Flip Report #6

I sold my first site! We hit profitability on another!

Ladies and gentlemen, we did it. 

I have completed my first “flip” on a site

I’ll get into all the details later on below, but I want to talk about why I decided to sell a site and what’s next for the flip reports.

And before you get too excited, I sold my smallest site. This wasn’t a large exit.

The first reason is that this isn’t much of a flipping series if there haven’t been any flips ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Secondly, I’m currently working on cutting out as many things out of my days that simply aren’t worth doing. Having a bunch of sites, even if I just sit on them, still require time to review earnings, write about on here, etc.

It’s simply taking away from my much more profitable tasks. So, I sold my smallest site to free up some time but also to go through the selling process. 

From the time I listed my site to the time the cash was released from Escrow, was under 24 hours and it was sold for my asking price.

As for my other sites, I only want a max of two active sites. Active meaning I actually do anything to them. Any other sites, they’re either going to be sold or just sat on indefinitely. 

Will this mean less overall earnings from those other sites? Yes. But, the extra time can be spent working on the two active sites as well as my other businesses and ventures where my EHR (effective hourly rate) is much higher.

As more delegation occurs in my other ventures, I want to put more effort into growing my portfolio for more flips.

With the introduction out of the way, let’s get into this.

Sports Site

Like always, not much going on with this site.

A new article was written, but won’t be posted until sometime in May.

Surprisingly, despite ‘rona preventing this sport from being played, the site had its highest earning month of this year in April and highest since November, 2019.

This is one of the sites that will be sat on going forward (basically already was already).

P&L (Mar – Apr 2020)

EXPENSES	REVENUE
Content ($97.50)	Amazon Earnings (Mar) $60.63
	Amazon Earnings (Apr) $92.59

This puts the site at a $8,728.02 loss so far. 

Outdoors Site

This site also did surprisingly well over the past two months and the earnings this year are looking much better than where they were last year.

But, considering it’s barely performing at the level it was when I bought it, I’d be happier if the site saw another 20-30% increase.

I’m going to attribute the rise in earnings to the content re-formatting that I did and talked about in previous reports.

In March, another existing page’s content was replaced with better review content.

This is one of the sites that will be sat on going forward.

P&L (Mar – Apr 2020)

EXPENSES	REVENUE
Content -$62.50	Amazon Earnings (Mar) $158.16
Ninjatables -$33 (explained below)	Amazon Earnings (Apr) $232.09

This puts the site at a $3,933.19 loss so far. 

Tech Site

This site had a record month in April, doing about 2x more than any other month so far, I believe. Which is pretty awesome.

This is likely due to ‘rona as everyone is trapped at home right now using their tech 24/7.

A new article was published in March and two more were written in April that will be published in May.

This is one of the sites I’ll actively work on growing and improving. With the active sites, how much work gets done is 100% dependent on my available time. Some months may just be new content and/or links whereas others may get a lot more interesting.

P&L (Mar – Apr 2020)

EXPENSES	REVENUE
Content -$390.00	Amazon Earnings (Mar) $345.49
	Amazon Earnings (Apr) $542.02

This puts the site at a $2,258.38 loss so far. 

Automotive Site

This site also pulled in a record month, which is a bit surprising because no one is driving right now.

Traffic has been trending up since February, but even with an increase in traffic, I would have expected earnings to suffer during this time. But, I’m not going to complain.

3 new articles were released in March.

I also got 15 free links from a vendor due to a private matter relating to another business, some of these may have been placed in Feb, but I think most were in March.

I’m not going to say any names, and nothing against the person. But the links were mostly shit and not what I was expecting. I’m happy I sent them all to the homepage with branded anchors.

These were supposed to be higher-end outreach links but 2 of the 15 looked like niche edits and 4 of the 15 links had already been dropped. I’m glad I didn’t have to pay anything for these.

In April, I was feeling really lazy with this site. I spent the budget on link building because I just didn’t feel like creating a content outline.

Or at least, I thought I did. 

I accidentally marked the task as complete without ever doing it – so In April nothing happened. But, those links will be ordered with a vendor in May instead.

The site’s in a decent place to start getting links more regularly now, but I want to finish the main content silo first.

I made some changes to the site by setting up ninjatables pro on some of the pages, most of them still need a table added, and I also removed the sidebar from 2-3 pages that still had it on.

The reason why you’ll find the ninja tables expenses on 3 sites is that it costs $99/yr so I split that cost evenly across the sites owned by the business that bought the plugin, hence the $33 per site.

This is the second active site that I’ll work on.

P&L (Mar – Apr 2020)

EXPENSES	REVENUE
Content -$312.50	Amazon Earnings (Mar) $697.31
Ninja tables -$33	Amazon Earnings (Apr) $712.53

This puts the site at a $346.69 profit so far. 

Pet Site

And then there was one.

Yes, this is the website I sold.

To cover what was done between the last report and the sale:

Previously, $100 in content was pre-purchased and counted as an expense, that content was spent on another site so the expenditure has been removed from this site.

I completely redesigned the site using a premium theme, previously, the site was on one of the default WordPress themes and looked awful.

Two links were sent to the homepage, both of which I got for free.

I also added a ninjatables pro table to each money page.

Now, let’s talk about the sale.

Technically, the site sold May 1st and shouldn’t be mentioned until the next report, but since it’s the first flip, I figured it’s only right that I include it here.

I listed the site on Flippa on the night of Thursday April 30th for $500 starting bid, and $800 to buy it now. Within an hour or two, someone bought it at the buy now price but I didn’t accept until the next morning.

By the end of the 1st, the sale had finalized and the domain was released on the 2nd.

I wanted to sell the site fast, and I figured Flippa would be a good place to start, I also wanted to try it out to see what the selling side looks like. I didn’t expect it to sell so fast.

This isn’t a paid endorsement of Flippa, but personally I’m pleased with my experience and would be willing to list small sites there again.

When talking about selling a larger site (multiple 5-figures or more), I’d still be more comfortable taking the site to Empire Flippers. If I was to go through a broker.

P&L (Mar – Apr 2020)

EXPENSES	REVENUE
Flippa listing -$49.00	Amazon Earnings (Mar) $87.16
Broker commission (10%) -$80.00	Amazon Earnings (Apr) $28.49
Ninja tables -$33.00	Sale (May) $800.00

This puts the site at a $509.04 profit total.

Here’s an interview I did shortly after selling this site about my buying and selling process:

Wrapping Up

I’m excited that I was able to go through my first exit, regardless of the size and my automotive site is the first site to become profitable (the pet site was only profitable after the sale).

Most of the loss in business 1 is from the sports site, the tech site has a very good chance of being profitable by the end of the year (depending on how aggressive I am with the spend).

I would say there’s a fairly good chance that I’ll make another exit before the year is over.

That’s it for this report! Have a question? Post it below

Like this post? Share it with your friends.

Not a fan? Share it with your enemies.