Bought a Website for $500, Turned it into $3,600 In 3 Days?

This week I want to talk about the world not of 1’s and 0’s but X’s and O’s. I want to talk about buying other people’s online babies.

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Brick 'n' mortar gets a lot of attention here at Contrarian Thinking. But if you're interested in building your digital asset empire with website flipping, you're in luck. We have a playbook on Cashflowing with Digital Assets inside our premium Cashflow membership. We filled it to the brim with exclusive interviews, step-by-step processes, and financial models on the how-to of digital acquisition. Check it out?

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Today in < 10 minutes we’re going to talk about:

• Building Empires. When ‘work’…. isn’t work at all and why I’ll still be talking about it on my deathbed.
• $1M a year flipping….websites? Flip websites to start your empire-building journey.
• The 3 F's. Find, fix, and flip your way to digital asset greatness.

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Building Empires: Legacies worth the name.

In normal speak, it's hard to invest thousands and make hundreds of thousands. BUT if you buy a website for thousands, making millions is actually possible. Like our friend Ramon who turned an initial $8,000 website purchase into a business that does 8 figures a year.

So, let’s get into how my friend James Camp started out buying small websites, flipping them for a few thousand a couple weeks later and then scaling that up to million-dollar acquisitions.

There’s a thing that’s funny about buying other people’s babies (businesses I mean), they take on a life of their own. They grow up into adults that are an amalgamation of you and the ones who came before you. It’s a rather beautiful Frankenstein to be… frank. I’ve felt this long leaning to a word, legacy.

What does it mean, legacy? What does it mean to stamp your pattern on the world in hopes that when you are ash it sticks? It is perhaps the best way to achieve the unachievable, immortality.

Maybe that is why I like the idea of building empires, they can outlive you. Similar to art. There are only a few things we remember from Napoleon’s time - the quotes that outlived him and the monuments he erected. These days it’s a bit ahem, “frowned upon” to go conquering lands so I can’t do that. Politics never really matched my particular shade of crazy so I’m not gunning for the Presidency. Thus, empires built of zeros and ones it is for me. You see the things we speak about here are ideas to grow your balance sheet and your bank account, but more than that they’re here to make it all matter. To live a life worthy of waking up early and burning the midnight candle. To leave a legacy worthy of a name on a building or employees who carry on in your wake.

I want my kids and my grandkids and their kids to reap the harvest I have sown. Maybe it won’t be as long as Rockefeller (who is still remembered 183 years later aka 2.5 people ago). Maybe it won’t be as long as Napoleon 253 (kind of like 3 people ago) but perhaps it’ll be something past. my bones in the dirt.

They say on our deathbed we tell many stories. But no one whispers they wish they had just worked a teeny bit more as they leave this world. No one? Between you and me I’m not so sure about that. After all, there isn’t a human I like as much as a pen in my hand, a creation to be had, and a thought in my mind.

We all die alone in the end anyway. At least we can leave something behind us.

AND THAT kind of empire-building - seems worth it all to me.

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Flip websites to start your empire building

James' story: James bought BestDogFrisbee.com for $500 after meeting the founder on a FB group for internet founders. It is an affiliate site for, you guessed it, Dog Frisbee’s making just $13 a month, but with 30 hours of work, he got it to $100 a month and flipped the site for around $3,600.

That means he made about $100 an hour. It’s not the biggest deal in the world but that’s the point. Start small, then scale. Also - don’t worry next we’ll show you how he would make $1.1M doing a similar process in a sec.

Here’s his plan:

Step 1: Identify 20 top keywords to target (“best dog frisbee” for example).

Step 2: Create new articles around those target keywords. Publish a new one every 2 weeks. Batching the content works well so he writes 5 or 6 articles now and schedule them out for the next couple months. Or uses SEO specific writers from SEMrush to do it for him for $25 an article.

Step 3: Update old articles; some mention the year 2020, so he just changes those to 2022.

Step 4: Add comparison tables for the articles that talk about products. People love visuals and retain information much better from them.

Step 5: Make an exit intent pop up for a chewy.com affiliate program.

Step 6: Add some more tech and help with monetization like Ezoic, programmatic display ads to run on non-product pages.

Step 7: Fix all broken affiliate links found on pages. You can use SEMrush.

Step 8: Wait 60-90 days and relist on Flippa to turnaround and sell it.

This isn’t rocket science, it’s a playbook applied again and again by someone who has been there before.

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SPONSORED BY TRENDS

What’s TRENDing?

Where do I go to get my ideas?

I’ll tell you.

Have you ever wished you could find unique ideas BEFORE they become saturated by the masses? We used to waste hours scouring Reddit and our competitors to find the best new ideas. Then we found Trends. Inside Trends you’ll find an arsenal of business-building case studies, exclusive online trainings, and booming industry breakdowns. Plus, their analysts publish new ideas weekly, break down all the numbers, deliver their newsletter to you and then you can run with them in a weekend.

In fact, Trends signals like this inspired me to go write about Harrison, who made 8 figures with e-commerce needlepoint. Yup.

So start the next big thing…months before anyone else even knows about it.

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Or go big and make $1.1M in 12 months:

Now let’s level up and say you have $50k instead of $500 here’s what he’d do:

First, he would buy a site for sale on Flippa for $50k+ with a loan or capital raised. Now;

Step 1: Site is a content-driven grooming site making $9k passively from ADSENSE! Right of the bat, you are going to either use a premium network like LockerDome or Mediavine, and DOUBLE that revenue. If you are really smart you will set up your own ad server with header bidding (eek I don’t even know what that is so we’ll skip that).

Step 2: Within 30 days you are making more like $18k a month. Why? Just better payouts, smarter systems etc. Now you could just flip the site. Pull in a clean $297k in profit. Could probably do the whole thing in 90 days, and net $250k if you knew what you are doing.

But $250k isn't enough...we want more…

Step 3: Luckily for you, the site has NO EMAIL LIST AND GETS 5k UNIQUES A MONTH.

So, you are going to make a lead magnet and get them into your newsletter. Start collecting those easy 100+ new subscribers a day!

If you want to see the rest of the thread, you can break it down here. From here he goes on to create a DTC (direct to consumer site) for grooming, that to me is a VERY intensive play so maybe I’d stick to the arbitrage of ad networks and increasing traffic, info products, ads etc.

James Camp 🛠,🛠 @JamesonCamp Another straightforward way any of you can make $1.1+ million in the next 12 months A thread ⬇️⬇️⬇️ October 2nd 2020 217 Retweets 1,807 Likes

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Regardless, you DO NOT need millions to buy businesses as we highlight on Unconventional Acquisitions until we are blue in the face. Start where you are with what you have… or take our course on it if you want to learn more.

Find, fix, and flip your website to greatness

Here’s a Cliff Notes master class on website flipping and what we’d do after speaking to James:

• Pick the site. Research and choose the type of website you want to flip: Think content, e-commerce, marketplace, Software as a Service. James typically recommends content-based sites to most newbies given they’re less complex. Add content → increase traffic → more ad revenue.
• Categorize website sizes and assess risk-adjusted return: Paradoxically, larger investments are often safer, as their revenue is easier to verify along with their web traffic. Above $50K-$5M is a sweet spot as you could hire an operator, focus on the parts you’re excited about, and still avoid the attention of the 'bigs'. That said I’ve sold a site for $8k before that made the buyer 6 figures.
• Conduct due diligence: James would rather overpay for a site than try to find diamonds in the rough. If you are buying through an aggregator (Flippa or Empire Builders, for example), use the Aggregators ‘verified listings’ if they have them as they’ve already conducted partial due diligence for you.

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• Verify quantity: Verify seller claims of visits, revenue, turnover rate, and anything else numbers based. Flippa’s article on due diligence, especially their tool recommendations, are gold. Learn the power of backlink validation as part of your verification strategy.
  • Verify quality: Visit the site itself and see the seller's quality. Even more important, speak to the person you’ll be buying from and assess. If they’re not someone you’d buy a used car from, probably not your seller, no matter the deal terms or revenue numbers.
  • Validate price. Solid multiples for websites are:
    • Average monthly net revenue in the trailing 6 months (36-60x this average monthly net revenue)
• Purchase the site itself: Make your purchase and get started improving.
• If you bought a content-heavy website: don’t be afraid to give away your expertise for later paying customers, target keywords in the area you’re writing content, and update any existing content from the previous owner.
• Monetize:
  • Google Adsense: 2 million users strong, Google’s AdSense is definitely a possible advertising partner
  • Digital Product sales: Build newsletters or online courses. We like Thinkific for Course Creation.
  • Affiliate marketing: Offervault and Clickbank are two big aggregators.
  • Sponsored stuff (posts, directory, product placement): Charging for directory placement is especially powerful if you’re serving a niche market.

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• Transition your visitors into newsletter subscribers: There’s a reason we have a course on Building a 7 Figure Newsletter. We average anywhere from 3-7% for email subscribers to purchasers which quickly turns into 7 figures a year.
• Optimize visitor experience and increase monetization with a tool like Ezoic that gives your suggestions for your site to increase conversion.
• Focus on multiple streams of traffic, arriving organically (not all SEO from Google, etc): Search engine-based traffic can be difficult to maintain and puts you at the mercy of an algorithm however content is a beast that you have to continue to feed. Marry the two.
• Give your users an exit-intent popup as they leave: Internet marketing 101 and yet many do not do it.

With all this in mind, what kind of earnings are we talking about?

​Flippa’s online business valuation can give you some numbers, but there’s a bit of art and science here. Search Flippa and you’ll see that sites selling for around $50,000 are often making ~$1,000/month. That’s $12,000/year and you’d pay off your initial purchase in 50 months. But if you were to increase your revenue by even $200/month would be a 20% increase in revenue for the year. Selling this site at the same multiple (50x) would be $60,000.

If you held it for a year and sold, this would be a 49% cash-on-cash return.

Hard to get 49% in the stock market. That’s why as often as we can we bet on one thing, ourselves. Maybe you should too.

Build your physical empire by starting digital,

Codie

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The 'Not So Boring' Section:

• Treat Yo' (Best) Self: Are you looking to optimize your life? Feel more fulfilled? Need to tackle your goals? Try out this journal... it's backed by fancy science stuff, so it works.
• Rent a What??: Yup apparently in today's day you can actually rent...friends. And make good money doing it. See what I mean.​
• 40 Year High?: If you're not keeping an eye on the economy...what are you doing? 9.1% inflation at last report. Highest in 40 years.

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I Asked a Billionaire How to Make Money

I sat down with my friend who is damn near a billionaire and asked him candidly, “How did you make your fortune?” What he told me surprised me. He said it all came down to training his brain to do this ONE task incredibly well every way.

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Watch to find out this one task and his actionable tips that have changed my life so could change yours too!

As we're talking about website acquisition, this week's YouTube video is brought to you by our friends at Flippa!

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What Did You Think of This Week's Newsletter?

​💲💲💲💲💲F*cking Killer​
​💲💲💲Meh​
​💲Do Better​

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Disclaimer – This is the “Be an adult” section. Everything mentioned above isn’t advice, just a recount of what I did. That said: This article is presented for informational purposes only. The opinions stated here are not intended to recommend any investment or provide tax advice. Neither are they an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any current or future investment vehicle managed or sponsored by Codie Ventures, LLC or its affiliates. All material presented in this newsletter is not to be regarded as investment advice, but for general informational purposes only. Day trading and investing do involve risk, so caution must always be utilized. We cannot guarantee profits or freedom from loss. You assume the entire cost and risk. You are solely responsible for making your own investment decisions. We recommend consulting with a registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, and/or financial advisor. If you choose to invest with or without seeking advice from such an advisor or entity, then any consequences resulting from your investments are your sole responsibility. By reading/sharing this newsletter or consuming our content on our other channels, you are indicating your consent and agreement to our disclaimer.

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