Just sold two sites for $9,000!

byJeremyH86

842 followers

Updated 7 years ago

That’s right, I just sold the only two sites of mine that were making money on Flippa.

It was a bittersweet day seeing all that hard work go but the money is surely going to help out a ton as my wife and I are expecting our second child here in August.

Anyway, just wanted to share this story for motivation for those of you are who are new or still haven’t made much money yet.

How I got to this point

I still remember the first day signing up for Wealthy Affiliate being super nervous that I was signing up for a scam.

However, the free trial obviously mitigates that. Once I was inside I almost immediately felt a sense of ease and knew I was in the right place.

I tend to pride myself on working fast, which is good and bad sometimes. So I thought that I would just pay monthly for a couple months then, “after I knew what I was doing” I would be able to stop paying for the monthly premiums.

This was my first mistake. While I wouldn’t expect most newcomers to sign up yearly right away it would have saved some money early on.

The thought of leaving WA after running through the training also led me to host my sites outside of WA, another mistake and waste of money.

The hosting here is solid and built for wordpress sites, there is no reason to do what I did but I guess I had to learn the hard way.

I quickly moved the sites over as soon as I saw the difference.

One Small Complaint

My only real complaint within WA is that in the training they tell you that you can make money with any niche.

Which is definitely true…

Some niches are just more competitive than others. I just wish they would spend a little more time talking about competition and potential sales.

I get that it might be a bit overwhelming for someone who is just starting out and wanting to quickly get a start up and running.

However, the first niche I chose ended up being a purely informational site and I was going to have to rely entirely on Adsense which was going to take a lot of traffic to get where I wanted to be.

So, four months in, I pretty much abandoned that site and built a product oriented site. I used Long Tail Pro to research the competition and never looked back.

That site started making consistent sales after the fourth month so I’m definitely glad I started with a fresh site.

I used the same process for a third site once that new site started making a couple hundred dollars a month but there was one thing I didn’t think of, the commission rate!

I got lucky with the second site where most of the products where in the 6-8% commission range.

This third site had so much potential, or so I thought. It had the same competition with way more search volume....but the products were in the 3-4% commission range.

Now I had to sell twice as much! Oh well, I didn’t let this get me down.

Key takeaways: make sure you look at the competition as well as the potential sales for a new niche!

The stats

My second site from the store above was average $350 a month when I sold it. The best month it had was in November for Black Friday and was around $1,400.

Of course this was seasonal, so sales came back to reality in January.

It was receiving 200-300 clicks a day from search that was pretty consistent from month to month.

I hadn’t done much to the site for a couple months so I wanted to try and sell it before the rankings started to dip.

Luckily I got an offer for $7,000 just 3 days in to the auction. I was hoping to get closer to a 24x multiple ($8,400) but for being my first site for sale I was anxious to lock in a sale.

The other site I sold I had only started in June and it was only showing 5 months of sales that averaged $125 once it started making money and it sold for $2,000.

However, since the site was created, that is only $56/month and a 35x multiple so I was pretty happy with that valuation even though it was for a lot less than the bigger site.

This site averaged 100-150 clicks a day from search and was steadily growing.

Why did I sell?

As some of you may know, I had the opportunity to go down to Mexico (I’m in Florida) for February and March to train for a new job opportunity.

When I was there I thought I was going to have time to keep up with the sites but between learning and getting to know everyone I was with, the time just wasn’t there.

Even after I came back I quickly realized that I just wouldn’t have the time to keep up with them and I wanted to try to sell them before rankings started to dip.

Plus, my wife and I wanted to get a bigger car for when the baby comes in a couple months!

Plans for the future

I will say that learning this skill set has been quite enjoyable over the last two years. Obviously, just as with any profession, there will be continuous education required to keep up with the industry and Google of course!

I am currently taking a break from building out my own niche sites but I don’t think I’m retired forever.

In the short term, I am going to move my father’s website for his restaurant to WA and onto Wordpress so that we can manage it more easily.

When I do decide to get back into owning my own sites I will probably buy existing sites to try and grow.

It my experience it takes 4-6 months to start seeing traffic trickle in and then really a good 12 months before sales and traffic start taking off. I probably wouldn’t have the patience to wait on this again!

However, I would not recommend purchasing a site for those of you who are new to the platform. You need to go through all of the steps to really see what it takes.

You could lose a lot of money trying to purchase a site without knowing what you are doing.

Anyway, that’s all I have for who knows how long but if you are still doubting that you can make money by simply offering your opinion and getting others to read it, here some more proof.

Some weeks were more productive than others but I probably only averaged 2-3 articles per week.

The Wealthy Affiliate system is simple to follow yet does require you to put in the work. You will get out of it what you put into it.

Hope you have a productive week!