💸 Buying a $14K site with a passionate fanbase

Nano Thought

The markets are not looking good right now. Stocks and crypto are both getting crushed recently. Where's the market headed next? I don't think anyone really knows. With the Fed pushing interest rates higher, stocks (especially tech) and crypto could keep falling.

While I'll keep investing some of my money in stocks and crypto for the long-term, the surer way to increase your net worth in the short-term is with cash-flowing websites.

James Camp 🛠,🛠 @JamesonCamp Owning websites is the best way to quickly build a valuable portfolio of businesses What takes decades in real estate can take a couple of years by owning online businesses June 20th 2022 12 Retweets 184 Likes

You can start with less than $100 if you're building from scratch, and maybe $500 or so if you're buying an existing site. I don't know of a better way to build a cash-flowing portfolio of businesses than owning websites.

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This Week’s Nano Flip Opportunity

This week we found a great opportunity to build a community and long tail content for a site listed on Motion Invest:

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This one isn't a huge business, but you could probably grow it steadily and make some good money. Traffic is stable and the site survived the Google core update in May, which rocked many others.

Here's a look at the traffic:

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This website is an affiliate business in the gun accessories niche, specifically scopes. The great part about a niche like that is that your customer base is very passionate about the subject, which means there's like an opportunity to build a community/newsletter around your site.

I also like that the traffic is nice and spread out, the top page accounts for less than 9% of the overall traffic.

Communities/newsletters are secret weapons for content sites. Build an engaged community around your subject matter, even if it's small, and you'll do well. You can find free content contributors and will have a way to get people coming back to you again and again. This might be a newsletter or something like a Facebook Group.

If you take a look at the analytics above, you'll see a pretty good foundation to work with. The average time on page is pretty high, meaning the existing audience is fairly engaged with the content already. Would be great to lower that bounce rate though!

The site makes its money from 2 sources: Amazon and Ezoic.

Right now, the site is definitely not optimized. Some of the display ad spots aren't set up properly; a few of them are cut off on the margin, and others take up way too much space. The first thing I'd do is clean up the design of the website so that the ads display properly. That should increase income right away. The team at Ezoic could help you do this. Or if you increased traffic, taking the site to MediaVine or Adthrive would be a great idea.

Besides that, I'd immediately create a newsletter/or FB group and implement a popup that asks visitors to sign up. If we could convert 2% of website visitors to the newsletter, we'd start adding 144 subscribers per month (based on the past 6 month average of site visitors).

Here's how this flip could look:

Investment:

• $14,102 purchase
• $485 monthly profit (based on May numbers)
• 29.07x monthly profit multiple

Value Add:

• Increase monthly profit from Ezoic by 25% through optimization and traffic increase (from $71 to $88.75+)
• Increase monthly profit from Amazon by 25% optimization and traffic increase (from $414 to $517.5)
• Create email newsletter or community and convert 2% of website visitors
  • After 6 months, you'd have 950 subscribers (assuming moderate website traffic growth of ~2% per month)
  • You can monetize newsletters at around $0.25 per subscriber per month - or $237.50 by month 6

By month 6, you should have an asset producing $843.75 per month - an annual run rate of $10,125!

Let's keep the math super simple for this one, and assume you don't even make more money as it grows in the first 6 months, but that at month 6, is when your optimizations come into changing the revenue (Amazon, Ezoic, and the newsletter/community). You would have collected $2910 in rev for the first 6 months, and $5062.50 in next 6 months.

...And you now have an asset worth $24,527.81 assuming you could sell for the same multiple you bought the site for.

The Return:

• $7,972.50 in revenue collected
• $24,527.81 sale of website
• $32,500.31 Total Return
• -$14,102 purchase (and lets just say - $3600 for the year in content/links/hosting) = $14798.31 Net Profit
• 104.93% return in 12 months

Of course, this is just a hypothetical scenario. Always do your own research and evaluate each opportunity based on your skillset! I kept the math simple on this one to break down a scenario, obviously it could be more or less.

Lets note somethings to be careful of with the site:

• backlink profile is weak
• low domain rank with Ahrefs - probably need to aggressively work on a link building strategy to keep its rankings and keep it growing.
• Strong competitors in the space
• site hasn't been around that long
• Not TONS of opportunities to increase revenue without really increasing traffic

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Nano Tips

Everyone seems to be worried about SEO for websites they want to flip. Keep in mind that there is more than one way to grow a site.

Email, social, Facebook groups, Quora, syndication deals etc all exist.

Don't lean on just one channel - become a great growth hacker and CMO and you wont be stuck relying only on SEO for traffic. If you're not great at SEO, then don't spend all day banging your head against the wall.

Figure out what your marketing strengths are, and use that skill to grow whatever website you buy.

Try not to rely on just one source of traffic!

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Builders Build

Last week on the pod, we did a 1-year recap on Colin’s wife’s eCommerce business acquisition, Glowless.

On this episode we recap where the business started, what was executed on in the first year, and where it’s going in the next 12 months. Topics include:

• Product cost down and packaging overhaul
• SEO successes
• Email automation
• Conversion rate optimization
• Tik Tok organic and paid
• The offer: Starter kits? Recurring?

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​Listen Here​

Thanks for reading! I'll hit your inbox next week with another breakdown of a website flip.

Thanks from the Nano Flips team

(James)

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P.S.

Check out 2 newsletters from my best friends Oren and Colin

Free Smoke - A Cannabis Business newsletter by Colin Landforce: https://freesmoke.xyz/​

Product People - Learn the art of building CPG brands with Oren Schauble: https://go.orenjohn.com/cpg/​

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All investment strategies and investments involve risk of loss. Nothing contained in this newsletter should be construed as investment advice. Any reference to an investment's past or potential performance is not, and should not be construed as, a recommendation or as a guarantee of any specific outcome or profit.

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