This is the first-ever issue of my site flipping project. Where I make my affiliate journey public.
So, I guess I’m going to start writing about how this site is doing every month. Because, why the hell not?
I also didn’t think a website called jarodspiewak.com was vein enough – so I started adding a picture of myself to all my blog images.
For the first time, I bought an affiliate site that was already making money with the hopes of growing and flipping it. For this report, I’ll get you caught up on:
- Why I bought a site rather than starting one.
- Why I bought this site
- My goals with the site
- What’s been done with the site up until this point
- P&L up to this point
- Why share all of this?
Other reports will go much deeper into what’s been done (as not much has been at this point) and the P&L.
Yeah, this is a 100% original idea, I’ve never even heard of Matthew Woodward. Why are you accusing me of shit?
Why I Bought A Site (and didn’t start from scratch)
I don’t always have time to work on a project, but when I do, I’m usually quoting memes or vines.
I wanted a site that I could sit on for months if I had to.
It also made a lot more sense economically. Someone reached out to me with this site, averaging $200/m selling at a 25x monthly multiple for $5,000.
- It had ~$3,000 – $4,000 worth of content
- Outsourcing a simple site build would cost me at least $500
- Buying the links the site had would also cost a couple grand.
Even if I went for lower quality content, it still made much more sense to buy the site in my opinion.
Why I Bought THIS Site
The link profile was clean and the original owner used a conservative approach. Mostly outreach with conservative anchors.
Earnings were pretty consistent. The site hadn’t really been touched in 3-6 months.
The site had been up for years without any issues.
It was a niche site with a decent amount of money pages (about 30).
It was clear that there was TLC put into the site.
All of that got me pretty excited and had me confident that the seller was legit and I wasn’t going to see the site tank or need to keep up with it every month to keep earnings up.
Niche
The site is in the outdoors niche, but it’s not a general outdoors/camping/survival type site.
It focused on a specific product category, I saw plenty of room to grow content within this sub-niche as well as enter 2-3 highly-relevant other outdoors sub-niches for the site.
Opportunity For Growth
One of the first things I noticed with the site was the CRO potential.
- Inconsistent tables, some money pages don’t have tables, and the tables were very basic.
- CTAs are the same color as everything else on the site.
- Only markup on pages is a table, headers, and bullet points. Content design could use work
- Content quality is OK but could use some upgrading
The link building done on the site was very conservative, I knew I could be more aggressive.
Lots of content potential. Just within the main sub-niche and the 2-3 other sub-niches I wanted the site to venture into, I found 300+ money page ideas by just looking at competitors. Not to mention TOFU content that could be built out.
My Goals With The Site
Really, just for experience and to have a site to mess around with some ideas on.
This is the first money generating website I’ve purchased and it’ll (hopefully) be the first I sell. I wanted to go through the process of buying & selling a site without risking too much money.
I tend to be a pretty go-with-the-flow type of person so my real goals are anything from grow the site a little, flip it, and buy a more expensive site or build the next mega-affiliate site.
Ideally, I’d like to get the site to at least $500/m (how modest of me).
I don’t do much affiliate (only started this year and have 2 sites) so I don’t know how long that’s going to take. If I didn’t get to $500/m while the site is already doing $200/m (avg) and with so much potential – I’d consider it a massive fail.
It would be cool to grow the site out to $1k/m-$2k/m and use it to fund and grow other sites – start to build a portfolio or something. Then flip this site when it grows to the 6-figure in value mark.
We’ll see. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What’s Been Done So Far?
Not much.
I bought the site at the end of Jan, all I did in Jan was switch the affiliate links over to my account. I don’t think I did anything in February either.
This is really a mind-blowing article, I know.
In March, I did some content research which found ~320 different money page ideas. I know absolutely nothing about the niche so this forced me to do some research. Now I have a vague idea on what ~2,000 people are coming to my website for every month.
The internet is a beautiful thing.
I also set up click tracking on all my affiliate links (Amazon by the way) using Google Tag Manager, this way I could track click percents (aside from Amazon’s dashboard) as well at what pages were generating clicks vs traffic.
There were a couple of informational pages on the site that made sense to add a product link to, I also took 3 money pages that weren’t niche relevant and canned them. They weren’t ranking for anything anyway.
My plan is still to just work on the site in my free time, but have enough to write a post once a month.
Q1 P&L
| Expense | Revenue |
|---|---|
| Website purchase ($5,000) | Jan Amazon $8.99 (only a couple days of having all the links up) |
| Web hosting ($59.4) | Feb Amazon $64.23 |
| Domain registrar ($13.16) | Mar Amazon $126.17 |
In total, currently down ($4,873.17). It’s more of a Spring-Fall product so I’m hoping to see April at the $200 mark. April 01 did ~$14 itself.
Why Share All This?
Boredom?
As of the time of writing, I have nothing to sell you. I’m not going to be making an affiliate course or a flipping course.
Maybe I’ll pick up a link or two (not that I care about ranking this site) or someone in the industry that’s cooler than me will notice me and think “That guys ‘aight. Maybe I’ll say hi.”