus on other things and know that the traffic was gonna continue increasing did you I went on things I read is is did you do you give them a valuation of things they could do to improve to move forward like here’s some strategies that we think you put more time in here you would get more you know a better income from that as well yes our since our big wins were on increasing prices and adding new monetization to the site what I recommended doing for them is see if you can add an even higher level of monetization to that site like create your own products because we mostly selling other people’s products at this point so because that was such a big win for us I said launching a course was something I always wanted to do on right but just never had the time so I was thinking a design course would be a perfect parent if I had hold on to the site that’s the next thing that I was planning to do was launch some sort of course where people could buy the product directly from me instead of going through that instead of getting part of an affiliate payment you get the whole affiliate yeah exactly the whole thing the whole thing so so for what you for what you sold it for first how much did you sell it for so we sold it for 25k okay and bought it for 9k so that was a really good return oh yeah a year and a half but you’re also also got the income they made for the year and a half that go on top of that yeah on top of that it was making over a thousand dollars a month so something so you’ve got it so you got it to a thousand to two thousand per month before you sold it what type of traffic did you have coming into it as well because I know I mean it really all comes down to income but as far as the actual traffic that you were able to convert into a thousand of two thousand dollars a month what type of traffic were you getting sure when we bought it it was doing 12,000 and and after that we’ve sold it at like 35,000 visitors a month so I was growing pretty quickly but like I said the first six months nothing happened and then after that changed the content strategy started outsourcing the content and saw a huge improvement there so that’s like what you want so what so once you did that so we’ll take the first six months out so we’re at when you started like how quickly did you see so it’s just still doing its 400 yeah when did you get the 600 like how long did that take to get to 600 that probably had been months seven or eight and that was just from testing the prices so that’s two months after you really started so if you started day one we’re talking about 60 90 days for you to get almost double Wigan or a hat in 60 or 90 days don’t mean that’s impressive at this point cuz if you wouldn’t a sat on it for six months that means right out of the gate you know you could have and if you’d had 12 months of you started then you’d have been able to flip it quicker you know exactly I’m just trying to make sure I understand like hey I’ve been there I know how when you buy something you sometimes let’s sit there for a while until you’re ready dude yeah if I could take it back I would would have increased the prices day one right that’s such a quick right I just made that’s what the next purchase is for yeah right right so in addition to what you do with you know with your personal website investing you also work for a company that does something similar right yeah so I work for wired investors doing due diligence and SEO on the website so finding websites that will want to buy or invest in mainly sass an affiliate monetization models and then actually making sure that we have opportunities to grow them and going and doing that growing them having that job that that gives you any insight into what you needed to look for when you were you know in the process of purchasing the site and things like that or was it just like you know you called your buddy in this department you’re like hey I’m getting ready to get this site and you know like how did that that’s why so it’s funny I actually bought the site before I worked for wired oh okay and I’ve learned so much since then and the biggest wins that I’ve been seeing our SEO wins and monetization wins which was very similar to my site some things that I picked up SEO specifically were adding amp plug-in and WordPress was something that increased traffic 30 or 40 percent oh wow so I had sold my site and I didn’t do that on my site I’m like oh man so if I can take it back yeah I’m not familiar with that it’s called an EMP so accelerated mobile pages okay so basically it speeds up the mobile speeds up the mobile you’ll see this on Facebook when you click on a news story sometimes and it just loads instantly how do they do that so that’s amp and it’s prioritizing the text and the image is over the ads and other stuff on the website all that code and JavaScript really speeds it up because on a mobile connection it’s not as fast as if you’re on the desktop or wired in so Google is really pushing people to adopt this format and they’ve even created separate mobile rankings that a lot of people don’t know about I didn’t know that okay so I can show up maybe number one in mobile even when I’m showing up number four or five on a desktop just because I added this plug-in nice nice that’s a power tip yeah yeah nice yes I’m looking for it yeah that’s yeah some information I’m looking for right there for so what a great opportunity to work for a company who does what you do have that inside knowledge and now be a website investor yourself I can’t imagine you know you go start flipping sites now so you just got your money right on your site you mean this has happened in the last couple of weeks right you just got paid out now did you structure a deal like did you get all your money or did you structure it at all or how did you put your deal together for smaller sites we you can get all of it so 25k where I was able to get like the entire amount but for larger sites stuff that wired is doing well we actually haven’t sold any we’re just buying right now but you say larger sites for their company give us some some perspective on what larger means sure so these are sites that are doing in general 50,000 visitors a month a hundred thousand plus visitors month and in terms of revenue ones that are doing five figures in general okay in in revenue monthly earnings so these are these are three $400,000 sites yeah and we’ve even purchased some that are over a million dollars all right see what’s happening right now in the whole investment world is is they’re figuring this out very quickly you know when we had mark Peters on shout out here I know he’s listening thank god he’s a great guy but here’s a golden sax guys who you know these guys are seeing this potential to be able to take money like that you can take you know this much money first of all the return just if they never improved it and they just sat there and got their return on their investment on something that’s that large mark talked about if you missed one out of four you’d still be making a ton of money like you bought for websites and one of them just continued you’d crush the market or any other investment you could possibly have absolutely in those winds that I talked about are amplified because right the traffic is so much higher sir making a little tweaks you price or your content strategy is gonna multiply multiply big-time sell 10,000 ing $2 you get an extra $10,000 a month which then turns into 250 grand on the other end absolutely and those broken links instead of costing a few dollars because if they’re broken links on the site this is the wired looking at you right yeah well hopefully the owner before us or they would probably be making that much money yeah so what are your what are your future plans because now you know now you know guys you have experience from your job you’ve been through the whole buy and sell process like what are your what are your future plans now that you’ve cashed out of the website do you have other sites that you’ve bought and you’re currently working on like what is it that you’re that you’re doing now sure I’m looking for other sites but I just bought a Shopify site okay which is pretty interesting model because there’s some things that are quick wins on that which are not on affiliate sites so on a Shopify site it’s dropshipping site and I’m selling a product on there it’s actually a tee and the quick wins on that are actually installing some of the Shopify plugins I noticed people aren’t using so you’ve got an abandoned email checkout plug-in where if somebody goes and they put all their information in but let’s say their credit card was expired or something or they got distracted because their cat jumped out the window then they didn’t complete their checkout and that that is gone but we have their email so installing this plug-in so when they get back from the vet after dealing with their cat that jumped out of the window they have that email waiting inside yep they have that email that says don’t forget to complete your checkout by the way here’s five percent off and that was just a quick win to increase on that side we talked to a guy Yanik a couple or a couple weeks ago and like literally had the same conversation he his his big tip was the big abandon versus abandoned cart sequence now he’s doing where he’s doing a text message on top of as well Wow so they get the email but then he sends a text message to him because they put their phone number so he gets email phone number first and then follows through the sequence so he sends a text message to him hey noticed earlier you were you know on the website hey we wanted to give you five percent discount to come back so let’s see what the hot links oh yeah so may want to look into that and okay so by the way this is guy doing one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars in sales a month Wow okay so here’s a little bit I’ll make I’ll get your contact with him he’s here in Chiang Mai so sure those are the type of things where when I’m buying a site I asked the seller hey do you have the Bandon checkout setup and they say no oh it’s like boom whoa big opportunity there hey online entrepreneur has d-didn’t too that contribute to their success once in your digital toolbox each and every show we have a little segment where we try to find out the tools that digital entrepreneurs use so what we want you to do is share with us what’s in your digital toolbox as far as maybe blogs you even listen to more plug-ins like you mentioned yes plug-in software even stuff you may be used to keep track and organize things or and then any inspirational things that you might use to kind of keep your head straight man I have so many tools parlez monitors I am on I’m already time this is a great time so go ahead and yeah sure so as an SEO I mean number one is gonna be a hrs that’s a tool that allows you to check the backlinks of websites and do keyword research so that’s really helpful in terms of finding any like quick wins oh I’m ranking for this keyword in position number eight and the title tag doesn’t even have the keyword in it that’s a quick one for me to go in and update their so a dress was helpful they have a little tool inside a dress that’s like a competitor content gap comparison so I love using that inside there to see what are my competitors writing about and it’ll actually check your site versus your competitors give you all the things that they’re writing about that you’re not keywords they’re ranking for and then you can use that and move I’ve been using that more than the traditional model of I’m gonna guess keyword and put it in so that’s one tool that I like using you have to have Yoast obviously on your website for for SEO purposes I’ve got a new tool called SEO jet that I’ve been testing out so that one is interesting because it lets you change the anchor text and check what is the most competitive anchor text on there for that syrup so every every search engine result has different ideal amounts of anchor text that you’re gonna use you know how many times you match the keyword how many times you match to the brand that’s gonna do all the hard work for you and figure that out hot jar is great two four four yet he maps and conversion optimization on there so I really like using them to get a little bit more information about why people are maybe leaving the page you’re not buying you can put up a little pop-up when they leave that just says hey while you’re leaving and get some more information in there it might be hey your links broken and you’re like wow that is ypically leaving so that’s that’s a really good one – WordPress plugins using the related yet another related post plug-in on WordPress or SEO so that adds more posts in your category and it makes it more relevant for Google to rank so let’s say I have a post about how to provide your cat from jumping out the window then it’s gonna show a post about maybe the best cat food on there so related post something that somebody can click on that’s gonna lower your bounce rate and make the content more relevant for you to rank project management I love Trello so Trello is kind of like a digital sticky note board you can just put the different tests in there and rearrange them as you’re working through and I love Google Spreadsheets I know it’s kind of a lame answer but it’s there are no lame answers it’s whatever works for for each of us you know yeah I mean Google Spreadsheets is is pretty amazing because you can just give it to any VA any Content writer and they know how to use it they don’t have to learn some new tool and register for new accounts because Excel wants $10 a month now or something like is it oh yeah like Microsoft is like on them you gotta sign up for a monthly monthly process so yeah Google I use Google sheets all the time so okay yeah what else you got what else I got okay so for sites where I’m doing lead capture thrive is amazing because you can buy it one time you don’t have to pay like a monthly subscription on there they’ve got so many different tools for that one-time purchase you can have abandon pop-up so you can have pop-ups that display on certain pages you can really tweak and edit how how things are going to display there and I’ve doubled or tripled leads by just using thrive pop-ups they have like thrive cart and thrive pages and I’ll bet they have a lot of tools mostly talking about thread leads specifically so then you can get your popup on there to to get more emails and they’re compatible with the new Google update as well so you can have pop-ups that aren’t going to get you penalized or anything Google released recently really something about intrusive pop-ups in February so they don’t want things on mobile that are gonna take up the entire page so that that even that alone is a great tip him yeah for people that don’t know that excellent tip I didn’t know that one either you giving me all kinds of knowledge and then in this one this is great so those are your software tools the who do you follow online who like hoosier who’s the guys that you look to who you know are leaders in the industry that you go obviously came to the CEO conference so I know that the guy who makes aah refs yeah he was there and he spoke so what other guys do you kind of follow and and you know that give you information keep you up on target sure I love Brian Dean’s blog is great for SEO Neil Patel for marketing in general I read for website investing specifically and buying empires blog is great wired investors blog we worried about doing due diligence on there as well when you’re buying a site from one of those marketplaces like what to look for quick wins yeah those are the the main ones that I’m really excited about when I get and listen to podcasts I do listen to podcasts but I tried to listen to more stuff about news and health then right then business ones I was the Joe Rogan by any chance because it seems like everybody seems to listen to Joe Rogan his episodes are so long though oh yeah you can’t like the only thing I do is put them up on and just let them play in the background as I’m working so it’s like my side entertainment yeah generally I’ll read blog post and then if there’s a cool podcast I’ll check it out but the promise I’m subscribed to so many likes oh yeah yeah he’s getting like uh-huh that’s on so yeah authority hacker has a good one too so they’ve if you’re building affiliate sites they’re a great source to learn more about those any inspirational people you read or anything like that I think like a lot of us read Tim Ferriss and that got me started on this whole journey so he’s got some great stuff I want to try and read more though and people have been telling me to read some sci-fi books before you go to bed it helps you sleep oh really so that’s something I’m trying to do for like Michael Crichton on that because when I start reading business books at night then a good bunch of ideas I get a bite website exactly yeah so your what about so one of the things we asked it in a deal a lot of entrepreneurs have them if you do or you don’t do you have a ritual that you use in the morning like when you get started for your day like what are some of the things you do to get you know your initial blast at getting started for the day sure so this might be kind of uncommon but I do intermittent fasting I don’t breakfast in the morning right so that means from like 8:00 p.m. till 12:00 usually I don’t have anything to eat and actually that really helped me concentrate more because I found after eating breakfast I just had a big sugar crash and I was sleepy and not productive for the rest of the day so giving that really helped I would sometimes I’ll do meditation with heads bays but generally try to do like 30-day challenges and something in the morning so meditate for 30 days or I’ll do intermittent fasting for 30 days and just see what’s most see if it sticks or not out of the 30 days it had enough benefit that you continue what’s your what’s your what’s your biggest transition from a 30 day challenge your your your biggest win from a 30 day challenge definitely intermittent fasting okay but I’m looking for new one so if you guys have any ideas love to test them out not blogging about them or anything it was just just doing them just doing them that’s cool that’s cool so if people want to find out more about you they want to get in contact with you they want to talk to you about maybe your process of buying or selling a website or or just you know just say hey how do people get people get in touch with you or find out more about you sure so you can shoot me an email can it wired investors calm okay um also if I personal site which I’m gonna try and put up this week in mr. inbound calm okay so that’s another way to contact me and yeah I’m not super active on Twitter or anything else to be honest usually I meet people they just add me on Facebook or something an email okay that’s fine sounds good thanks for coming and hanging out with us can we appreciate your time and all the amazing information you shared today you’ve been listening to the digital journey podcast navigating through your online business voyage we’ll see you next week and if you’ve not listened to our previous episodes you can find them at our website at digital journey podcast.com we also want to encourage you to give us some feedback so leave a review or send us a message and if you have a great story that you want to share you can reach out to Rob at gorillas online.com or you can reach me at Nick Neiman calm and if you’re interested in searching for an online business or selling your business make sure to check out Empire flippers com opportunity is waiting for you at Empire flippers calm alright guys thanks for sharing your digital journey one more time can I wish you tons and tons of success in the future we hope you enjoyed this podcast and has inspired you before we go I’m gonna share some wise words from some other smart entrepreneur and this is from Tony Robbins people who succeed have momentum the more they succeed the more they want to succeed and the more they find a way to succeed similarly when someone is failing the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy boom boom honey see you thanking her thanks for listening you’re listening to the digital journey teiecast the digital journey is brought to you by Empire flippers the largest marketplace for selling and purchasing online businesses Empire flippers com