How A College Student Built A 6-Figure Business Flipping Websites

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How A College Student Built A 6-Figure Business Flipping Websites

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Below is a guest post by Mushfiq. Since 2008, he's bought, grown, and sold (flipped) over 215 content websites with multiple 6-figure exits. He's a known expert in the field of M&A partnered with digital marketing.

You can check out his flagship website flipping site, The Website Flip, or if you want to hire him to help you in M&A, then check out WebAcquisition.com. You can also find him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

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While many people talk about building passive income from niche sites, they can be missing out on a huge opportunity by not looking at the world of website flipping. With an average valuation multiple of 35x to 45x monthly (i.e., roughly 3X to 4X annual), and that trend continuing to go up, one good site sale can be life-changing for many people.

I built up my first website in 2008 in the VoIP niche. That was sold to Slashdot Media in 2010.

This got me interested in the prospect of building sites and then selling them at a significant value. Since then, I’ve flipped 215+ websites with multiple 6-figure exits, but the majority of the deal size ranges less than 5 figures (i.e., smaller and quick exits).

Buying, growing, and selling websites is something anyone can learn. It’s not rocket science. The basic skillsets include a combination of content marketing and search engine optimization to drive organic search traffic to the website.

Focusing on website flipping also opens up not only the possibility of building and selling sites, but finding underperforming sites, getting a good deal buying them, and then improving earnings to sell them for a major profit.

There’s a lot to learn about website flipping so let’s jump in!

The 4-Part Process

There are four basic parts to the website flipping process. Each one has its own unique challenges and “ins and outs” but always keeping an eye on the overall process is important.

The 4-part process (in order) is:

1. Finding good potential websites to buy
2. Buying the website at a good price
3. Rapidly improving traffic, rankings, and earnings for the site
4. Selling the website (completing the flip)

The most successful flippers know the importance of paying attention to each part of the process.

#1. Finding Websites to Buy

I will search listing sites like Empire Flippers and Flippa, as well as hobby-based Facebook groups for buying and selling sites (e.g., Website Flipping - Buy & Sell Websites group). Sometimes there are good deals here, but I will also sometimes just search Google to find acquisition targets.

Let me explain. If there is a particular niche I enjoy or want to work on I’ll comb through Google search results looking for hobby sites that are clearly written by passionate hobbyists but aren’t optimized for SEO or monetization. Then I reach out asking if they’re interested in selling.

Most don’t respond, but some of my best deals have come from those who have.

Once you find a site that is worth looking at, you must put it through due diligence. My short list of what I need to proceed:

• Looking at a site’s full backlink profile (looking for spammy links)
• Access to view Google Analytics
• Traffic history (at least 5,000 pageviews/mo is my criteria)
• Content information (at least 50 articles published)
• Monthly income & profit/loss statements
• Information on why the owner is selling

If you find any red flags at all, walk away and look for another deal.

Given enough time combing through site auctions, marketplaces, and groups you’ll continue to hone your skills to find websites with good potential more quickly.

#2. Buying Websites

Website valuation is a key part of the process. For content websites valuation is based on average monthly earnings. The average monthly earnings will be pulled from the last 6 months’ earnings, or the last 12 months if the niche is seasonal.

That average is multiplied by a multiplier which varies depending on backlinks, website history, type of revenue, potential, and even the desire of individual buyers.

As an example, I bought a site in the dating niche for $32,000 and it was earning $800/month on average over the last 6 months. This equated to a 40X multiple.

Negotiate for a good deal. The better the deal here, the better the profit margins will be at the end.

If I’m buying through a marketplace where the price is more or less set it’s important to me to find sites that:

• Have obvious fast ways to improve monetization like switching from Google AdSense to Ezoic or Mediavine (resulting in a 50-75% boost in revenues) or adding affiliate links when there are none

• Have good niche authority but terrible on-site SEO that could be fixed to quickly boost rankings (and therefore traffic) 

If the site has both, then I’m excited even at paying market valuation levels because I know the site is undervalued because it’s underdeveloped and under optimized.

For private deals, negotiate. Sometimes the website owner will quote a low price that you’ll be happy to pay. If they quote high, they often do so expecting negotiation on price.

Always use Escrow when buying or selling sites to protect all parties involved. Escrow.com is a standard solution.

#3. Improving the Site (Traffic, Rankings, Earnings)

Growing the site is going to be a major part of making a flip profitable, not to mention increasing the monthly revenue while you hold onto the site for the next year or two before selling further down the road.

The immediate steps are to fix any major technical SEO or On-Site SEO issues that are killing the site’s potential. If something in the foundation is off (not using headers, orphaned content, no sitemap, etc) that needs to be addressed ASAP.

After these fixes, work on easy wins like:

• Switching to a more profitable ad display network
• Adding high-converting affiliate offers
• Adding high-value affiliate offers

If I can do something today that brings in more revenue right away, I want that to happen.

The next step is to focus on the on-site side of things. Does the site use internal linking? Are headers properly used with keywords throughout the article? Do articles need some rewriting (especially opening paragraphs)?

When these basic steps are taken care of to improve the site, the next step is using the rankings and authority the site has to rank new content. I aim for large batches of content focusing on low-competition keywords. I don’t need a single home run - a lot of articles hitting on decent traffic will add up very fast.

These are articles the site can rank for very quickly, bringing in more traffic and more earnings, helping to start boosting that average monthly revenue number.

#4. Selling the Website

Keep in mind that valuations happen by the last six months (L6M) or the last twelve months (L12) for figuring out the average. That means we need to hold the site over time to make sure the increased revenue has time to bring up that monthly average from when the site was bought to when it’s sold.

This is why most sites are held for at least one year, if not longer, as they are being improved. 

Many niche website builders sell sites because (1) it provides a significant payout upfront, and (2) allows them to reinvest the funds into more sites. Having the payout now instead of waiting 35-45X months provides a way to derisk the investment.

When it’s a good time to sell, decide on how to do it. If this is the first time, going through a broker that offers Escrow and guidance can be a very good move to help smooth out the process.

You will need to provide:

• Up to date Analytics data
• Verifiable earnings/revenue data

Beyond this I’m a huge proponent of positioning your site for sale by creating a document showing the work put in, monetary investment, highlighting major benefits (like hard-to-get authority backlinks), and even potential easy wins still there for the buyer to take advantage of.

If you are doing a private deal make sure to work out the details of the Escrow process, where the money will be held, and set up agreements such as technical support for the transfer and post-sale support.

Then at that point enjoy the profit from a successful website flip.

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