6 Figures Website Flip (😪 barely trying)

Key Takeaways

We took an expired domain, worked on it casually, and sold it for six figures in 2023. And I'll even be revealing the exact domain in this video, so you can see for yourself and get an idea of what it really takes to make a six-figure website flip in 2023. And in case you don't know who I am, my name is Mark Webster. I'm one of the co-founders of Authority Hacker, and since 2014, we've taught over 12,000 students how to build, grow, and sell authority sites. This is not our first exit, either. We've done this many times before, and our entire ethos at Authority Hacker is cutting through the and telling you exactly what works and how to do it yourself. So, with that in mind, let's get into the eight things we learned from a six-figure website flip. Now, the first step is choosing the right niche. Get this wrong, and no matter how great your site is, the business just won't work. We chose home renovation for a few reasons here. First, there was really good potential to monetize using high-priced affiliate products. Think toilets, showers, kitchen fittings, that sort of thing. And since most affiliate programs pay affiliates a percentage of the sale, the higher the value the sale is, the more money you make. So, this is also important when thinking of monetizing with ads. If your target audience are wealthy homeowners looking to improve their house, then the RPM is going to be significantly higher than if you're selling to broke college students, for example. Next, we look at competition. Now, some competition is good, as it means people are making money. If you can see lower DR sites ranking on page one for commercial terms with buying intent, that's a good indication that smaller sites have a chance. But, another aspect of competition is how many seasoned marketers are in the niche. Looking at some of the sites we'd compete against, you can tell they're not exactly elite-level marketers, and maybe the competition isn't going to be as fierce. Third, we want to make sure that we could create great content in this space. To find writers, Google your keyword plus entitle work with me to see if there are lots of bloggers looking for work. Finally, we wanted to make sure that we had some personal interest in the niche. Having renovated an apartment a few years ago, both Gail and I had some first-hand experience that could keep us motivated it to grow the site. Our full niche selection process is very thorough and takes hours to explain, but if you would like to learn more about it, check out the free training we have over authorityhacker training.com. You can save literally years of time by buying a dropped domain that used to have an active website on it. You can repurpose the domain for a similar project in the similar space and benefit from all of the links and all of the publicity that that site had gotten before. This effectively bypasses the supposed Google sandbox as Google already trusts the domain. You can use tools like SpamZilla to find soon-to-be-dropped domains across most popular marketplaces like GoDaddy, SnapNames, NameJet, and Dynadot. It lets you search and filter by various SEO metrics, and you can get a free account to try it out. Once you find the domain you're interested in, use a tool like DropCatch to grab it. The good domains with solid link profiles don't go cheap though, so it can take a bit of time to get this right. Alternatively, you can use a service that sells premium dropped domains. We used a company called Alpha Investors who actually provided us with the domain name we used, bombich.com. Gail made a video about this here. They don't exist anymore though, but you can also give Otis.global a try instead. If you look at archive.org, you can see that it used to be a home decor e-com store. This means it had a high number of strong relevancy signals, which would later help us to rank really easily. And we didn't just get the domain from Alpha Investors. They also built us a starter site with 20 articles on there. The initial articles were focused on the bathroom category, so it kind of made sense to focus on this category as well. And something that we learned from another case study where we sold an 18-month-old site for mid six figures was that focusing in on one category and writing really every keyword on that topic seemed to work quite well. So, we took things one step further this time and focused in on toilets, which itself was a subcategory of the bathrooms category. We did pretty extensive research to build a complete list of low to mid DR competitors, nothing higher than sort of 50, that had traffic. And we noticed that there were a lot of low DR affiliate sites focused on toilets that actually got traffic. This was our green light that this was going to be a viable niche. To find specific keywords, we put each competitor into Ahrefs and used the top pages report to see which of their articles were ranking. We then looked for toilet-related pages and we checked this in keyword explorer for each keyword to look at volume, keyword difficulty, and just the overview of the SERP. And during all this, we realized we were not in a shitty niche. Multiple low DR sites ranking on page one is a good indication that you stand a chance to rank. And so, that keyword would get added to the list. Additionally, as we're doing this, we start to identify more and more bathroom and toilet sites and adjacent keywords in the SERP overview. So, this way, the more keyword research you do, the more competitors and keyword ideas you generate. In 2023, generalist SEO writers aren't going to cut it. The quality of content in most niches is just too good for generic, uninteresting content to stand a chance. For Balmush, we focused on hiring writers that had real-world experience with DIY and renovations. And we got some great results with the ProBlogger Job Sport here. As you can see from our original job post, we strongly emphasize experience in DIY being important. We also said up front what we were willing to pay, in this case 6 cents per word, and that means that you don't waste lots of time looking at applications from writers far outside your price range. Now, to be fair, prices have gone up a little bit since we did this, especially this year, so I'd expect to pay a few more cents per word today. The other thing that worked well was creating an application form that asked some topic-specific questions, which had no correct answer. This shows us how well a writer can form arguments and present their opinions on the topic. If you get lots of these two-word responses, that's probably going to be a no, but if someone takes the time to think things through and present a good argument, then their application has my attention. Now, when you find a good writer, give them a steady stream of work and plenty of feedback. One of the biggest mistakes I see new site owners make is that they skip link building. This is a big no-no in the early days of a site. These early links you get are super important for your SEO. And if you're working on a dropped domain, this is even more crucial because it really only takes a little bit of link building to show Google that the site is active again. So, focus on a few high-quality links here. For Balmush, we focused on guest post outreach using a mix of sniper and shotgun tactics. You can actually find an overview of these in this video I made here. And we had a lot of success in finding great prospects by reverse engineering other active link builders in the niche. So, whenever we got guest posts on a site, we'd plug that site into Ahrefs outbound links tool and see who else they were linking to. So, very quickly, we would be able to find the prolific guest posters in the space. And then we'd just use the Ahrefs backlinks report to build out our prospect list, as we knew the sites they were posting on were likely taking guest posts. And yes, some were paid links. Our average cost per link was $37.87, which I think compares pretty favorably to the industry average of $83, which we found on our recent link building survey. Check out this article on our blog to see those results, too. We topped this off with some links from Jason Malone's agency We Outreach. You can learn more about how they build links on this podcast here. And you can see on this graph of our DR here that as soon as we got serious about link building, the DR started to shoot up. The site was monetized initially with Amazon Associates, and their commission rates aren't the highest, but they do have a very wide range of products. And anyone who clicks on one of your links to go to Amazon and buy something, anything from Amazon within 24 hours, you get commission on that, too. Around 50% of the commissions we made had nothing to do with bathrooms and homes. It was just people shopping normally on Amazon. But what gave this site another big boost was when we added display ads to the site, which was AdThrive, who are now called Raptive, for three reasons. First, the RPMs are excellent on AdThrive. And second, they allow you to transfer your account to a new owner if you sell the site. I've heard anecdotal reports that Mediavine, their largest competitor, don't allow this. If you have some experience of this, let me know in the comments how it went. They allow you to sign up sites at only 30,000 visits per month if you have an existing account with them already. Normally, their limit is 100,000 per month. And if you buy a site that already has an AdThrive account, I believe this qualifies you to get other sites in 30K, too. So, this might open up some interesting arbitrage opportunities for some people. If you have less traffic than this, you can also consider Ezoic. I'll put a link to them in the video description below. But not all results come straight away. One of the most difficult mental blocks to get over is that it often takes time between when you create content and links and when you start getting more traffic from Google. This is important on the way up and on the way down. From mid-2022, we decided to completely stop working on the site. The site was doing pretty well, but frankly, we had bigger fish to fry. So, what happened when we completely stopped content and links? Well, traffic kept going up. This is input lag and it's caused by many factors such as the time it takes Google to crawl and count new links. But, why is this important? Well, if you take a step back from your business, there aren't many types of businesses out there that will continue to run fine without you for a short period of time. As a former agency owner, I would have killed to be able to do that back then. Now, the traffic did eventually come down a little bit. So, do make sure that you don't abandon your site for too long. After not doing anything on the site for over half a year, we decided to sell it in February of this year. We wanted to maximize our profit here. So, instead of selling it through a broker like we've done before, we decided to try and sell it ourselves. You can list your site yourself on site like Flippa if you're feeling adventurous, or you can try one of the website flipping communities on Facebook. Or if you're an Authority Hacker Pro member, you can even sell it in our group. We have lots of buyers there. These groups have zero fees, so you can potentially save tens of thousands of dollars in commissions. To sell a site, you want to first create a profit and loss showing your income and your costs. And typically, you will exclude content and links as these are considered add backs. They're not really operational costs, but more investments in the asset value. And a profit multiplier of 35 to 45 is pretty typical these days. We got around 41x for Bomisch, though at the time of publishing this video, multiples have come down a little bit due to kind of macroeconomic factors this year. You'll also want to get proof of earnings for each month your site has been going, and it does help to generate more interest just to produce some nice graphs and charts to show the site's trajectory, too. In our experience, about one out of every five people who contact you are serious buyers. That's okay. Treat everyone as if they are, and you'll impress the genuine buyers along the way. We negotiated a final amount with our buyer, and then he created an asset purchase contract. We agreed to a few specific terms, such as the ability to create this video about it. Then we used escrow.com to do the transfer, splitting the fees 50/50 with the buyer. It took about a week for everything to go through and for us to get our money in the bank. So, in my opinion, flipping websites is both easy and pretty fun. And most importantly, it's something that can be done in 2023 while running multiple other projects, too, as most of the work can be outsourced. Just be aware that growth is never linear in a straight line. There's always ups and downs. But, if you do the core things right, you're consistent in your work, then things will work out in the long run. If you want more tips on how to build and grow your site, then subscribe to our channel. We release a new video every single week. Or if you want our free training right now, head on over to authorityhacker training.com and watch that first.