Website Sold For a $17K Payday

byPaulWatson

3.8K followers

11 months ago

Hey there fellow WA'ers, hope all is going well for all of you.

So, as you can probably tell from the heading I am a little happy today as the sale of my website went through . Now, I am not writing this post just to brag (well maybe a little) but more as a guide for those of you looking to do the same thing now, or into the future.

One of my reasons for selling the site now was to give me a baseline as to what I may be able to sell future sites for. So, let's start with the base stats:

What Was The Site?

Ok, so the site in question (I have an agreement with the seller not to publish the name) is in the outdoors niche and focused on fishing, camping, hunting, skiing and a few other things. The site is four years or so old however I had really only been working on it in earnest for about 2 years.

Here are the stats:

Posts: 455

Rough post breakdown:

• buying guides (3 best x for x etc.): 50%
• Tips and how to's: 30%
• Reviews: 10%
• Other: 10%

Monthly traffic: approx $15k

Monthly revenue: $500 - $800 per month

Revenue breakdown:

• Adsense: 19%
• Ezoic: 29%
• Amazon: 50%
• Impact Bass Pro Shops: 2%

Monthly expenses were around $250 for hosting and a writer to produce around 15 posts per month.

The rest of the work was done by me.

Why Did I Sell?

To be honest, I had thought about selling sites that I have built but never really investigated it too much until I received a comment on the website from a guy that said:

"Hi, I like your site and am willing to pay up to 27x monthly profit".

This was a site I really hadn't considered selling as it was starting to make some good cash each month, but if those figures were accurate then it was well worth checking out. So I spoke to a couple of the super affiliates here at WA and decided to contact a broker.

How Did I Sell?

So, as above, I reached out to a broker that I was given the details of and asked him to have a look at my site. He gave me a couple of questionnaires etc. that I ran through and answered a LOT of questions about the site.

He informed me that I could indeed get in the low to mid $10k range. And for 15%, he manages the entire sales process for me.

Now here is the kicker, he informed me that the sale is via a 'no reserve' auction so if the site sold for $100, then that was it - i.e. I had no choice but to sell. This made me really nervous but hey, entrepreneurship is all about learning so at least I was going to get a good baseline hey!

Now to cut a long story short, it was on auction for 2 weeks and the sales price went up around $500 per day for the first 12 days, then day 13 it went to $10k, then $11k an hour before deadline. Then BANG - $17K.

So, What Influenced The Sale?

As you would probably expect, the two main factors that most looked for were traffic and sales.

In terms of traffic, the questions that came back were:

• If I kept the site, what would I do to increase traffic?
• What could I have done better to improve SEO?
• Is the traffic consistent - which in my case no - the northern hemisphere summer drives more traffic to this site than winter.
• Does the site suffer from drops due to Google algorithm changes?

Then for sales - the questions were similar:

• If I kept the site, what would I do to increase sales?
• What could I have done better to improve sales?
• Are sales consistent - which again in my case the northern hemisphere summer is much stronger.
• Are there any other affiliate programs I could suggest?
• How easy is it to transfer affiliate links to the account of the buyer?

What other influences are there?

In terms of salability, other things that arose - and hence for you to consider are:

1. Premium plugins - this is a big sales plus for a site - however make sure they are not subscription based - or else they will need to be changed over.
2. Graphics - there were a lot of questions about the legality of the graphics on the site. You will definitely not be able to sell for as high if the graphics are not licensed or legal.
3. Ability to change affiliate links - I use a plugin called Lasso to post my Amazon links to my sites. This makes things a lot easier to transfer links over as the buyer can simply change the Amazon Associates account number and it all changes automatically.

So what now?

I have a couple of websites on the build and plan to sell them all over the next 12 months. Based on my experience here, this is how I am working them:

1. Build the sites lightly and clean - this is a big sales point as buyers want something they can change quickly and easily should they see fit. Loading a premium theme is recommended here too.
2. Try not to hard code affiliate links if possible - although it is the buyer's responsibility to change the links, they still like it if it is easy to do. There are plenty of plugins that can handle this.
3. Write posts that rank - use keyword research and follow the well-used post types for affiliate marketers - buying guides, tips, reviews and how to's. You can definitely use AI but make sure the posts are helpful and strong.
4. SEO is key - focus on backlinks and keywords - keeping the site light will assist with site speed and SEO as well. Watch your analytics and work on the post types that are ranking well.

The key I have learned here is that you will need to take personal passions out of it and simply create it to rank and sell. With the site I just sold, I spent a lot of time (before I knew I was going to sell it) really trying to personalize it and play with different settings etc.

With my new sites, this will not be done as I want a clean site that performs. This is not to say that the above is wrong, especially if you plan to keep it and build affiliate income - in fact if this is the case - I strongly recommend that path.

If you are building to sell however, then to be frank, it is not really worth the effort. - In my opinion only of course.

Conclusion

So, that is the story of my site sale. I hope it has been helpful and would love to hear of your site selling experiences below.

Until then,

Have fun

Paul