Selling Digital Assets - Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2017 Lead-Up Event

Key Takeaways

I so much for coming out this is a free event for the chamber HTM conference happening Friday November 3rd hope to see you love you guys they're going to be anything so we're very shortly to Greg belfry from Empire Clippers of my good friends sure that's cutting here now right about a year yeah about a year close friend of mine quickly became close friends we've actually played Dungeons and Dragons together as a best player yeah so uh Greg is the content manager for Empire flippers you've probably seen some of this very prolific guest posts for Huffington Post the hustle Shopify pretty much everywhere you hang out I try to be exactly so Greg's getting a great presentation for us on selling digital assets who here has an affiliate website cool anyone ever flipped a site on Empire flippers or any other marketplaces those how many people want to learn more about what it takes to flip a digital asset make some money all right good alright so this show is yours so it stops - alright thanks for having me here about really excited I you know prepared to speech four times so please forgive me if it's not too good I have a bit of a cold so Mike you do a little compact but basically on the presentation we'll go I'm going to cover behind the scenes of selling a multiple six-figure affiliate site what that looks like in terms of some generalities and then at the end we're actually going to go do a case study of a $235,000 Amazon affiliate site let me sole it up Rob oh yeah where's it's raw back in sin site mr. painless acted soon himself go talk to him smart SEO guy so Empire flippers is a do most of you guys know that powerful persons raise your hands you go yep okay cool so I don't want to talk too much about ourselves but basically we're largest theory the marketplace when it comes to buying and selling online businesses we're 100 percent remote distributed so like most of you guys out here viewing the digital nomad thing we don't really have an office or anything like that we just collaborate collaborate on the internet and every few months we meet up for about a month and bang out a bunch of work so we're also Inc 5000 was that is a magazine that back in America that accumulates the fastest growing companies we applied for it and we came in the first year I 161 this year 172 just to give you like a quick range of the kind of businesses we sell on average we sell anywhere from $50,000 Amazon affiliate sites all the way up to 1.7 million dollar to commerce business so when it comes to the kind of businesses we're growing pretty fast and we are becoming the leader when it comes to anything you need to ten million dollar level so on one of the news I'm giving this presentation is one of a lot of our big things we want to do it's become the leaders and helping buy sell and invest it on my businesses and part of that is the education rights I'm logging out they're building up to a site is probably no idea you can sell your site like what yeah this the other day who is uh like I can't sell somebody a CBN weeks on totally absolutely can be we've sold tons of them dozens and dozens of them so that's part of our mission is to educate the market out here to show so Who I am my name is Gary no Franca's I set a Content Manager two and a half years ago so I was still on oil rigs and a lots gonna go a circle covered in bug working for Halliburton I call them Walmart's of the oilfield because it always roll back prices for their employees a great place to work I was actually here reading blogs I'm at dignity tongue trans five living an authority hacker working those 12-hour days just like man I really want to stop doing this and unfortunately I started pretty nice writing and started learning a thing or two about content marketing and somehow convinced Empire flippers let me work for themselves so the first question you might want to ask yourself this why even style business a lot of you guys out there like I said are just starting out you guys ran your first affiliate site do a thousand maybe five thousand dollars a month and you're thinking why the hell would I ever sell this thing it took me so much effort to build it in the first place I would be crazy to set alright but the truth is if you can build one you can build menu you can own the factory by writing on your processor so if you own the factory I mean you can sell all of you don't have any emotional attachment with the site's you build as your processes get better and better and the things you can do by selling those businesses it's pretty cool so on average you go will sell an affiliate site between like 20 and 40 acts of its net monthly profit so say there's a thousand dollar net Amazon affiliate site you can sell that for like twenty six thousand thirty thousand dollars and you can use that money to invest into other stuff so some of the things that star sellers do they'll find real estate free and clear don't you sell two hundred thousand four hundred thousand dollar business you can buy a nice property mortgage right I don't that's another offline investments of the stock gold stuff like that they can also use capital this is probably the most common thing that summers do they use the capsule who's selling their business to leverage themselves to do a more competitive and lucrative space so if you have like $200,000 in your war chest and you go into a competitive niche it's going to be a lot easier to compete at a niche that if you had zero dollars right so that's one reason people sell their asset and the final reason will not the fineries are the last kind of fun reason is the diversification of De Aza so looking to the seller these cells an affiliate site that's all the strategy under Google and then they'll go buy an ecommerce site so like an Amazon it'd be a business work all this traffic is coming from Amazon all of us as SEO s I probably pick at least one spy a Google algorithm update where it's just a big punch in the face thank you thank you google for that everybody really appreciated that this morning so diversify your visual assets while guests by buying Amazon IP business ie relying on the Amazon algorithm these are not a hundred percent reliant of the Google algorithm so that's another reason why people sell there's a bunch of personal reasons people might sell to like you know maybe you have a medical operation or I mean I really unreasoning a divorce or one of her summers he actually sold his business to raise the money to doctor child you know so that's kind of cool so here are some of the stuff you can do to increase the value of your site that this before you submit the site before you talk to anyone about buying or anything like that you should probably plan about 12 months out at least before you so assertive is a big one where you know you fixing a lot of stuff to increase its value so some of the obvious things is kind of unneeded expenses or given a monthly fee for your tools that that aren't being used active in there you can build and monetize an email list now if you build an email list or a site that's like that's lighters 2017 comm probably not the best use of your time but if you have a more of a 40 site with a broader niche that this could be very worth your time because that you know this can be used to bring that traffic back to the site offer more affiliate offers outside of this Amazon office you can do like CPA you all the fun stuff and that could add some serious value to your business and you know great more cash flow on the monthly basis for you so that's nice too the one thing you do as well is change PDI links to white athletes and something Rob did and a case study about going to not here in a second you also have green SOPs that's stands for standard operating procedures basically a semi operating procedure to detail how you do something so say like keyword research your content for guys how you format content are you upload content even and you give to an EA or even an apprentice would be you know qualified as an SLP basically may hand out to someone they should be able to do an 80% as good as you that's the goal and when you have a bunch of a sense of ease to give to a potential buyer well that doesn't necessarily increase the price of your business it doesn't crease the fire of confidence in your business so they look at that like oh well this guy is basically an operations manual for me to follow so that's that you know and there's an entire roadmap of what to do to maintain this business right so that adds a lot of value to a potential buyer and it gives them a lot more confidence in what you're selling so three months out you don't really want to do anything too crazy here because your your business is going to be evaluated on like a six month to a 12-month net average so you do anything crazy in your income suddenly dips you kind of screwed yourselves you don't you don't want to do that right but right now this is a really good time to look at back of your traffic look back at your revenue numbers was there any dips no was there any spikes why why were there as a Spiker tip you know I have a good reasons especially on the dips because the hardest question different gas it's always going to be about your traffic dip or revenue tip right so you better have good answers for that another thing is you want to really concise it's about bad links this is an SEO crowds I'm sure I do want you to much what that means but yeah you can definitely creep into science like build a really big authority site you might do some keyword cannibalization purely on accident you know so you want get rid of that as possible and honestly it's some of the native SEO campaign for years right good idea to get rid of it at this point so what I talked about earlier about changing pbn links to white handlings Ron Atkinson actually did this he partnered up with Huntington a few months before they sold their site it was a little thing that ran called project the white hat and uh some of you out there who are hardcore great ass right screw that white hat and I'm not gonna do any of that but you might be surprised how much you can actually hurt Mike Doyle white hat so we analyzed 99 GPS sites and 99 sites without you guys money sites it does happen to work out that we sold a hundred ninety-eight and even split because it was weird but no white hat on average sold for ten percent more value now now might not sound a lot but your site is for 200k but that's it's like an extra $20,000 in your pocket right so they can't be worthwhile to change those PPI ways especially you know a good consultant like Rob use you get all the systems already in place and we'll break that down a little bit more about what they did later on the presentation what I would thing to know about white hat sites is they so much quicker because again the fire confidence is there there's no PBM objections none of that everyone's hungry for a white hat site so that's one of the reasons why they're more valuable but but that said I know no epns I know a majority of this crowd a lot of the strategies they're building on ton of TV ads and I talked to a few people already here we were surprised yourself site that's BPM weights on it so I do like a little bit already don't believe the hype there's plenty of people who are buying TV on sites and a lot of these fires they're not stupid about naive in fact they are quite successful savvy buyers we have buyers of my sites that have TV outlets over and over and over again from us you're in an ear out in they were just losing money all the time I mean I don't know why they would keep that business small right let's be strange so most of the time a buyer doesn't care as much about the SEO as you might think SEO so they tend to care about their SEO a lot more a little bit more buy out the biggest ones that I as a buyer they just want to find the site for the data and maybe they're like a Facebook ad viewer and the SEO is just kind of like icing on cake for your affiliate site something along those lines one thing you should know about the PBM site so if you decide to sell just be prepared to take a little bit longer with them because you will have those objections and especially if it's a smart buyer a smart buyer might not care that there's a few yet but it will make it seem like he cares and because of that do try to talk to you down on the price oh yeah and maybe you should discount this so that 26 X let's see 25 X or maybe you do a longer earn out here you type the rankings or something like that so that's something to expect more of now one way you can overcome this problem is over coming up with just massive amount of support and then obviously if you're building out and really almost any affiliate site the amount of support you can give someone it's pretty bit always once the work is done it's all front limit right there's not that much of work left to do unless they want to grow the site or something like that but their point I'm maintaining the site we're at it where it is it isn't much to do so if your competitors selling a site similar to yours says white hat is offering 30 days before you go off for 60 day support and you probably won't even do that much okay I in two weeks the guy is good to go most of the time so that's one way to get rid of get rid of overcoming with support if you have SOPs like that manual book that's also super helpful because again it shows confidence in your processes in your business which is part of the major reason that fires objective-c tasks they're not confident right but you can show that how confident you are in it then you know it makes them a lot more reachable what what do you built one last thing or two glass things actually so one of the things you can do if you sell a site with DTS is you don't give away the PDI Network that's another business actually a lot of people have instead you can just rent out the links which pretties a little small residual income let's say you had I don't know eight eight fleets at our PV I'm late twenties your filly incite a you so you rented it to the buyer for $10 per so eighty dollars per month the only thing that would change in this outcome is that since your business is based off of a monthly net profit that eighty dollars would go into the expenses of all that net profit so that would be like inside the business listing already for the seller or for the buyer looking at it like they looked about to be $80 to maintain this business and of course some buyers they all do you'll go white hat and eventually stop paying you now perhaps say yeah I don't need to sleep anymore but somewhat we'll just keep them forever yeah I think you no problem I'll pay that too to the end of time you know whatever the last thing I will tell you about DBS which I kind of already pin to that about it take you longer is expect more deal structures especially if it's a high six figures site there's probably gonna be a lot more wheeling and dealing and negotiation that's involved speed and negotiation ah biggest key thing to negotiation in my opinion it's just to be flexible so with some people they come with just readily numberless take ideas like on this is a $600 another website I expect you to pay me six hours out of there right now like come on man look we don't have six legs it's any other pocket or Amazon affiliate site right so that's why you know you gotta negotiate now with that said you should be flexible in terms of price support things like that but you should not be flexible on a hard minimum sales price so this is the price you should have in your head like hey I listen to psycho 275 buy more than happy to walk away with 175 if you have that kind of flexibility you know you don't want to go down below your heart man himself price you want to walk away too happy right you don't want to walk away like now I'm sure glad I got scammed on that deal I'm gonna do that well walk away actually making the money that makes you happy that you sold the asset right the next thing I would suggest is become hyper responsive so this is something we see all the time southerners just stop responding to buyer questions they go off to trip to Bali maybe they're having a spiritual question Chiang Mai where yeah they just stopped talking to the buyer and they wonder well why is it might do getting sold well because you haven't answered any no two weeks so we've we've seen buyers on the verge of buying you know a six-figure or even multiple 6-meter site and they say hey look I also buy it at six for your site from you guys well not buy it from this guy he hasn't responded to me in a week and a half but he's not willing to respond to me when I'm about to give it like a 50k help that is he going to be during the support stage right it's gonna be awful to work with so that might be hyper responsive if you want to be you get a better price on your deal I'm getting quicker price but also I'll be ready to answer the difficult questions so that would be like the traffic tips and stuff like that stuff I already kind of covered and promised the most important thing is look at someone that's buying your site as your customer signal they aren't right they're pinning you the money you're giving them a product they are your customer so the way to think about this process is the best way for our crowd here is when you go out a niche affiliate site what are you trying to do you're trying to get traffic that has a problem to your content that solves that problem and your affiliate offers a solution right that's what we're all trying to do pretty much so we'll get your business in the same perspective in your business is the solution to that minors problem and you only think okay well why is that the solution to this buyers problem and if you use a brokerage like us for example you kind of get a little bit of an added benefit because our business advisors almost the time to do the buyers right so we can give you a little bit more of a heads up into the psychology psychology of the prospect and so on if you're in a meeting a private cell you know think about where you found them you did you find about the chamber of commerce you know so maybe need to do new to the stump into a share or maybe you found them that up you know the meet up your and shake my everybody's well clued into digital marketing no it's trying to voice think about it what is the problem and look at my sites all so I'm on the deal structuring at burnouts this is something a lot of sellers don't expect to run into especially on the bigger sites so but it's get it down to the finance part here real quick so any site that's over $200,000 pretty much almost always have a her now not always almost always now I think you love that there's people with that money though just pay up front or almost all up front for the business but anything over that it's very rare and the reason why financing is super difficult in our industry you know if you're getting a five hundred thousand dollar Amazon to the site you don't go walking into Wells Fargo chase like hey man you give me a business loan is don't name and it's ten dollars with a collateral so you can lend against right no that's how you get out of their office so why that's super difficult that's what I deal structuring happens and there was a common kind of deal structuring or seller finance turnouts and what that means is I already have a 10,000 over website give me a hundred seven thousand they pay me 30,000 over a period of time like six twelve months maybe the longer depending ago she ations and the deal structuring part at that hard up might be tied to net revenue or net profit so for an example if I my or not was I'll be u 2k per month as long as the site hits four thousand dollars per month and that profit for the seller that's kind of a bad bad deal in some aspects because you don't want to type in that profit as a southern as a fire it's great cuz I didn't go hire a bunch of SEO guys order a bunch of content I a man out maybe to 500 every month this stuff I don't have a baby that's okay right but if you tied it to revenue instead is a much better deal for the seller because the revenue is a little bit harder to manipulate so that would be like a form of a deal structure another really common deal structure you might find is like bigger size you will give you an upfront amount and then they'll have a very long pee-yew a very low monthly enough say like $500,000 on $60,000 and it's over a 12-month period so this is from a balloon meter at the end of the 12-month period they won't be maybe 12 K of the 60 K and they have to now give you all the rest of it right now that makes balloon payment so that's a very common field structure as well just something to be prepared for you know I have this huge post as matt said I was pretty prolific it's like 8,000 works long or something you guys want to go read it it's all about feelings from training for online businesses all right so this is the case study for Rob Rob so generous to allow us to talk about his uh business here so the business overview the niche was sports and outdoors the monetization with Amazon Associates I'm sure most of you guys are pretty familiar with Amazon monthly net profit was making eight thousand three hundred twenty four dollars number of content pages under six you know it was listed for $275,000 $40 on May 1st of this year that listing multiples at 33 X and it sold for 2 or 35 pay later that month with a sell multiple of 28 X with two hundred thirty five thousand dollars upfront cash so you might be looking at this right now if you like to 75 it's over 235 it's kind of a bad deal right but if you get all that cash off the front without any earn out there's no risk to the seller and what's nice is that Ron had a hard minimum sales price of more like 175 and he always also valuing the site more at 200,000 because of some of the stuff that was going to give it a second so this was actually a win for us so we're talking questions did these people ask Rob obviously traffic drops right like why is the traffic down in January well that'll be because up like Friday and Christmas obviously it was busiest time of the for almost all of us some of us are affiliates that's only make money during this time of the year right so that was the reason eyes coming back down to normal also at this time Ron had that listen his business of us in January but at this time simply 5% of his BPI plates I just better replace with the good ol white hat and it's real nice right so that moved it down by one or two positions some of those links weren't as powerful as the PBM Williams perhaps and as we all know if you move for a first position down to second or third you lose quite a bit of traffic the other problem was and this is the reason why the valuation and Rob said was a little bit lower around the 200-day bar well as you're generally trending downwards for a couple of products that I searched father they just weren't as popular as it used to be years ago but they were still getting some good traffic and of course the seasonal before starting the summer months most people are camping in the winter unless you're in Alaska like me and then there was unfortunately there was a negative SEO campaign that you had to disavow those links and so all these answers he gave to the buyers and the buyers were impressed like okay yeah this all makes sense so this goes back to the confidence building right that allows you to do better negotiation like you actually know what's going on here and let me explain is here ah one of the guys asked like okay you make a big deal about changing your PPI lines to white hat how is I was I've done how much did it cost and how could I do so wrong I should partner dum-dum had all the systems in place for it they spent forty seven hundred dollars on one-off or the temporary Virtual Assistants which then of them 45 to 50 guest post plus they did a scholarship wink okay that was the extent of their white hat outreach right there also another one end up giving a detailed document showing the disavowed lake so you did that to stop about negative SEO campaign other you can tell those questions part of that heart to actually answer but it is all about preparation right like if you prepare to answer those questions then you're not going to spend like two three days a week trying to figure out why did I have this dip you know becomes prepared to the table when you're prepared when you submit your Center so that allows you to be hyper responsive like Rob was very good at it so the first offer came in for off-site was $250,000 and forget her 20 bucks on upfront aim it 125 with 160 with a same burnout or thousand dollars more earn out I paid from a 30% monthly net profit until finish so this goes back to the deal structure I was just talking about where it's not that great of a deal over Rob it's tied to that profit because they can just purchase all that stuff that anything they want and that 30% we would be like one dollar one one you know it's a brawl counter is my steward 50k upfront 150 170 cage you're bigger upfront and you wanted to turn out to be a hundred percent of the monthly never bought them to finish great feel for a seller terrible deal for a buyer the buyer now Wow no operational cash flow when he's running that business he just spent hundreds NT thousand dollars out of his pocket because he didn't want to pay the full of fluffy because he wanted to use that cash flow to improve the business now he's excited to pay a hundred percent of the new businesses profits it's a very difficult deal for buyers who said our business advisor suggested that a blue payment would be a better counter but luckily we never had to we never did the actual balloon counter is a second offer payment this one was a sales price of two hundred thousand so again the valuation of that mob thought the business would actually value that and the cash upfront would be a hundred fifty ten I had a her now at fifty thousand dollars eight out at $5,000 increments per month as long as it reached over eight thousand dollars in earnings every single month so the problem with this and the next one I was fourteen months come on with this is a worm talked about the business for a couple of the products of these four on the downward trend right so that was concerning goes a certain hit like where it's had a peak performance that it when it goes down these are all American turnout so this isn't a good deal either so we countered with 190 K up front $180,000 or not the offer was position actually not taking 100 idk but to get a rods of hard minimum this 175 uttered a TKO front and so it was supposed to make it this steel look way more attractively okay I guess I'll get 75 ko Wow all the way with this slide to was more discussion or announced the previous special clause basically with a lowered the threshold where there would be out of $2000 for now as long as I cited four thousand dollars per month this is far more reasonable about half of what the renter was making right here so the big go down there say you don't thumpers I probably still get paid back her now they don't was including a bonus at the site did in over a K or remained over TK there was a six point five K in there enough for that month so fairly good counter very reasonable as you can tell both the buyer and the seller are being flexible here this is always going to give or take right so there's somebody people I would be go changes luckily we didn't have to do this deal either there's a third offer came in we guys I came out that you're 35 game right now we're on that's done that's over oh so you can I guess what jumper he took I mean you already know is he should know which operator so migrating the six-figure site you do it right itself this could be an incredibly tedious process that is a super annoying he views us we do it for you we change the hosting the domain all the filling links to the order we work with the buyer and the seller to make sure this annoying task is done it's part of our service for you guys as just make sure we have entire specialist recreation team that says so what happens at this point is the buyer wires in to Empire flippers the money now if you're not using a fire flippers I highly recommend using some kind of escrow service at least that the buyer will wire into the money before you hand off the site what we do is they wire the buyer wires into money to us we hold on to the domain and we put the domain on to the buyers hosting once it's all set up and stuff we have the buyer verify the traffic verify the revenue that is seen the numbers it's supposed to though there's agreed upon and then the buyer after about a week two weeks you'll say go ahead I'm happy release the funds will reduce the funds to the seller - our 15 percent commission so we sent Rob a hundred ninety nine thousand and seven fifty dollars and that was all in 30 days who I mean that's pretty good at earnings for a month right so what would you do with two hundred thousand dollars dozens of possibilities away to do with its two hundred thousand dollar war chest we live a amazing type of digital opportunity with all the knowledge that's in this room alone it's just in this room alone I've got to do it's something the distraction you know if you find something that's working really well for you they just stick with what works for you if you're a black hat person that's charmed to the bone black hat you're making churning burn site that lasts between two months or maybe a year keep doing that skeleton moon we didn't thinking 30 50 K for a month just look by the way that site don't need to learn to do skill me it's all front of it anyways most of these sites take an hour a week to run if that unless you want to grow the site obviously which you find without how to grow sigh at that point so that's what I suggest your factory whatever your method is monetize your site creation really fine-tune your processes you can turn any black out cash flow into white hat assets so if you have an affiliate site right now and you want to make a profitable asset you can go check out our free valuation tool to find out what it's worth Vampira Clippers comm / valuation tool will give you a rough estimate now this isn't the real price of your business now if you submit your business with us we actually do that Inc process we have an entire team that goes over your site and we use path data as sales data to price your business the valuation tool it will give you a rough estimate so you have at least some rule of thumb of what your asset is worth right now so with that said thank you so much for listening to me and if you guys have any questions it will free board ask [Music] selling digital absent I personally got a lot of knowledge from you I learned a lot I was nervous [Music] [Music] [Music]