Category Archives: Case Studies

Case Study: Buying A Site on Flippa for Profit – Part 2

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It’s been about 12 days since I started this Case Study (check out Part 1 here), so I thought it was about time for an update. Unfortunately due to the holidays, I haven’t been able to spend as much time working on the site as I wanted to.

I really haven’t made many changes to the site itself at all, other than some small on-page SEO fixes. The main things that I have done are link building and social bookmarking. If you don’t have the time to do social bookmarking yourself (like me), I highly recommend Red_Virus’s $25 package. I have used Amit for several projects and he always does a great job. I’ve had a site get ranked just from these bookmarks alone.

Here’s what the traffic has looked like since I took over the site:

Case Study - Traffic Stats

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the site has a good amount of Pageviews and a decently low Bounce Rate. So the people that get to the site seem to be sticking around and browsing for a bit. I just need to continue increasing the traffic. The good news is the trend is definitely upward for overall visitors.

As far as monetization, the affiliate banner I put on it has failed so far. It gets barely any clicks and it has not generated a single lead. I’ll have to test out different banners or offers to optimize this. For AdSense, it’s averaging about $0.75 – $1.00 a day right now. So at this rate, if I leave it alone, it will pay back the money I spent on it in about 2 years. Obviously that’s no good, so more optimization will follow!

The next step is to start an email list so that I can capture addresses and send them relevant articles and affiliate offers on an ongoing basis. That’s all I’ve got to report for now!

Case Study: Buying A Site on Flippa for Profit

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Last month Stackman did a really cool post about buying websites on Flippa and optimizing them for profit. I have created tons of websites from scratch, but I’ve never tried to buy one before. So I took his advice, went over to Flippa and started browsing around. Here’s what I found…

There’s a bunch of crappy websites for sale!

There are good ones as well but you have to really dig through a bunch of crap to find the good stuff. I don’t think I was prepared for all of the retarded sites for sale at outrageous prices, but I got used to it. I ended up bidding on two different sites that I thought had potential.

Flippa

If you haven't ever been to Flippa.com, you should check it out!

The first site ended up being highly competitive, and went for $3,200. I didn’t want to spend that much my first time out, so I let that one go. The problem was it was already too far developed and had affiliate income already set up on it. Honestly I’m not sure why the guy was selling it, unless it had just been sandboxed or something… Anyways, on to the next one.

The second site had about 15 bids on it as well as a Buy It Now price of $500. After doing some due-diligence and researching the niche and the site’s traffic, I decided to go ahead and buy it. I’m sure I could have gotten a better deal by waiting for the auction to finish, but I’m pretty impulsive when I get an idea into my head so I just bought it for the $500 BIN price.

The reason I liked the site was that it had a lot of content already generated. It has over 2,000 pages in it. That saves me a lot of work on the front end so I can focus on getting it traffic and monetizing it. It doesn’t have a blog, so I will probably add one of those shortly and put some more content on it. It also had quite a few backlinks already going to it. It has a PR of 0, but the groundwork is still there. It should be fairly easy to get it up to PR 2 or PR 3 in the next couple of months.

AdSense was the only type of monetization on the site, and there weren’t very many ads at all. I went ahead and placed a 468×60 banner for an affiliate offer in the header, and spruced up the AdSense locations. I will most likely build an email list as well so I can mail offers to my users.

That’s all I’ve got to report for now. I’m excited about the project and hopefully it will be a good long-term source of income. It gets old doing the affiliate campaign grind after a while, so this has been a fresh breath of air.