How important is it to have a map? Does it matter who you buy your map from?

We will get into all of that below.

The ‘Free Map’ versus the ‘Paid Map’

My family and I went hiking in Santa Fe this week.

The entire time we were walking on the hiking trails, my family kept joking about the ‘free’ map we were all using, versus the ‘paid’ map a man in the gift shop had tried to sell us before we went on our merry way.

The man trying to sell the map mentioned that the free map wasn’t accurate and complete and that you had to pay for the map to get all the information you needed.

Of course we didn’t buy the paid map and we started our hike. Right away, we were looking at which trail to start the hike on. The free map didn’t have this information marked clearly on it.

My dad remarked jokingly, “Guess we should have paid for the map! Then we’d know which way to go.”

As we kept walking, the map jokes continued.

One of us would say, “I wonder what those rock formations were used for? I guess we’d know the answer if we’d paid for the map!”

and my sister would say, “Yeah, that type of information is definitely not included on the free map!”

Guess we should’ve paid for the map!

We’d all laugh and say, “Guess we should have paid for the map!” and make all these jokes about the free map missing information that the paid map included, but we were obviously kidding.

It was way more fun to joke about all the things the paid map had that the free map was missing than it would have been to actually have purchased the ‘paid’ map.

Jokes aside, having a map, whether that map is paid or free, can be useful in any endeavor, especially when you’re trying to reach an end goal you have in mind.

If you don’t know where you’re going, and if you don’t have a clear plan written out, then there is no way you’ll get there.

How can you reach a goal if you don’t have one?

One thing that every single goal, website and non-website, I’ve ever reached has in common, is that I knew I wanted it before getting it, I wrote it down, made a plan to get there, and then worked toward it.

The point is, if you don’t clearly identify your goal, make a goal action plan, and work toward it every day, then you will never get to your goal, or any goal at all.

Create a map to help reach your goal

You need to create your own map, and it can be a free one. You can also get a special ‘paid’ map, by paying someone who’s been there to help you create a map, but the main takeaway is you need to identify a goal and create a map to reach that goal.

Otherwise, you’ll be drifting in life directed by other’s goals and wishes, such as your boss’s in your 9 to 5. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of.

You simply need to realize if you have your own goals to work toward and if yes what they are, or if you would rather be present and live life without specific goals.

Who should you hire to help you create a map?

If you want to start a company like Amazon, then paying Jeff Bezos to create your map would probably be a good idea. Although hiring him to create a map would likely be out of most of our price range.

If you want to be a teacher, then sure hiring your first grade teacher to create a map is a great idea. If you’re doing anything but becoming a teacher, then likely you’ll want to pass on Ms. Jenny’s map since she won’t know how to get to where you’re looking to go.

My first website goal

For example, my first website goal was to make $1,000 a month with a website. That is the reason I made my first two to three site purchases, all with this goal in mind.

I looked for sites I could take to this level on Flippa, would buy the sites and then work on improving their revenue.

At first I would switch ad networks to improve revenue to get to the $1,000 a month goal.

Then I worked on keyword research and adding new content to scale the sites farther past that point once I hit my goal.

If I hadn’t had my specific goal in mind of $1,000 a month, then I never would have spent as much as I did on website #2 and #3, because I would have had no reason to without my having my specific goal in mind.

Website Goal Map

1) When creating a website goal map, first figure out what you want and why you want it. You can spend time thinking about this in silence, or go on a walk outside and sleep on it for a few days.

Don’t make any decisions when you’re in any emotional state other than calm. If you’re angry, frustrated, depressed, excited, or emotional in any way, sleep another day or two before making your decisions or goals to avoid rushing into anything.

2) Next write down your specific goal, such as website revenue per month.

3) Then write down how you will get there. You can be specific here and write down if you will buy a site making X amount or start your own site from scratch, then what you will do to increase traffic or revenue and get to your goal:

Examples of action steps:

• Change theme to speed up site
• Test new ad networks
• Test new ad placements
• Keyword research 100 keywords for website
• Write and publish one piece of 1,000 word content per day for the next 100 days
• Backlink strategy
• Promotion strategy
• Email strategy
• Other traffic / revenue strategies

Fit your goals into your daily routine

I’ve found it is best when you can fit each into a specific daily routine, and take time to reflect each week and analyze progress and results, then shift your strategy in the direction of what is working the best

Obviously, this entire goal mapping process may not work for everyone etc, *insert whatever disclaimer here* and this is not advice or financial advice in any way it is simply my own experience and what has worked well for me.

You can comment here and let me know if you have ever reached a goal you set, or your own specific goal-mapping process if it includes anything I didn’t mention!

Remember that website for sale last week?

Remember the matrixlab-examples.com website that a Her.CEO reader listed for sale last week?

Many of you were interested in purchasing the website, and a great buyer closed on the site this Wednesday.

The site had a solid monthly 18,193 last 30 days traffic, and 29 Ahrefs DA.

It was also severely under-monetized with only one revenue source, Adsense, which the valuation was based on, even though in the past the owner had made money off of teaching services and even selling a few guest posts, so it had a lot of potential.

The site ended up selling over-asking price, and both the buyer and seller were very happy with how the sale turned out.

Looking to sell your own website?

If any of you have a website you are looking to sell, you can send me an email at stacycaprio@gmail.com and I am happy to talk more to see if there is anything I can do to help.

How do you find a good website deal?

One of the Her.CEO site readers was interested if this specific site would sell because it was priced at a multiple a bit higher than an Adsense site would generally sell at.

At first I was surprised by this question simply because the site had tons of traffic, a very solid DA and age, and was severely under-monetized.

Then I realized that this was a way I could share with you guys to identify undervalued websites so you could find sites at a great deal. Ones that you can easily increase revenue on.

Which is better, profit or traffic?

Many people value profit on a site more than traffic. Sure, profit is nice, but you have to pay a multiple on profit, not traffic. Websites in today’s market are valued at a multiple of monthly profit, not traffic, and traffic is just as valuable as profit.

Traffic is arguably more valuable than profit, since you can always monetize traffic. You can monetize it in layers too, which is what makes it so valuable.

Monetize the site in layers

You can put ads on in layers. You can put products and services on top of that. You can sell sponsorships and email sponsorships and sponsored shout-outs. You can get even more creative and add layers on top of that.

Traffic is the baseline for profit. It’s a foundation for profit. So the fact that websites are valued based on profit and not traffic gives you guys a loophole. It gives anyone a loophole to get an undervalued site.

Find a site that has a ton of traffic and low profit. Then add layers of monetization to that site to quickly improve profit.

That is one way to find and buy an undervalued site and diamond in the rough, just like the site sold in my last email arguably was.

My favorite way to bump up a site’s revenue

The site sold in the last email is a great example of a site where you can add in more monetization methods to quickly increase revenue because it already has a ton of traffic. For example:

•  Adding in your own or outsourced Math tutoring or teaching services
• Adding in Math courses or ebooks, you could put your own or affiliate links
• Selling sponsored posts or links on the site, the old owner did this a bit in the past and found it successful but didn’t include this in his revenue or in the multiple since it was further in the past
• Selling banner ads to other Math teaching companies etc, since the site already has tens of thousands in traffic a month

How to quickly increase revenue on a site with traffic:

Buy an undervalued site by looking for one with lots of traffic but low profit

One of my favorite things to look for in any site I buy is, how can i increase the revenue here quickly, with the traffic we already have?

That’s why I love switching ad networks or adding in new ads to quickly increase revenue. Because it’s not a bet on if you can increase traffic with SEO or social media.

Less risk when you use the traffic you already have

It’s simply taking what you already have and squeezing more juice out of it. It’s less risky if you know the traffic you already have can be monetized in more ways or better ways than if you’re counting on scaling the traffic to the moon or making some bigger change.

You still need a long-term SEO plan

Of course, long-term, looking to scale traffic and actually grow the site is usually the best way to very significantly increase revenue over-time, but to take away the most risk, I’ve found it best to look for very high-traffic sites that are severely under-monetized.

Traffic & Attention are Valuable

The key thing to note here is if a website, or anything for that matter, has a lot of traffic and eyeballs on it, but little to no revenue, is that it is still valuable. Traffic and attention are very valuable and you can always monetize traffic.

Profit is Valuable, but so is Traffic

It is much easier to take a site with tons of traffic, and put more ads on it or different ads, or simply add in your own extra layers of monetization such as adding in your own products or services to sell on the site, and then see revenue increase significantly, than it is to take a site with little to no traffic, even if it has a high DA, and grow its traffic and revenue that way.

Find an under-valued site by looking for one with traffic and low revenue

The key point here is I’ve found from experience that a site with traffic is often just as valuable, or more valuable as a site with revenue.

The only difference is that a site with revenue will cost you more to purchase, since websites are valued at a multiple of monthly profit, not monthly traffic.

Leave a comment and let me know if you’ve ever bought a site with tons of traffic and then added more monetization methods, I’m interested to know if anyone else has and how they did it!

As a reader of the Her.CEO blog, you’re probably aware of the power of an affiliate business in starting off as an entrepreneur.

This post is an Empire Flippers case study from a seller who bought an Empire Flippers site and flipped it for a profit. The website buyer bought the site, optimized it, and then sold it for $136,773, getting to keep $116,257 in their pocket after transaction fees. In total, the seller made a total of $64,001 profit on the site from time of purchase to time of sale 18 months later. 

This case study walks you through exactly how the seller successfully bought, grew and flipped their website profitably, and includes some great insights that will help serve as a roadmap for anyone interested in learning more about how to successfully flip sites.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to monetize a website and create a hands-off source of income. Further down the road, you might even think about selling your site for a huge sum of money.

But what if the hidden value of an affiliate business lies in your skillset instead of the site itself?

Flipping sites can become a profitable career, even more so than building a business from scratch! Flipping online businesses for a living is becoming a growing industry. In the Empire Flippers marketplace, we see many sellers return as buyers, and they sell their acquisition for a profit in a year or so.

Once you’ve planned your exit strategy, you could use the capital windfall to buy a house without a mortgage, put the money toward your children’s college funds, or even buy a smaller affiliate business with the intention of improving it and selling it for a profit.

That’s exactly what one seller did in our marketplace: they bought an affiliate business and sold it for over $120,000 in profit after 1.5 years of improvement.

They achieved this success by following two simple steps:

• Creating a due diligence checklist and sticking to it.
• Figuring out a sustainable growth strategy that can be applied again and again.

We’ll break down how this seller achieved that in this case study, and hopefully you’ll have a better idea of what flipping online businesses looks like.

The Timeline

• Niche: Advertising, hobbies, lifestyle
• Site Created: May 2014
• Site Acquired: April 2017 for $52,256
• Monetization: Amazon Associates
• Total earnings (April 2017–October 2018): $60,000
• Completed Empire Flippers Application: October 6, 2018
• Listed on marketplace: October 14, 2018 for $136,773
• Agreed sale price: October 25, 2018 for $136,773
• Transaction completed: November 11, 2018. Net payout after broker’s commission: $116,257
• Total site profit: $124,750

Over the course of 18 months, this seller optimized the site and increased its overall earnings. After being listed for sale in the marketplace for only 11 days, it sold for its listing price in an all-cash offer.

Let’s break down the earnings. The site was bought for $52,256, and sold for $136,773. After the commission fee, the seller received $116,257. The seller made a profit of $64,001 from the initial purchase.

Keep in mind that the profit isn’t just the sales price. The seller received a monthly profit generated by the business from Amazon Affiliate commissions, which totaled around $60,000 during this time. In sum, the seller walked away with over $120,000.

Now that we know the details of the sale, let’s look at the seller’s strategy in buying the right asset to flip.

Fine-Tuning Due Diligence to Streamline Your Search

The seller’s main purchase criteria involved the following four points:

• An evergreen niche: The site should be as evergreen as possible, focusing on topics in the niche that will be relevant. 
• A great backlink profile: A spammy backlink profile could lead to a Google algorithm penalty. Some buyers also avoid PBNs and any blackhat SEO tactics. Look for high-quality backlinks from domains with high DR and in a relevant niche.
• A niche with a high potential ceiling: For this seller, potential was measured by how many keywords the site was already ranking for. In other words, they considered the search volume of the top keywords.
• Upward traffic trends: The seller focused on acquiring sites that had a positive traffic trend. Reading traffic was similar to reading stock charts.

These are some great starting points to consider when creating your own due diligence checklist. However, keep in mind that this seller has been flipping online businesses for a while, so their criteria will likely be very different from what you’d include. If you need help in deciding what criteria to use, download this free due diligence checklist to make your search easier.

Once you’ve decided on your checklist, this will help you eliminate unqualified businesses from your search, so you can spend more time focusing on the best available options.

In addition to the above criteria, you might consider the age of the business as a qualifying measure. While the site in the case study was created in May 2014, the seller acquired it nearly three years after it was started. This period of time is useful because it gives you enough time to grow a domain’s authority, which makes it easier to rank for keywords.

You might consider simplifying the criteria of positive trends to a minimum traffic measure, such as 10,000 monthly views. If you’re buying a site for the first time and you’re not confident about identifying trends, these types of stats can be easier to visualize to help you decide if a business might be a good acquisition.

Growth Strategy

The overall flow of the growth strategy in the case study was to identify the site’s strengths, improve them, and, once performance had improved, expand the business further.

The seller’s growth strategy can be broken down into three steps:

• Identify the top 5 to 10 highest earning pages.
• Optimize these top pages for on-page and off-page SEO.
• Create new content sections.

The first step included adding a unique affiliate link to each page so that they could monitor how much revenue each page brought in. From there, they could see the best-performing pages or articles and optimize the content. Another way you can check performance is by looking at your web analytics software. Google Analytics is a top choice for many bloggers, with Clicky being a popular alternative.

However, analytics aren’t as accurate as setting up unique affiliate IDs when measuring revenue performance. Check out this in-depth guide on how to create affiliate links if you want to follow the above strategy.

Once the seller identified the top-performing pages, they began optimizing them for on-page and off-page SEO to supercharge their potential.

On-page optimization ensures that you’re capturing all the relevant keywords from the parent keyword and placing them in appropriate places and with enough volume on each page. On the other hand, off-page SEO is more nuanced and requires a different approach, since this depends on a site’s backlink profile.

When considering manual outreach, many bloggers turn to guest posting for sites in shoulder niches or posting on forums while providing contextual links. These efforts require patience and steady output if you’re considering doing these on your own.

If you don’t have time for manual outreach, you could hire an agency to create guest posts for you so you can focus on securing opportunities and providing briefs.

The final step of the growth plan was to monitor the pages the seller improved. After seeing the site’s overall performance, new content sections were created in order to target new keywords. 

Finding new keywords to start ranking doesn’t mean you need to go after all the competitive ones with high search volumes. From a search engine’s perspective, targeting low-competition keywords with a small search volume can build the site’s overall domain ranking and authority, especially if those articles appear in the first few search results for a specific keyword.

The Exit

Once the site reached a certain level of performance, the seller decided that it was time to sell their investment. After 17 months of improvement and optimization, the seller listed the affiliate business in our marketplace.

It was listed at $136,773, and after 11 days, an all-cash offer was made. With low 6-figure deals, it’s more common to see offers with cash up-front, as buyers are able to raise the capital. Deal structuring can come into play to mitigate the buyer’s risk, but sellers can also use these earnouts in their favor to negotiate a higher overall sales price to compensate for receiving a delayed payout.

All deal structures are different, and although this case study didn’t involve one, it’s worth bearing in mind when you decide to exit your business.

Flipping – a Full Time Career?

We hope this step-by-step guide on how a seller managed to turn an initial $50,000 investment in an affiliate business into more than $120,000 profit has been useful to you. 

If you have capital and skills, flipping online businesses could be a great career opportunity. Instead of sticking with one or a few businesses, you could put the skills and experience you’ve gathered into improving failing or immature businesses and selling them for a profit.

The types of assets you flip depend on your strategy. However, it’s recommended that when you begin, you stick with a single type of monetization in the same type of niche.

Once you’ve created a system for choosing businesses that are the right fit for you and a way to optimize them, you’ve got processes to trust every time. All that’s left to do is decide where you want to buy and sell your online businesses when it’s time to flip the assets.

Where to Buy or Sell Businesses

If you’re selling or buying an affiliate business for the first time, we recommend that you use a broker’s service instead of going with a private sale.

A private sale has no protection for either party, and you’re depending on the honesty of the other party. If you’re buying, there’s no real way to tell if a business actually performs as advertised, or if the traffic and revenue figures have been doctored just to make the business look great.

If you’re selling through a private sale, you’ve got no way to protect yourself from tire kickers who will constantly present low-ball offers without any serious buying intent. Not to mention, there’s little protection in the final step when the funds are wired to your account.

When you use a broker, there are well-established processes in the service that will ensure that the deal goes as smoothly as possible. A reputable broker will ensure impartial service for everyone involved, since it’s the broker’s reputation on the line if they allow a bad actor into the system.

Which broker you should choose is harder to say. Stacy gives her own account of what worked and what didn’t, so make sure you check it out here.

In the meantime, if you own an online business, think about your exit strategy. You could gain a large amount of money in a short amount of time, and you can use that money to accelerate the growth of another project you’ve been working on. You could even start your own journey of flipping digital assets for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Start your own flipping journey by registering for free and start browsing today for the right deal that could be waiting for you.

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This post is a case study documented by Vinnie Wong. 

Vinnie Wong is a Content Specialist at Empire Flippers. Originally from the UK and now residing in Malaysia, he loves everything related to online businesses. When he’s not neck deep with work, he’s running after his toddler or trying to relive the glory days by injuring himself while playing soccer.

His first exit was in 2010.

Since then, he has done 175 website flips with multiple 6-figure exits. His free newsletter, The Website Flip, covers case studies on his portfolio of sites, website flipping guides, and exclusive websites for sale.

I had the pleasure to speak with Mushfiq and learn how he recently bought a website making $300 a month and has grown it to make $3,000 a month in under a year and a half. He plans to keep growing the site and flip it soon, so keep an eye out for when it comes on the market!

Mushfiq explains how and why he bought the site, what he paid, how he’s grown the site. This is a great case study anyone looking to buy, grow and flip a site will enjoy and learn a lot from.

Mushfiq explains what he’s done so far, and his specific case study, so he will take it from here:

Buying, growing, and selling websites is what I have been doing since 2008. Since then, I’ve successfully done 175+ website flips with multiple six-figure exits. 

This case study will reveal how I purchased a site for $23,000 at a 76X monthly multiple (6.33X annually) earning just around $300/mo. I reveal what I did to grow the site to what it’s earning today around $3,000 on average to $6,000 in peak months.

Let’s get into it!

The Website I Purchased

I use Flippa to find sites created by “hobby bloggers”. These are sites that the individual created out of passion, wrote a lot of content, but hit a wall when trying to figure out how to monetize it. This is because the bloggers are niche experts but not experts in SEO, monetization, and/or conversion rate optimization (CRO).

These types of sites are excellent acquisition targets for niche website investors. Let’s get into the stats.

Acquisition Statistics

• The site is in the overall outdoor niche
• Acquired on March 2020, paid $23,000 to the previous owner (76x avg earnings)
• The site was averaging $300/mo via Amazon Associates only
• Domain live since 2010
• DR 48 according to Ahrefs
• Around 500 articles written by experts
• 181,000 Facebook followers and an email list of 3400
• Multiple natural backlinks from high authority general websites (e.g., CNN, Forbes) as well as authority websites in the same niche

Why Did I Purchase?

• I saw this as a strong authority site built by hobbyists that was poorly monetized
• Saw multiple easy wins to almost immediately 10x earnings (which was done by end of April 2020 just one month after purchase)
• Extremely strong backlinks all gained naturally
• Very high per visitor revenue niche when properly monetized
• Product focused niche with professional reviews
• Very recession-friendly topic

After performing detailed website due diligence, I asked the seller what their asking price was and closed the deal via a Buy It Now on Flippa. 

Now, let’s get into why I paid such a high multiple with the easy-win growth tactics.

How I 10X Growth with 5 Major Easy Wins

When I acquire sites, I like to map out the easy wins available on the site before purchasing them. This allows me to justify overpaying for the site to take it off-market.

Note that this is a skill set I’ve developed over many years by buying and selling hundreds of sites.

Here are the growth wins that I implemented within the first month after purchasing the site.

1. Add Custom Comparison Tables 

I knew adding a custom comparison table is a fast way to put information readers want right by a “check price” button they are very likely to click. The most successful Amazon affiliate sites use customized comparison tables. For example, Wirecutter is a good example of this.

This allowed me to display high commission relevant products in a way that was eye-catching, helpful, and appealing. This increases both the click-through rate as well as the number of sales made.

This is what I did:

• Analyzed Google Analytics to find the top 20 pages getting the majority of the traffic
• Analyzed the top products being sold on each page
• Created a dedicated comparison table for each page with 3 product recommendations

Here is an example of the comparison table I created for all of my top traffic pages:

2. Implemented New Affiliate Programs

It’s no secret Amazon doesn’t generally give the best terms to affiliates.

Many other affiliate programs have much higher affiliate rates and longer-lasting cookies to track sales. There is also a small but growing group of consumers who simply won’t buy from Amazon.

By having an alternative check price button I increased overall conversions as well as affiliate sales from programs that paid a far higher percentage than Amazon did.

I added relevant brands from AvantLink, ShareASale, and more with the comparison tables. This drastically increased both the number of total sales and the number of high percentage affiliate sales.

Here is an example of the multi-affiliate comparison table:

3. Add Contextual Affiliate Links to Amazon

I’m a huge fan of AAWP. This is simply the best WordPress plugin for adding Amazon links.

The flexibility of AAWP allows me to replace old Amazon links from the previous owner and display my Amazon affiliate links quickly and effectively however I want them presented.

The previous site owner did not add links to products within the content. I manually added links throughout the content. 

This increases the click-through rate because as readers read the content, they are enticed to click on links instead of manually finding the call-to-action buttons or comparison tables. 

Our job as site owners is to make the user experience as streamlined as possible. 

4. Added Display Advertisements

Since there were no display ads on the site, adding display ads was one of the clearest ways to increase revenue on the site.

I applied to Mediavine and AdThrive but the site was rejected due to the topic. Because of this, I went with NeworMedia for general display ads, and LockerDome, a specialized display ad network. 

I treat display ads as residual income. So I generally get a low ad RPM because I won’t interfere with the user experience to receive higher display ad rates. 

Video ads were added on the desktop via Ex.co to bring in another additional income stream. These are incredibly disruptive on mobile devices which is why I only allow them on desktop computers.

Even at low RPM rates, these display ads were new income to the site. Ramping up the traffic will only continue to grow the display ad income numbers.

5. Revamp Site Foundation

I saw multiple foundational issues with the site that could be improved immediately to help with both user experience and on-site SEO. 

First, I removed Elementor for GeneratePress Premium and GenerateBlocks. These are my preferred theme and customization tool options. They’re clean, flexible, and let me design the user experience I want visitors to have.

Next, I added the WP Rocket plugin for caching. This would help with load times and site speed.

Finally, I used Cloudways for hosting. I want web hosting that is fast, dependable, and that I don’t have to worry about.

These foundational changes mattered immensely when optimizing the site to run fast, smooth, and be SEO-friendly according to what Google wants to see. 

The Results

Now for the results! Here is the profit and loss of the website since March 2020. I’ve owned the site now for 14 full months as of May 2021. In blue are the revenues, and in red are the growth costs.

After acquiring the site in mid-March, I implemented the growth easy wins, and in the first full month in April 2020, the site earned $3,595.

I continued improving on the site as time went on and due to this being in the outdoor niche, the site received a seasonal uptick in revenues peaking at $7,536 in July 2020. 

One thing you will notice is that I invest heavily in growth. Growth includes new content, backlinks, virtual assistants, software, and more. 

When did I break even? Month 9!

Check out this chart that shows my cumulative profit every month since acquisition. The red line is my breakeven line of $23,000. Essentially when my cumulative profit surpasses the red line, I have fully recouped my cost of acquisition, and every dollar I earn is pure profit.

What’s next?

After owning the site for 14-months and in full growth mode, I am entering the maintenance phase of the website flip lifecycle.

Now, I am cutting down on a significant amount of content. At one point, I was publishing 50+ articles on the site. To maintain the site, I will be publishing 10-15 articles. 

Why am I cutting down? A few reasons:

• The content needs time to “marinate” in the Google SERPs. Giving some time for the content to rank will allow me to understand which articles need further optimization
• Build up reserves. By piling the profits, I can be ready for the new growth phase for this website
• Focus on other projects. I have a portfolio of sites so my other sites need my attention more than this one.

Will I flip this site?

Yes, I will flip this site at one point. I am a website flipper first. I prefer not to hold on to sites for a long time horizon. In approximately 12-15 months, I will plan for an exit on this site.

This is not because I do not believe in the site, it’s more about my personality. I like to grow businesses; not maintain them.

Wrap Up

Buying, growing, and selling niche sites is a great way to build up an income stream but also build up realizable equity in an asset.

While the passive income is nice to have, real wealth is created when sites are sold for 6-figure outcomes.

This site’s trailing 12-month average revenue is $4,840. At a 35X to 40X monthly multiple which is the approximate going rate these days, I can exit right now for $169,400 to $193,600.

Go out there, analyze some deals, and get going buying your first site!

First, this is not investing or financial advice. Anything you do is at your own risk and your own decision. This is simply an example of a mental model I use when I invest in websites. You can read and learn and start thinking about developing your own website investing and general investing mental model.

The VSOT method, also known as the Website Value Investing method, is a framework you can use to help determine if a website is a good buying opportunity and to scale growth and earn back your investment as quickly as possible.

This video goes through the VSOT method and explains how the different pillars came to be through my experiences. The article also goes through the method in-depth.

VSOT – Value Website Investing Method

The VSOT method is one way you can walk through a website purchase before making it to help determine if it makes sense for you.

The method allows you to look at the purchase from different angles to help set you up to buy an online business that can actually return money and profit month after month.

The first two sites I purchased I didn’t put through a rigorous method and ended up making poor investing decisions. That’s when I started thinking more carefully about how to fully vet sites and what makes a truly good website purchase.

This is when I started thinking about a mental framework to think about what makes a good site purchase, and started developing the VSOT mental model even though I didn’t think of it that way as an official method yet.

The second two sites I bought more than paid for my two mistakes as well as grew to the point where they paid for and pay for my current lifestyle, so its safe to say I learned a lot from my first and second mistake purchases but that I was able to parlay them into knowledge that has given me a great structure and method I use to make my successful website purchases that fund my lifestyle today.

The method I developed is called the VSOT value website investing method and I’ll go through each step below. It is designed to help you make good website purchases by buying sites that will earn your initial investment back so you can start earning profit from your website each month.

Verification

The first step in the VSOT method is verification:

First you need to verify all revenue and traffic sources explain how, so you know the site is being truthfully represented and its traffic and revenue and profit.

You’ll need to get access to all analytics and revenue and cost sources and it is best to get added as a primary or secondary user on each account, and screenshots and live video shares can also be supplements at this stage.

Source Evaluation

The next step is Source evaluation where you can determine where the traffic and revenue is coming from and how risky the number of channels are and the type of channels are.

Here is where you look at where the site’s traffic is coming from:

You can evaluate the traffic sources and look at how dependent is the site on a single traffic or revenue source. You want more than one traffic source and you want to fully understand how that traffic source works. You also want to understand how you can maintain and increase that traffic source once you own the site and how to add new sources into the current mix.

You’ll look at how diversified is the current traffic mix and revenue mix. If one affiliate program gives the site all its revenue, is there a risk of that going away and how can you prepare for this happening? Same with traffic sources, you need to think this all through and it can help to write this all out. This will be one way to flesh out the risk level.

Is traffic all from Google, or from a certain ad type, or from a specific social channel or an email list? This is the time to dive deep into all traffic sources and determine how healthy it is.

You’ll need to check what country and language the traffic is.

Ad providers pay more for US and UK traffic and English speaking traffic bc these countries are more affluent, and take the time to check if the traffic is high quality and staying for a long time on the site. If everyone is bouncing or not sticking around you’ll want to know.

It is important to know where all traffic and revenue is coming and going from, and one way to do this is to get out an excel sheet and list the following:

• List all traffic sources
• List all revenue sources
• List all expenses
• Do you know all the expenses?
• Are you dependent on a single affiliate network? Or a trend etc
• Are you dependent on a single back link or few back links or PBN or bad links? Link audit is important here too
• This is where you dive deep to find what could easily stop your traffic or revenue or profit so you have a clear understanding of the risks
• See how dependent your traffic And profit are on A single source this helps you evaluate risk and create a growth plan

Opportunity

The third step in the VSOT method is O for Opportunity
Opportunity means looking at the opportunity you have to increase the site’s traffic and revenue. Here you can look specifically for ways the site is currently undervalued or under-monetized.

You can also look specifically for traffic and monetization opportunities.

Opportunity means looking at the the site’s current input, AKA traffic, and its current output, aka monetization, and determining the different possibilities and ways you can increase each as the new site owner.

Your own skills and talents will come into play here. For example, I am experienced with SEO and paid ads, so these are both areas I always audit and look to increase traffic, and profit and decrease costs on.

There are often many Organic traffic opportunities after you buy a site: before buying you can do an SEO audit – there is often an opportunity here to clean up current keyword targeting, cut dead pages or change keyword targeting on current pages.

You can do a current keyword ranking audit and plan how you can direct more powerful internal and external Links to areas with opportunity for ranking boosts

Additionally this is the time you can start to do keyword research and create a new plan for keywords and content to grow your site over time, think long term and how much room this site has for content and keyword growth.

This is the least sexy or flashy part but the part that has the most benefit over time as you figure out what search engines see your site as an auth for and then continue to publish in that area and see traffic growth slow and steady over time

The site I bought that has been the most successful with the highest ROI got that way not from a flashy ad network switch or a quick hack, but from me adding hundreds of keyword researched articles over a few year time period and I was able to see huge organic traffic and revenue growth over time.

Then if you’re good at ads or social media or whatever you know how to do, you can think about how you would approach that with the new site and what the growth potential for that would be.

For example, does the site currently sell high ticket items and are they running either super expensive ads and wasting ad spend you can quickly cut? Or are they not running ads and missing the opportunity to add a ton of profitable sales each month.

These are things you can test and change once you own the site and are potential opportunities to quickly increase the site’s monthly profit and value.

Another opportunity to look at during this time is to ask the questions:

• Is this asset a supplement to something you already own? Another site in a similar niche it can support in brand or in SEO?
• Will it boost your brand in a non tangible or even tangible way?

Think about how it fits into your overall vision, brand and portfolio and if it adds value in any less obvious way.

Lastly and arguably one of the most important opportunities to think about is monetization. What is the current site doing to monetize and how can you add to this and improve upon it?

Anyway you can add a monetization method or switch monetization methods to be more profitable, do it here. Test test test first and then find what works best for the site.

Organic traffic opportunity: Do an SEO audit – there can be an opportunity here to clean up current keyword targeting, cut dead pages or change keyword targeting on them.

You can do a current keyword ranking audit and direct more powerful internal and external Links to areas with opportunity for ranking boosts.

Start to do keyword research and create a new plan for keywords and content to grow your site over time.

This is the least sexy or flashy part but the part that has the most benefit over time as you figure out what search engines see your site as an auth for and then continue to publish in that area and see traffic growth slow and steady over time.

Ad traffic opportunity Here are some questions you can start by asking:

Are currently making a littler visitor or sell high end products? Consider running ads to your site and test if could be a profitable opportunity.

Is this asset a supplement to something you already own? Another site in a similar niche it can support in brand or in SEO?

Will it boost your brand in a non tangible or even tangible way?

Think about how it fits into your overall vision, brand and portfolio and if it adds value in any less obvious way.

Monetization opportunity:

Anyway you can add a monetization method or switch monetization methods to be more profitable, do it here. Test test test first and then

Some examples:

Is your monetization currently affiliate? If its amazon can you switch to a different affiliate network that pays more and Test it
Or can you switch completely affiliate or wholesale?

Are there ads on the site?

If there are not currently ads on the site even if it is monetized in other ways you can often add ads especially on high traffic sites and get a big revenue boost without hurting your other areas of revenue including affiliate or even e-commerce depending on what you’re selling.

May not always work but always a good idea to try and look at overall profit for a few weeks compared to few weeks before and year prior and just see if there’s a lift or not

Test ad networks:

Ad networks pay different rates for different niches. I’ve seen 2-4X increase from switching ad networks and different ad networks pay different amounts per niche so there isn’t one best network overall. Key is to test here, rpm specially if ads are your site’s only revenue source .

Reach out to brands to put banner ads on your site for a monthly fee or in your email newsletter or as a social shoutout.

I was getting $500 flat fee in euros actually when that was higher than USD for a header banner on one of my sites that was also making a few hundred a month from the other ads running on it in addition the flat fee banner
Having brand sponsors can be hugely profitable and often they’ll reach out to you but you can brainstorm who would be a perfect fit and reach out to them to.

Remember when reaching out is not all about you, it’s about how you can help them, they are the hero and winner in the story if you want to close a deal

Social Media & Customer Communication

Next you can look at how the site communicates with customers, look at social media, are there areas you can improve and automate, then look at email.

Does the site have an email list? Start regular emailing build up trust and intimacy.

Use this an an opportunity to build real connections with your Audi be and reply and have conversations. Having conversations also puts your email in more people’s inbox and not promo or spam folders as email providers see that as a real person trust signal.

That’s why my Her.CEO emails have such high open rates (right now 42%+ and land in a lot of main inbox folders), I have other lists I didn’t do This with and took over when I bought with much lower 10-13% open rates and get pushed into the promo folder as a default.

Add more value than trying to sell in every email or social post. Every so often you can send a sales email for something you know your audience actually wants and people will stay because they like your emails, even the sales ones because At that point your sales emails aren’t selling Anymore because you’re giving your readers what they want to pay for anyway.

Create a product

Then there’s the under-appreciated monetization opportunity which is to create a product- Your site has traffic in a spec niche but no revenue or only ad or affil rev? you can start offering a wholesale product or even take The step after wholesale which can actually be more profitable than wholesale which is to create your own product.

Your site has traffic in a spec niche but no rev or only ad or affil rev? The step after wholesale and can actually be more profitable than wholesale is to create your own product.

First of all, do you think the people running ads on your site are doing so out of charity because they like handing you free money Each month? Obvs not! There is so much tracking available online these days they know what they’re spending and the profit they’re getting from running ads on your site.

What if, you decided to sell what they’re selling using your traffic generating site as the vehicle?

What?

I never thought of that you’re thinking! Genius!

Why thank you,

You can always step your site monetization game up a level from ads to actually selling something whether that is wholesale or your own physical product or even service or ebook or non physical product .

If you have traffic you can monetize it all you have to do is brainstorm every possible way then test every possible way then pick the winner.

For your long term revenue source, and try stacking revenue methods by doing more than one at the same time.

For example you can even triple dip and run ads on your site while promoting affiliate products while selling your own products on your site and you may find you make the most money while doing all three at once as opposed to only picking one at a time and you’ll never figure that out unless you try and test it.

Create supplementary videos

More opportunities include generating traffic through other channels, and you can do this by repurposing content or crating new content in the form of videos.

Think about how you could Create supplementary videos in the website’s niche.

One site I own I created a viral 600K video for expecting the video to drive site traffic and sales, which it did in a small way but this also added an entirely new monetization method to the site and the video itself ended up earning more in Youtube ad revenue than the website earned the first year in affiliate income.

Getting more eyeballs to your site with videos can drive more sales and more revenue just from the videos themselves in some cases worth a try

Sponsored posts

Reach out to brands to put banner ads on your site for a monthly fee or in your email newsletter or as a social shoutout. I was getting $500 flat fee in euros actually when that was higher than USD for a header banner on one of my sites that was also making a few hundred a month from the other ads running on it in addition the flat fee banner.

Having brand sponsors can be hugely profitable and often they’ll reach out to you but you can brainstorm who would be a perfect fit and reach out to them to. Remember when reaching out is not all about you, it’s about how you can help them, they are the hero and winner in the story if you want to close a deal

You can always let brands reach out to you for sponsored posts or reach out proactively to start getting sponsored posts on your site. Having more traffic helps with this and having an uber specific niche also helps.

Lastly, you can always think of more ways to monetize the site, there isn’t a limit on what you can do. My list includes ones I’ve personally done or thought of but the list is endless and only limited by your creativity and what your audience does, wants or needs, and think of how you can best serve them in a way that also allows your site to generate revenue.

Timeframe

The next step in the VSOT method is Timeframe.

Timeframe is how long it will take to earn your money back. You can determine the timeframe and the subsequent Value of a website by looking at what multiple is the site priced at? If nothing changes how long will it take you to earn your investment back?

For example, if the site is priced at 30X its monthly profit multiple that means if nothing changes it will take you 30 months to earn your investment back assuming your site is not hit by a traffic or monetization penalty that you already evaluated the risk of in the step 1 the Verification step in the VSOT method.

I always plan for say none of my optimizations work or nothing changes, I’ll make it back in X months.
You need to be ok with that because nothing is ever guaranteed.

I’ve bought most of my successful sites at either 10 or 20X monthly profit valuation. New French Affiliate site I bought Was at 30X valuation but was lower price so I knew it’d be ok even if my plan to wholesale didn’t workout, but also easier to justify because going from a few dollars profit to 10-20X+ that per sale would mean earning back my investment in less than 2 months If my wholesale and estimates worked out.

Run through a few situations using the opportunities you found as well and figure out best case scenario earn back time period as well.

Using These estimates as a range can help you decide if the investment seems worth it to you.

I’ve bought most of my successful sites at either 10 or 20X monthly profit valuation. The new French Affiliate site I bought was at a 30X valuation but it was also a pretty low price and there was a huge revenue opportunity to move from affiliate to wholesale so I knew it’d be ok even if my plan to wholesale didn’t workout. It is also easier to justify because going from a few dollars profit to 10-20X+ that per sale would mean earning back my investment in less than 2 months If my wholesale and estimates worked out.

Everything is risk reward and you can use these steps to help you make an informed decision but you also have to realize there are risks involved in any purchase.

Let me know what you think of the VSOT value website investing method – this is something I’ll be continually updating and adding more detail to as I go along – let me know in the comments the #1 thing you look for when buying a website.

Get the Website Investing Checklist here.

Christopher Schwab started an outsourced Cleaning business from his college dorm, and grew it to the point he was able to work entirely remotely from Japan and London.

From there he grew to become a virtual assistant hiring expert and started a VA outsourcing company as well as a handful of other successful ventures.

He shares his experience starting a cleaning business, growing it, hiring VA’s for his company and for others, and how he was able to remove himself from day to day operations to be able to live the digital nomad dream and work completely remotely.

If you are thinking of starting a cleaning business, hiring a VA, or learning to outsource day to day operations in your own business, this article will help you learn how to do so.

How to Find a Virtual Assistant

If you really want to find a great VA, you want to find someone who might not necessarily even label themselves as a VA. But nonetheless, who can do the job you require remotely.

For example, my VA company, we focus on admin work for local businesses, we’re not a sales VA, or a real estate VA. Instead we’re really Office Admin for local businesses. So we don’t need to specifically hire a local business VA.

This means we can hire someone who’s helped run a family business, or who’s done admin work for much of their career, or who’s worked as a specific type of secretary. And then we can train them on the virtual aspects.

And I actually find this works better to find someone with the underlying skills that you need, and hire them and then train them on the virtual side, instead of finding someone who’s a VA and then teaching them the underlying skills that we need.

I think a lot of people get that wrong. And so we focus on the underlying skills.

So for someone who’s qualified and has the experience, we look for people who aren’t really marketing themselves as vas, but who can become the best VA that we need.

Common VA-based Business Mistakes

The most common mistake I’ve seen that can make a VA-based business crumble is promising quality of service at the level of an expert. I see a lot of VA companies doing this, where someone says they need a marketing funnel designer and a good marketing funnel designer can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000.

I’ve spent 10s of thousands of dollars on a really good funnel designer before. But I see VA is offering the service for $15, or $20 or $25 an hour. And it’s just not a realistic thing to offer.

If you’re being honest about the level of quality that you can deliver to the client, you are not an expert in that field. But many VA businesses fall into the generalist category, but they sell themselves as a specialist. So many VA services offer 10 or 12 or 15 different services to their clients. But they’re a generalist to all of them, and that’s fine.

But, but they need to recognize and be honest that they cannot deliver the quality of an expert specialist who only does that one service. And I see a lot of VA companies making that mistake. And so their clients inevitably get disappointed when they get something that is not at the level of expert that they were hoping for.

So you have marketing VA’s, you have econ VA’s, and funnel VA’s, you have all these decent all-rounders, which is great. But you just need to be realistic about what level of service you can actually deliver. That is probably the biggest mistake that I see people make.

And this is not just true to the industry, but it’s particularly true of the VA industry. So what led me to start thinking it’s what I want you to do for that is Google Think Maids Side Hustle School, there’s a quick five to six minute interview that Chris Guillebeau of Side Hustle School did that answers questions three and four.

Why Should You Start a Cleaning Business?

Starting a cleaning business allowed Chris to become location independent and fulfill his dream of working for himself.

Starting any type of business can help you gain independence and allow you to work for yourself. Choosing cleaning specifically is a niche you could get into if you enjoy cleaning, or if you see a need in your community for more cleaning services and think you can do a good job fulfilling this either yourself or by outsourcing the work and doing the marketing, sales and business side yourself as Chris has done.

Comment below if you have ever thought of starting a cleaning business and your experience so far.

When Should You Start to Outsource Your Business

You can outsource any type of business tasks, including cleaning business tasks, as Chris did.

Here is some detail to help you figure out if your business is at the point where you should outsource.

When you should start outsourcing your cleaning business or any VA-based business entirely really depends on the business model that you’re running.

For example, an e-commerce business doing $20,000 a month is totally different than a local business doing $20,000 a month. And it’s totally different than your manufacturing business doing $20,000 a month. I see a lot of people say, Hey, get to $10K a month and then outsource, get to $20K a month and outsource. And it’s just terrible advice.

Because it’s not specific to their business model is not specific to their industry. Those things really do matter. There are certain things that you can generalize, but this is not one of them. You need to know the business model, and you need to know the stage of growth they’re at before you can make a call that you need to outsource things because a lot of people are starting to outsource too early, and it’s an enormous mistake.

Of course my specialty is local businesses. So I will stick to that but if you local service business, you shouldn’t even think about it before getting to around $15,000 to $18,000 a month, unless you have a full-time job. If you have a full time job, and you just need someone to cover some of that basic admin, and you can afford it from the salary in your full time job, that’s fine.

Otherwise, you need to have a base of revenue, and you need to have a base of profit coming through before it makes sense to offload that. So when you’re an owner, you really need a solid foundation built, meaning you’re profitable, meaning you have a base of recurring revenue every month, and you have clients that are with you a long time.

You also need to be consistently closing sales and growing. You don’t need to have a crazy growth trajectory, but you need to be closing more business than you are losing every month. So your closing rate needs to be higher than your churn rate.

And the last thing is you need to reach a point where most of your day to day is spent on busy and work and the busy work is what is really stopping you from growing, because you’re just spending so much time on the basic running of the business. And when you get to that point, that’s the point, at least in a local business, where you should start to hire a VA and offload some of that admin work so that you can refocus on growth.

I see a lot of business owners get to a good stage of growth and then hire a VA and offload everything to them. One that’s bad because the VA is only good at certain things. And you should only offload the things that they’re good at. So if everything but to it’s bad, because I see the owners become complacent. And they don’t take the extra time that they gain from hiring their VA to refocus on growth. And that’s when their business starts to crumble. So before the that stage, money should be reinvested back into marketing and sales for quicker growth,

Until you’re hitting around that $15K to $18K mark in a local business, all your profits, you need to reinvest back into marketing and sales. If you’re not paying yourself or if you can afford to not pay yourself, you should also work on systematizing before you burn on help, otherwise, you’re just wasting money that needs not be spent otherwise.

I’m a big fan of systems and automations but you shouldn’t do it with everything. You know, if you ever call a bank, and you can’t get a hold of a human, it’s a really frustrating experience. And it almost it just makes you angry. So there’s certain things you should not automate. But there’s a lot that you can and you could automate and make your business twice as efficient, and then bring on the extra time and revenue. And then you’re saving all that extra money, because you’re not having your VA is having to work two hours a day instead of four, six. So that’s a big one.

Outsourcing Cleaning VA’s vs Hiring Full-Time Employees

In terms of outsourcing and using a VA or a full-time employee, what makes more sense?

If you are a bigger business, you know, if you’re running seven figures in most industries, e-commerce is a little different, because there’s so much volume and not that much profit, but manufacturing too.

If you’re a bigger business, it’s better to go with employees generally but it differs by industry and is not something to generalize.

If I had to generalize for this question, it would be roughly seven figures is going to cover most industries, is when you should start transitioning over to full time dedicated in office employees. Before that point, VA’s grow really well with you, they’re really adaptable.

And you can build a specialized team of the A’s for each little service that you need. After that point, it becomes better and more profitable to have an in house team. You know, if you’re only doing $10,000 a month, you can’t afford an in office employee, you can’t afford it in office marketing team, you can’t afford it in office salesperson, you might have one or two marketing platforms that you’re using, like Facebook ads, you might have a VA that’s helping with a couple hours of admin work.

But at that revenue, you can’t afford to have people in house full time on a salary working for you. But as you scale up, and you have those profit margins, and you have that leeway, it actually becomes cheaper and more effective to have an in house marketer to have an in house sales guy to have an in house admin team because you’re paying them a set salary every month, you know what’s gonna cost and they’re in the office with you and they’re able to work more closely on your business goals. Instead of just viewing you as a client, they’re viewing you as their employer.

So when you’re bigger it’s a con to have a VA you can still have the ACE for specific tasks. Of course we still do that that goes without saying. But generally it becomes a con to have a VA versus a full time employee. So stage of growth is the biggest thing that’s going to determine how Reliant you become on VAs. The other thing is with outsourcing if you outsource to US-based agents, this is this is not much of an issue. And it happens rarely, although it does happen.

But with international VAs, it’s just unfortunately the case that ghosting clients is quite common. See, and part of this is pay rate. You people pay want to pay an international VA $5 to $7 an hour, which is okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. I know this is a, a big debate in the industry. But there’s nothing wrong with paying someone a good pay rate for their country. Right. It’s just geo arbitrage.

But if you pay a cheaper rate, be aware there is to a certain extent you pay what you get for it in this industry. And it’s increasingly common, where people come to me that their VA from the Philippines or from somewhere else, has ghosted them. And they don’t have access to the account they gave the VA to anymore. The VA is not responding to the emails a week went by, and they didn’t hear anything. So their customers weren’t being served. And so they come to us, and they want to try to transition to a US based firm for more reliability. And I don’t like making these generalizations again. But unfortunately, this is one that generally does hold true, is US based firms tend to be more reliable, they tend to be easier to track down, they don’t tend to ghost you as much. It’s just what it is.

Another con is reliability. If you’re hiring internationally, it is just less reliable. There are so many good days and so many good companies internationally, but they’re less generally reliable in the US. So that’s another con if you’re hiring internationally, for a VA, especially as you get bigger becomes mission critical to have that reliability.

Where to Find a VA

For us, we look a few different places from sourcing VAs.

Where we actually source vas is a mixture of Craigslist. It’s a mixture of indeed, it’s a mixture of Facebook groups, LinkedIn and old VA forums, we found if price is not an issue, VA forums are actually a great place and VA societies as well, are a great place to reach out to VA because there is a vetting process.

There people who’ve been VA s often for 10 or 15 years, they were among the first batch of VA s, when this was kind of a new job, it’s not so new. Now, it’s been around almost 25 years now. Some people were doing this, really in the late 90s. This, that there were very, very few, but there were vas who were VA’s in the late 90s. So you know, this is not a new industry now. But it’s fairly new to most people as of the last 10 years or so still, maybe even the last seven or eight.

Having said that, we find if price is not an issue, VA societies and VA forums are a fantastic source for more experienced VA’s who have industry experience as well.

• Facebook Groups
• Craigslist
• LinkedIn
• VA Societies
• VA Forums
• Facebook Ads
• Recommendations

We find Facebook groups are okay. But the but it’s mostly newer VA’s. There are there are of course many viewers who are not. But a lot of the newer VA s are the ones who are jumping on the job posts immediately who are applying. And so there is a lower level of expertise in Facebook groups.

Having said that, if you’re bringing them on in house as an employee VA versus a subcontractor, you’re that’s okay, because you’re able to train them on your processes. But for us, it’s a mixture of Facebook groups, Craigslist, LinkedIn, and VA societies and forms. Those are the main ones. We’ve played around with Facebook ads, and we’ve had some success. But we don’t really use that unless we’re in a pinch, just because you know, it’s a more expensive option to get applicants through. Those are kind of the sources that we use.

Other ones just include asking our current fees if they know people who are reliable that they’d recommend for this job. And honestly, just asking friends and family, if they know any former office admin staff who might be interested in remote job. So that’s kind of how we source for it. There’s no secret sauce there that you could look for. It’s pretty standard sourcing.

And what I would do a tip that I would give to people for the location they live in is to go to Craigslist and go to their local Craigslist, and then put up a post in the local high like the local office and then customer support and sales sections of the hiring board on Craigslist. And you get a lot of people applying to those ads. They’re not currently VA’s but they’re very open to becoming VA’s. And so that’s been a great source of new ways for us.

I know Craigslist has a very bad reputation. But that was the early days of Craigslist. It’s a very different place now there there are still scams that go on. There are still people who reply who aren’t serious. But Craigslist has evolved as a platform and become a very good source of job applicants. So it’s a good tip for people looking for ways outside of the typical Facebook or LinkedIn.

Cleaning Business Operations Roadblock – Case Study

The biggest roadblock I encountered starting to think maids was the speed of our growth, we went from $0 to $20,000 a month in less than 90 days. And that caused issues because I was a first time business owner. For me, it meant that I was just focused on booking people and getting them on the schedule.

I wasn’t learning how to handle my teams particularly well. I had great teams early on. So they put up with me, and they put up with a lot of mistakes. But one big mistake for me was Halloween. This is actually the story. I’ll keep it very short, just a few seconds. But this is how I ended up starting my VA company was in my cleaning company. Halloween 2016, I was still a full time student was in my final semester University.

And I was doing all exams at the same at that time, it was midterm exams, and people were calling left and right for Halloween cleaning. And I didn’t say no, I was booking people thinking that my teams would want to be on with all the extra money coming in, because we pay them a percentage. So the more cleans they do, they get a lot more money.

I was thinking that they would want to do these cleanings because hey, more money for both of us. But a lot of my team’s called off last minute to be with their family, which is perfectly understandable. I just didn’t have the foresight to ask them ahead of time.

On those days, if they would be available, I just assumed that they would be. And so I had a bunch of customers who were very angry because every other cleaning company in the city was booked. And I had really screwed up there. And some people missed their cleanings for that day. And so that was a really tough moment for me as a business owner.

Not only did my customers lose faith in me, I lost a couple of those customers. But also my teams were frustrated because I was scheduling them for cleans that they couldn’t go to. And so it was just a very big issue for me as a first time business owner, learning that balance of how much business we could take in versus the needs of my teams. And and the time respecting the time of my teams as well. These are issues that I hadn’t thought about before as a business owner because I’d only been in business a few months. So this was a big roadblock for me.

I had wanted to grow, I wanted to grow so fast, and it was going so well. But I was humbled by this experience of finding out that maybe the marketing or the sales isn’t the problem. But there’s all these other parts of running the business that maybe I wasn’t doing a good job on.

And actually I had to step back and learn those things. I had to learn the operations, I had to learn how to handle my teams properly, I had to learn the customer service parts, I had to learn foresight, right, I had to learn how to predict these things ahead of time for the next busy season, and how to handle those ahead of time. And so the biggest roadblock for me with Think Maids was really those other parts of the business.

They’re actually my strengths now. Our operations, our customer service, our teams, those are our main strengths were even better that than that. We’re even better at those than marketing. But those were early on the struggle. I would say the proudest moment with Think Maids was when I was able to take it remote.

But when I started Think Maids, it was kind of a side project I was I was debating that, or becoming a web developer at the time. I just I didn’t want to work for a boss. And so I I gave it a go and I started this business. And that was a beautiful thing when I had that first booking come in. But what made it truly real for me was a few months after I graduated university, I realized that I had slipped into this thing full time. And I had gone from kind of a side business, and it just naturally evolved into a full business.

Taking a Cleaning Business Remote

I had brought my VA on at that point for a few months. And I found out that I was able to just take it remote full time. We did a test run in November when I visited my girlfriend in Japan for a week and a half. But, and that that went perfectly well the VA handled everything while I was away. We jumped on meetings at weird times to make sure things were fine, but everything went okay. And that was a beautiful moment in my business where I thought maybe we can do this.

But the moment that I’m most proud of Think Maids is March 2016-2017. At the end of March, I believe it was March 24 or 25th 2017. I took off and I moved to Japan for an entire year. And I’ve been living since between Japan in London these past three years. But I moved to Japan for an entire year March 24th or 25th and in 2017 and I made this permanent, running my business remotely a permanent thing.

And I realized that I actually hit this dream that so many of these digital nomads talk about that so many of these business owners talk about, but they never show you how to get there. They just tell you it and then they sell you the dream, but they don’t tell you the process, I realized I’d actually hit that myself. And I did it myself.

And in just a few months that that was really the culmination of, of what I do working towards at that point for thickness. And it just made me so indescribably happy to know that that was my situation. So I would say that’s the proudest moment.

Adding Cleaning Business Services

And we’re looking forward to adding additional services we’ve played around with carpet and window cleaning these past few years. It’s something that I want to make a permanent offering what we do as well. So that’s a major focus of this year, it was a major focus last year.

But between my other businesses I just didn’t get around to it. So for think Nate’s the focus this year is really adding those carpet and window cleaning services as a full part of our business rather than just to existing customers or just to people who ask about it.

After Outsourcing Cleaning & Adding New Businesses

Yeah, so for my local business MBA program. This is for people who either want to start a local business from scratch, or people who’ve been stuck in their local business for years. In so in one case, we’ve been helped a lady who’d been stuck since 1989, at the same place.

This is a program for people who are really stuck or new. And the people who are stuck when they join with us, it’s to rebuild the foundation of their business, they often haven’t, they’ve often been good at sales or marketing, or they’ve been good at word of mouth or just teams, they’re usually good at one or two things and bad at a lot of things.

This is for people who plowed ahead being good at one or two things, but never did the basic foundational work of their business.

So this getting unstuck part of the MBA program is really about rebuilding the foundation of their business. So they know the basics in every area are covered and functioning well. It’s about implementing the right systems, of which I have many detailed tutorials for everyone goes through it.

And it’s about removing yourself from the day to day, that’s kind of the final stage is you rebuild your foundation, you put the right systems in place, you start marketing and sales, again aggressively with the right strategies. And then you start to remove yourself from the day to day so that you’re more of a business owner and less of a business manager. So that’s kind of what people sign up with us to fix is to get unstuck to get to the next stage of growth, or to start from scratch.

Comment below if you have started a cleaning or VA based business and your favorite takeaway from this article.

How to Sell a Website – Tips How & Where to Sell Your Website + How I sold mine. You can learn how to sell your site watching the video below or reading the rest of this article.

First things first, I am here to be a resource for you and if you are looking to sell a website send me an email, stacy@her.ceo.

I’m always looking to buy high traffic and/ors revenue generating websites, and I have a website investing email list who are also hungry and ready to buy websites. So if you have a site that gets traffic, or any type of revenue send me an email, stacy@her.ceo.

You can also sign up for my email list if you want to buy a website, as I send website buying tips and deals.

Starter Sites vs Established Sites

There are two types of sites you can sell, one is a starter site, which is one that you either custom make or that you’ve already made that has all the pieces in place. It has content and structure or is a custom site for someone, but it has no traffic and no revenue.

Depending on how you position it you can still sell it for a lot of money, especially if it’s a custom site for someone.

Th second type of site is one that has traffic and is making money already so it’s actually worth something on its own.

Personally, I only like to purchase the second type of site which is a site that already has traffic and already has revenue.

If you have a starter site you can always try to get it traffic and optimize it for SEO and other traffic sources and then if you start getting traffic or revenue you actually might be able to sell it for more than what you’ll be able to sell it.

Basically if you make a website and want to sell it, anything you can do to get more traffic to it or monetize it more fully will allow you to get a buyer more quickly and to sell it for a much higher price.

How to Sell a Starter Website

Sell on Motion Invest for Quick Cash:

If you choose to ignore my advice then you can still sell a site not getting any traffic. Motioninvest.com is one site that sells both websites that are earning a small amount of revenue and brand new starter sites that aren’t earning revenue. You can try contacting motion invest and selling your starter site, although I believe they prefer sites that do have some sort of monthly revenue.

Sell on a Facebook Group:

Another way to sell your starter site is to join website investing and passive income and retirement income facebook groups and once you establish a relationship with people in the group by helping answer questions and have value-add posts, you can post about your starter site that is ready to go and see if anyone is interested in purchasing it.

You’ll want to ask the group admins first if this is allowed or figure out a creative way to phrase it where it doesn’t seem like you’re selling anything but you’re still gauging interest if anyone wants it.

For example you could post, “I have this beautiful, 10,000 word, finance website, but I don’t know what to do with it. What do you guys think? Should I renew the domain or let it go or try to sell it somewhere? “ the beauty with this type of post is you’re not actively selling but if someone is super interested in your site they will reach out to you via DM and you can start a sales conversation there.

If you have a site that does have some sort of traffic or revenue then you have a lot more options to sell it.

You can email me, stacy@her.ceo and I can either make an offer on it or send it to my website investing waitlist to see if anyone there has any interest in buying it.

How to Sell an Established Website

How to sell a website that already has traffic and revenue:

Email Stacy@Her.CEO

The first thing you want to do is email me stacy@her.ceo, and we can start a conversation and see if there’s some way that I can either buy your site or help you sell it. As a first step, always I have a huge email list that always wants to even if it’s something I’m interested in.

List Your Site on a Website Selling Platform:

You can also choose to sell it on a website investing platform.

You can list your site to sell on Flippa which has a starter site listing fee of $15 or an established site listing fee of $49 PLUS a 10% sale success fee that goes down in a tiered structure for sites that sell for over 50K, you can also apply to sell your sit on Empireflippers.com they don’t accept all sites like Flippa does so you have to send in stat and revenue verification data and they have to choose your site to list on their platform.

When I went through the process of listing my website for sale on Empire Flippers they made me pay a $250 deposit that they ended up refunding when they didn’t choose to list my site for sale on their platform.

I’m not sure but I think they might refund the deposit after you sell your site but you’d need to check with them to verify how that works or even if they still collect that type of deposit because I checked their website and they don’t publicly post about requiring sellers to send in a deposit even though it was something I had to do. they also take a 15% success fee for any website that sells for under $1 million dollars which is quite hefty, and that also goes down in a tiered structure for more expensive sites.

I don’t have personal experience selling a site through any other platforms but you can also apply to sell your site at FEinternational.com, investors.club and quietlightbrokerage.com.

I ended up selling my site using a broker at Latonas.com.

It’s important to do your research for each platform to figure out the fees you’ll have to pay for listing and sale success fees as it differs by platform.

If you choose to sell on Flippa.com for example, they have $49 listing fee and then they take a 10% success fee of each sale, and that goes down as your site price goes up, like, the percentage that they take goes down so the number they take still goes up but the percentage will go down.

You can also sell your site on Empire flippers.com Flippa accepts every site that lists on it, Empire Flippers is more choosy and they’re going about your site and going to make sure it’s exactly what they want to sell to their audience. You might not even get accepted with Empire Flippers since they don’t accept all sites to sell.

Getting accepted by them is also not a a guarantee of a sale, although you’re going to get more visibility from listing on Empire Flippers, Flippa or any of the other site listing platforms because both of these platforms have a huge audience so there’s a really high chance that someone will want your site.

I was looking at EmpireFlippers.com and it says that out of all the sites they’ve approved, they’ve actually sold 89% of the ones that they’ve listed, so still your site could be in the 11% that doesn’t get sold.

Empire Flippers also makes you pay a $250 deposit when you list it which I think they say they refund after the sale or return of the site. I only know about the $250 fee because I went through the process of listing the site with them although I didn’t end up listing it on their platform, but I still had to pay them the $250 and then they refunded it when they didn’t approve my site for their platform. They actually don’t post about this fee publicly but I only know about it because I had to pay it when I tried to list with them.

They also take a 15% success fee which is pretty hefty it goes down if your site is over a million dollars in price, they take a pretty big success fee so that’s something you want to take into account if you can try selling it with a broker first that takes a lower success fee, you’re going to get to keep more of your total selling price.

It’s something I’d recommend listing all your options and then seeing the potential amount you could get for the site on the different platforms and start with the ones that have the highest potential and then apply for the ones that have lower potential.

Where to sell your website

There are many platforms and places you can sell your site. Here are a few you can research and try:

• Her.CEO
• Facebook Groups
• Private Deals
• Flippa
• Empire Flippers
• Latonas
• FE International
• Motion Invest
• Quiet Light Brokerage
• Investors.Club

My Experience Selling a Website

Latonas.com is where I actually ended up selling my site.

I had a very good experience in the sense they worked hard to sell my site and were very communicative and responsive. They also have a pretty big audience so I had a buyer within a few weeks, an interested buyer, so we got on a call and everything was great. After the call he made an offer and wanted to buy it.

We went through the process. The buyer put the money in Escrow and I transferred everything to him. We signed multiple airtight contracts. After I transferred everything to him he had everything he had the domain he had the host he had the database. He sends an email and says, “You know what, I just I can’t, I don’t want to do this anymore and I want to take my money out.” He got cold feet, and he said it was because the site didn’t comply with GDPR.

He said, “You need like a controller, someone to manage the data GDPR”. GDPR is very complex, however if you don’t think a website complies with GDPR, you probably aren’t going to be able to buy any website, because even Google has had the GDPR lawsuits and they’ve had to pay huge fines.

If Google has its huge team of lawyers and they weren’t even incredibly able to correctly, prepare for GDPR, any small website or any website on any listing platform is likely not even close to prepared for literally any GDPR lawsuit. At the end of the day, this person just got cold feet and wanted to pull out and they were trying to pin the blame on something so they chose GDPR. The takeaway here is that even if it didn’t have anything to blame it on they still could have pulled out of the deal.

The buyer was able to take their money out of escrow, and then I transferred everything back even though we had airtight contracts. It’s not worth it to get into a lawsuit over something like this – I’m not going to go after them with a lawyer to try to make them follow through with the transaction.

I guess it’s good to know that contracts, at the end of the day airtight contracts don’t have that much value. I mean if you take something to court I would guess that contracts have more value. It took a few more months to find another interested buyer.

This person did end up buying it for less than the already very low price I had originally put on it, and this buyer had tons of red flags. I shouldn’t have sold to that person and there ended up being issues later on which I won’t go into here.

At the end of the day I don’t regret selling the site however I do wish I had waited for a different buyer and went for a higher multiple.

Website Selling Takeaways

Takeaway 1: Choose a high-multiple broker with low fees

When selling my site I do wish I’d chosen a higher-end broker so I could have sold at a higher multiple.

Takeaway 2: Be Patient, there will be a buyer

I do wish I’d been more patient waiting for someone, or does that so I could have gotten a better purchaser who would have done more work on the site and not cause issues that we ran into later on, as well as a purchaser who was willing to pay a higher multiple take all those things into consideration when you’re selling your site.

In conclusion, if I could go back in time and give my old self advice before selling the site I would say, “Be patient, choose a higher end broker and work out the math on the different brokerages and platforms to see what makes sense for you to list your site, and just know that contracts aren’t really airtight until the money has been not just put in escrow but literally released from escrow.”

Comment below if you have ever bought or sold a site and your experience with your listing platform.

How can you make a viral YouTube video when you have ZERO subscribers? This article goes through a case study of my video went viral and teaches you the process to make your own viral videos and get free organic YouTube views.

You can watch the case study and viral video process tips below, or read the article for more detail:

How to Get More Views on Youtube

You can make a viral or semi viral video in really any niche, even boring ecommerce ones like I did.

Viral videos have a few things in common – the first being they inspire people to share the video. This is the #1 characteristic of viral videos, when a video gets shared it starts to go viral. People want to share videos that cause them to feel any emotion strongly, whether that is:

• laughter
• happiness
• sadness
• fear
• surprise
• or any strong emotion

If your video makes people feel something, they will naturally want to share it with others.
People also share videos that are super helpful, such as how to videos, and videos that helped them with a specific problem or solution, so even if your video doesn’t evoke strong emotion, you can still make it helpful enough to go viral.

Viral videos also have a unique angle that makes people want to watch that specific video even if there are other similar videos out there. Meaning you need to make your video different from any other similar topic video out there – you can do this by injecting your own case study or experience into it because no one else has had your exact experience with a situation.

You can also curate other people’s data or experience in a unique way that’s never been done. The key is to take a unique approach that makes people drawn to your video over any other video in your niche to increase the chances they choose to spend their precious time watching your video as opposed to any others.

People have a lot of things vying for their attention so if they don’t have a clear reason to watch your video over all the others, they simply won’t watch it so give them a reason to watch yours.

In addition to strong emotion, if you make them learn something about themselves or feel a strong bond they will also want to share and watch your video:

• Identity
• Bond
• Learn about yourself
• This is us
• Family

How to Increase YouTube Views

The way to make a boring niche viral video, like I did with my ecommerce store product demonstration video is to make it super relevant and exactly what the watcher is searching for, make it interesting, make it helpful, and optimize it specifically for youtube search.

If your niche is boring, you actually have an advantage because you can have fun while making your own video and make it interesting and fun.

When you make it fun and start incorporating your own experience and story into then people watching it start to have fun with you, and then suddenly your boring niche becomes more fun and people start to emotionally connect with it, making it even more likely to stand out from your competition and go viral. So don’t assume your boring niche is actually boring and make a boring video to represent that.

No, instead, have fun with your boring niche and make your video be helpful in a way that is a compelling story for your audience so they stay engaged and want to watch the whole thing.

A compelling story can be from your own personal experience or it can simply be a transformational before after visual story such as a makeup tutorial presents- people are always intensely interested in before after visual stories as you can see from any makeup or home improvement channel, as well as engaging personal experience stories which you can inject into any niche, not as a side note, but as a way to tell the entire video in a story arc to keep people engaged.

YouTube SEO

You can have a viral video that goes viral from just people sharing it, and you can have a video that goes viral from being correctly optimized for YouTube SEO.

Here is how to optimize a video to go viral through YouTube SEO, which is how my specific ecommerce video went viral:

• Keyword research

  Keyword research is a huge part of viral YouTube SEO. Search for keywords in your niche on YouTube and choose a video topic, keyword and title that is not overcrowded.

  This means choosing one where there are not too many videos uploaded for the keyword already, and especially not too many good or similar videos already uploaded on it. You need to know you can make the best video, with firsthand experience preferably so yours has a chance of living on the first page in a high-ranking position. It is important there isn’t already too much super good competition because otherwise you’ll never rank organically without an ad budget, and why add more noise to some thoroughly and well covered already if you don’t have anything unique to add.

  If you can take a super interesting unique angle on a well covered topic, that is a good play to stand out as long as you make that super clear in your title however.

• Video Title

  The video title is very important for ranking in YouTube.

  For your keyword research in the title, the key is to have your most specific keyword at the front of the title because that will carry the most weigh tin search results, and this will increase your watch time which increases your video rank which I talk about more later on.

  After the specific keyword you want to rank #1 one on then put an interesting short phrase that highlights your unique experience and results try to include an interesting question or number or something that makes people want to click, then you can insert one or two more broad, more general keywords in the title so later on once people start liking and watching your video, youtube will start to rank you for your broader keywords in addition to your general keywords. This is a great way to structure your title for maximum views so you get people’s attention so they want to watch and click, and you get the super specific high quality views plus set yourself up with the opportunity to rake in broader keyword rankings and views as well.

  The title has to be relevant to the high traffic keywords with as low comp as possible so your video will show. Try putting a specific number or result in your title when possible so people see you as credible and with experience. People like watching those who have direct experience in the area so they know the advice will actually work and it makes watching the videos more interesting, make the title something they want to click.

  I create a standout title by looking at the currently ranking page of YouTube videos where I want my video to show up based on the keyword I’m targeting. I then picture my title on that page near the middle and ask myself, “would I click that title to watch it? Would I click that thumbnail? What would make me want to click and watch that’s NOT clickbait?”

  Not having a clickbait title, but actually being able to follow through on your title in the video is key because visitors have to click and watch and then be hooked and want to watch more and trust you, not feel duped into thinking they clicked and then go to a horrible video that is boring and not relevant.

• Video Thumbnail

  The video thumbnail is super important for YouTube SEO because without a good one, even if your title thumbnail and keywords are spot on, you’ll never rank long term.

  It’s important to look at the videos already ranking on the page you want yours to rank and then see how you can make your thumbnail stand out.

  Choose a different color, choose a captivating statistic or word you can add to your own thumbnail. The key is to make your thumbnail stand out and be the best on the page, the one you’d want to click if shown the search result page.

  This will increase your video CTR which will increase its ranking long term as long as people actually watch your video and it’s not clickbait.

• Captivating Content

  Having insanely interesting content that draws the viewer in for the majority of the video is the #1 ranking factor and without it your video has no chance of ranking even if you ace every other single ranking factor.

  You have to make your video interesting with no pauses or ums or boring filler pieces. People will stop watching if you even have a second or two of filler or confusion.

  Let me say that again. Every second of your video has to have a purpose. Every second has to capture attention, add value and be interesting. The second you start rambling or didn’t know what you were going to say, or didn’t edit a pause or put in excess filler info, the viewer will stop watching.

  Youtube videos are different from podcasts in that people want an answer or help and they want it now, they don’t want to listen to you ramble for an hour and then get a few key takeaways like people do on podcasts or longer form content.

  You probably know from your own experience, if you’re watching a youtube video for a specific reason and the person starts talking about something else or is super boring you simply stop watching and find a different video. The youtube algorithm takes this into account in a huge way because of the enormous volume of content that is uploaded each day and the fierce competition for each keyword.

  Youtube wants to give viewers the best possible content and they do this by measuring metrics including click through rate on title and thumbnail and even more so by measuring view time and video engagement including likes and comments.

  Youtube will drive more traffic to your video when people watch most of it or the whole thing because this is a huge signal to them that your video was good because someone took the time to watch the whole thing. If your viewers are all clicking out because you clickbaited them, or because you’re boring or pause a lot then you’re not giving your video even a chance to start ranking.

  Another huge bonus When people love and watch your whole video, youtube starts expanding the keywords it shows for so you can start gaining more views than you even originally tried to target

• High Production Value: Lighting & Sound

  Probably the least important ranking factor, but it will help, and it will add to how long people watch your video which will help boost it in results.

  Lighting is key because if people have trouble seeing you or think you look strange they’ll likely click out and find another video with good lighting to watch. My first viral video had insanely good lighting even though it was my first youtube video because I bought lightbulb lamps at Home Depot and a white tarp for my background so it looked professional and clean and super well-lit which was even more important for a beauty product video, but is also important if you want any type of viral video.

  Sound isn’t as important and my first viral video had OK sound from my computer, but if you’re producing more than one video you might as well invest in a lavalier mic to increase your production value.

  Let me know if which viral video ranking factor you think is most important in the comments!

  ]]> https://her.ceo/how-to-increase-youtube-views/feed/ 0 https://her.ceo/flippa/ https://her.ceo/flippa/#respond Wed, 18 Nov 2020 18:57:19 +0000 https://her.ceo/?p=1315 Flippa

  Flippa – I’ve Spent $35,700 on Flippa, What did I learn? Avoid my mistakes. Learn from my experiences on Flippa by watching the video below or reading the article that outlines the lessons:

  Pre-Flippa: My 9 to 5 Background

  I’m going to start by giving you my background from the first business I started to feeling trapped in my first 9 to 5 job to spending $35K on sites from Flippa to where I am now. I’ll take you through my experience with Flippa and what I learned form each purchase so you can learn from my mistakes and successes and get a feel for what’s possible buying websites on the Flippa platform.

  I remember when I was really young, in elementary school and high school, and I would see my dad and other adults go off to work each day and come home each night, and I always assumed they were all so happy and having so much fun each day at their work!

  I never thought about my own work or future at that point or even looked forward to it and I never wanted it to come faster, I just assumed when I got there it would be great and that I would absolutely love each day. I never even considered the possibility they were only doing it for money or what each day really entailed. I think I assumed because they were adults and knew everything and had everything under control that they were choosing to go to a fun place each day to something they loved to do, it never even crossed my mind there was any other possibility. I never thought about salary or salary caps or freedom or anything, I didn’t even really realize people got different amounts of money for different types of work – it wasn’t something I ever thought about.

  Even in college, I never connected my major to the job I would eventually have. I didn’t even think about choosing a major connected to my future job, it never really crossed my mind, which looking back doesn’t seem very bright, but I wouldn’t go back and change a thing.

  I graduated from Boston College and found out later that my dad had wanted my sister and I to apply to the Carroll School of Management, aka the business school at BC so we would have better paying job prospects, but my mom told him we should be able to follow our hearts and choose the majors we were most interested in.

  It’s funny because I love business and my first job was even in marketing, but it never crossed my mind to major in ‘business’ because I clearly was not thinking in any type of long-term way since at this point as I still assumed everyone got a job they loved and went away each day to a fun retreat type setting or something – honestly I never gave it much thought.

  So I majored in psychology in the school of arts and sciences at BC because I loved psych classes, and I knew from the start I never wanted to be a psychologist or go to any more years of school – that never interested me. I was able to get a job running google ads for an ecommerce marketing agency, mostly because I’d already run google ads in an unpaid internship the past summer, not because of my psychology degree. However having a college degree definitely helped me get the job, and I don’t think that company or most companies will hire you without some type of college degree.

  I was so excited to get my first job offer and to finally be a true adult and going to the special adult work club each day. I actually loved my first three months at my new job and thought it was such an exciting, fun and new experience.

  Once I settled in I realized how constricting it was. My boss actually sat me down and said, “ I noticed you have been eating lunch away from your desk each day, for over half an hour?” I said,”yes, I like to go get lunch and eat it outside and stretch my legs, it’s nice to have that time to myself” he said “that’s not how we do things around here. You should try to start packing lunch and eat at your desk for no longer than 15 minutes each day.” I remember being flabbergasted that he would even say that.

  In his mind, and most company’s mind, they are paying for you like some type of ‘workhorse’ and they want you to be seated at your desk for 8 to 9 or in some cases more hours each day, and that is how they measure your productivity and dedication to your job. They don’t care about your results as long as your results are mediocre or better. If you only worked 4 hours each day but had insanely good results they would definitely fire you which doesn’t make any sense at all but that’s how it is because of the way companies look at owning you and your time.

  The funny part is sitting all day is unhealthy, and honestly even worse for productivity because you need to get up and move in the middle of each day for blood flow and to think more clearly.

  I know now every time I take my midday run, it completely resets me mentally and physically and I’m able to start working again after it with an incredibly clear mind and start working as effectively as I was at the beginning of the day again as opposed to petering off mentally with tiredness and anxiety as I used to after the half way point each day at my 9 to 5 when I was stuck sitting in the same position the entire day.

  Companies including my 9 to 5 roles also don’t pay you based on results, with the exception of commission in a handful of sales roles, so no matter how long you sit there each day and no matter what results and revenue you bring in to the company, your pay stays the same or goes up very slightly. Effort and results aren’t tied to pay in a normal company setting.

  For me, even worse than the pay caps and no match between effort results and salary, was the lack of freedom, and the relentless sitting each day, and that started to wear on me mentally. The fact someone else owned me, and my time, and that even a simple vacation request had to be submitted and could be denied, which actually happened to me at my first job, and vacation limited to a small number of days each year, and that I needed to sit in a chair for 8 or 9 hours each day plus two hours of driving each day, meant I had only a handful of hours truly to myself each day, and only a handful of hours I could do anything but sit forced and trapped staring at a computer screen each day.

  I remember my face would get really inflamed and red from anxiety of feeling forced to be sitting at my desk for the 8 hours each day. The company wasn’t paying for results, they were paying to have me chained to my desk each day. Every company does. I guess it’s an easy way for them to measure your perceived effort even if it doesn’t help them maximize their own results.

  Anyway, I realized a few months in that I would really rather have control over my own time each day, and I would really rather see a correlation between my effort, results and salary as opposed to some type of artificial cap where I could never really make over a certain amount.

  I kept working there and learned a ton about paid ads and SEO and ecommerce marketing so it was a great learning experience, and I was able to learn even more online marketing skills that have helped me tremendously to get a website investing ROI and still help me to this day.

  Flippa Mistakes: My First Flippa Purchases

  At my third 9 to 5, working in the marketing department at a financial technology type company, I started reading even more financial freedom and how to make money online blogs and for the first time I started seriously implementing what I was reading.

  This is the time I read a Niche Pursuits blog guest post article where I learned about Flippa, a website buying and selling platform, and I had more disposable income than I’d ever had before at this time due to a multi five figure salary raise I’d gotten when I’d switched from my second to third job. This was when I took the leap to purchase a website on Flippa while I was still at my 9 to 5.

  I remember scrolling through hundreds of pages of both live and expired listings, poring over each one and trying to figure out which to buy. I was really desperate at this time in my life in the sense I felt I needed to be making more so I could stop feeling anxious and trapped all the time. My desperation put me in a poor place to be making any type of buying decision, but I didn’t realize that at the time.

  I ended up rushing into buying a small website that educated people on technology and iPad case coverings monetized with amazon affiliates. I paid $1,300 for the site which the owner claimed was making $350 profit a month, so I thought oh this is an incredible deal I’ll be able to make back what I paid for the site in less than 4 months, this is great! He even showed me revenue screenshots from his amazon account that showed over $300 each month in affiliate commission, and I had Google analytics access to the site before buying it.

  I remember my gut telling me there was a red flag. When I looked at the amazon affiliate screenshots, the majority of the purchases were not technology related, they were bible or other related, and the thing about amazon is they pay affiliate commission on all purchases someone makes after clicking your link, not just the direct purchase of the item you inspired them to purchase.

  This means logically there could have been a lot of other non-related commissions being received. But I had a feeling there was something off, but I ignored it out of desperation to buy a site that was making money. And I told myself, worst case scenario it has to be making something.

  At this point I’d never evaluated a site to determine how much it is currently making and what its potential is via google analytics so I saw it had around thousand visits a month from only 30 or so visits a day and thought maybe it just had a very high conversion rate etc, I wasn’t diving deep to verify things and I was way too trusting.
  Another red flag was he was selling it for a 4X monthly profit valuation and I knew that the going rate for sites at this point in time was 20X monthly profit valuation, another “too good to be true” signal.

  I put in my offer and bought the site and transferred it into my hosting account. I remember getting the first affiliate commission from it for a few dollars and how excited I was. It really is a great feeling to make your first few dollars from something online, if you’ve done this already you’ll know what I’m talking about. And then there were crickets.

  I realized pretty quickly he had lied about the site profit and revenue and that I’d fallen for a Flippa scam.

  The site was only making around $20 a month, and the previous owner had said it was making $350. Turns out I had paid a 65X monthly profit valuation multiple when I thought I was paying a 4X multiple, and had been lied to about site revenue.

  I reached out to the seller and he never responded of course, and to Flippa to report his account, and they were able to take action and deactivate his account, but I had been lied to and had fallen for one of the many Flippa scammers who try to lie about revenue to sell sites for a lot more than they’re worth.

  Looking back it ended up being a great first lesson for me because I’d only lost a small amount of money, $1,300, to learn such an important lesson that has likely saved me from losing tens of thousands I could have lost if I’d made that mistake on a bigger site purchase.

  Imagine if my first $1,300 site purchase had been an honest good purchase, and then I’d lost way more on my next bigger site purchase that was a scam. I definitely got lucky that I only fell for a scam on my first very small purchase because the main takeaway I got was a lesson to never fall for any similar scam again.

  You have to remember that no platform has time to really dig through everything which is why you as an individual, always have to verify everything and dig through everything before you make a purchase, before we make any investment before you buy stock, you need to look at all the financial statements and dig through it to make sure it’s a solid company. Similarly, you have to do the same thing before you buy real estate before and before you buy any investment. For example, you have to go and inspect a house before buying it and make sure it checks out as well as look at historical rental rates in the area and other numbers to determine if it is a good investment.

  Even though my first purchase didn’t end up having a positive ROI,=it also got me hooked on Flippa and buying websites in general, because it was making a little bit of money when I first bought it. I remember seeing that money go into my Amazon affiliate account.

  It was just a few dollars and I thought so happy because I realized what was possible with owning a website and buying websites that you could actually make money online, it really opened my mind I never even realized websites could make money. The first site purchase ended up being a blessing overall because it encouraged me to keep going.

  Lesson 1: Dive Deep into Verification

  The lesson I took away from that experience is that if you’re buying any type of investment, including a website, you need to go deep to verify revenue and stats and make sure the seller is honest and telling the truth. You also need to use the common sense test to look at all the website traffic and industry average RPMs and do your own calculations in addition to getting revenue verification screenshots, looking at video earning reports, and diving into analytics to check not only traffic numbers but traffic sources, location, language and more.

  Lesson 2: Don’t Ignore your Gut or Red Flags

  You also need to listen to your gut if it’s telling you there’s a mismatch, like in my example where a technology site was getting its main revenue source from bible affiliate products and when a site is only getting 28 visitors a day but the owner tells you it’s making $350 a month Which doesn’t past any type of gut or common sense test or even logical test if you site down and work the numbers out and truly think about it.

  What you need to realize is there will always be people trying to lie to get more money, yes on Flippa, and yes even when you’re buying a house or buying any type of business or even product. People lie if they can get away with it.

  So you need to assume nothing is valid up front and go deep to verify everything on your own before making a purchase to avoid falling for any type of scam.

  Lesson 3: Only make investments with a clear, calm mind

  The other lesson I took away from this site purchase is to only buy a site when you are calm and have a clear, non-desperate mindset. It’s similar to making a decision when you’re angry, or texting someone when you’re drunk or angry. None of those actions will end well. You should only make a big decision or purchase when you’re in a good, clear state of mind.

  It’s also important to listen to your gut even after verifying everything with logic. If something feels off, it probably is, and your gut is a lot smarter than you give it credit for, so if everything checks out on the verification end but you still feel something is off, then my advice would be to not buy the website.

  In this specific example, even though I was a website buying newbie and had no idea even how to verify revenue or what a site getting 28 visitors a day in the tech affiliate niche should be making, if I had listened to my intuition that was screaming red flags I wouldn’t have made the purchase.

  However, only listening to your gut can only get you so far, you need to have a handle on revenue verification if you’re buying a website, no matter how good your intuition is.

  Lesson 4: Weed out sites early on using Flippa’s Verification Features

  This website also wasn’t using any of Flippa’s verification features which include google analytics verification and google adsense revenue verification, and I now only even consider sites on the platform that have these two features enabled, so I can weed out fake sites sooner to only dive deep into ones that already have basic traffic and ad revenue verification enabled.

  Lesson 5: Buy sites with long-term potential, not fad or trendy

  The final lesson from my first site purchase is the content was based around the current iPhone and iPad models, which meant every time a new model came out you’d need to update the content. I now look for evergreen content when buying now so I can focus more on stable growth and long-term revenue producing content, so the cyclical content nature of the site would have been another red flag for me since I buy sites for long term revenue potential that don’t require constant content updates.

  My Second Flippa Mistake – Site Purchase #2

  I was still at my 9 to 5 at this point when I decided to buy another website, this time for a much larger investment, $10,000. I applied my revenue verification lesson and was 100% certain of the site’s amazing traffic and revenue before I bought it. I also knew I could switch ad networks right away and 2X or more the revenue, so I knew it was a great purchase.

  Again, my desperation this time combined with over-confidence lead me to make the purchase.

  I was right that the traffic was great and I was right about quickly doubling the revenue, so at first I thought I’d made an amazing purchase.

  The issue was the website was based on a trendy app’s popularity, and a few months after I bought it the traffic tanked and so did its revenue.

  I did make over $5K back from that purchase from first few months of great performance, but I ended up losing a bit on the total purchase price.

  This time I lost money not because of a dishonest seller and definitely not because of Flippa itself, but because I had made a bet on something trendy and short term, not thinking about a long-term content play.

  Main Lesson: Focus on sites that are long-term investments, not short term money plays

  I was still at my 9 to 5 at this point, and had lost $4K or so my previous two website purchases combined, but I had also learned a lot from the mistakes I’d made.

  I knew there was an opportunity to buy a website that could help me achieve my goal of financial independence and I knew I now had the knowledge and skillset to make a good purchase.

  I took the lessons I’d learned from my previous two purchases and I was very careful to verify traffic and revenue and to buy a site that had evergreen content and long-term potential, and one that I knew I could quickly increase revenue on in several ways.

  How to Have Success with a Flippa Purchase

  I bought my third site while still at my 9 to 5 and it was my first success and is what gave me my foundation for financial independence.

  On my third website purchase I was able to quickly double the revenue again like I had with my second Flippa site purchase. So in other words, I was able to see how a site could actually make money and how a successful purchase on Flippa works.

  With this purchase, I made back all the money I bought from other sites plus more plus profit. This site ended up having aI really good return on investment, and I was able to see how successful website runs and works and how a good purchase on Flippa works.

  You have to remember that there are tons of good listings on Flippa, you just have to know what you’re doing and understand the space to make a good purchase.

  My fourth Flippa purchase is the one that really knocked it out of the park and enabled me to fully support myself on my own and move out of my rent free living at my grandma’s in the Chicago suburbs.

  The site was in a great niche I was able to expand using SEO and consistent content publishing over time.

  Flippa Success Lessons

  • Lesson 1: Use what you’ve learned from previous sites, investments and purchases to improve your decision making
  • Lesson 2: Implement quick wins such as quick SEO wins, ad network changes & placement changes to quickly increase revenue
  • Lesson 3: Look for long-term value in sites
  • Lesson 4: Use long-term SEO and content adding to grow sites over time

  The takeaway is that Flippa is a great place to find undervalued assets is amazing if you look closely enough, and you put in the time to grow them consistently each day.

  Flippa assets, and website assets in general, tend to be undervalued as compared to any other type of asset, real estate, you’re lucky if you make your investment back in five or six years in my two successful website investing cases.

  My two successful Flippa site purchases I made back my purchase price within 10 months. I increased revenue off the bat and long term for these purchases.

  One thing to keep in mind is that website multiples are continuing to go up so you have to make sure you are finding a good deal and a good timeframe that you can actually make it back end websites are a great area to invest in right now they’re a great asset. You can also plan on improving and then selling the site as the multiples keep going up.

  Of course there are risks involved, and you can make mistakes. As I mentioned earlier, Flippa has a great selection of sites and is my favorite website broker because it doesn’t vet sites so you have to take on the vetting yourself, and that means you can actually find better deals.

  When a broker vets sites they hike up the commission, and this includes broker sites like Empire Flippers that hike site prices so they can take a large cut, making the deal less good for the buyer. I like other website brokers too but Flippa is actually my favorite and I have bought most of my websites from Flippa and had a great overall experience with them.

  You guys can let me know if you have you bought a website from Flippa in the comments.

  ]]> https://her.ceo/flippa/feed/ 0 https://her.ceo/pinterest-seo/ https://her.ceo/pinterest-seo/#respond Tue, 17 Nov 2020 20:53:41 +0000 https://her.ceo/?p=1311 Pinterest SEO

  How to Get Pinterest Traffic – My 2,570,000 a month Pinterest Traffic Strategy

  In the past 30 days I received 2.57 million monthly pin views! How did I do it?

  Here I go through the exact steps I took to create viral pins and get millions of free organic Pinterest impressions each month.

  

  Get More Pinterest Impressions

  I just checked and this month my account has received 2.57 mission impressions.

  My top 5 pins for the past 30 days have all received over 100k views, with the top one receiving 353,626 impressions. These are all organic and I haven’t touched my account in years.

  

  It’s even crazier because I don’t post on my account anymore or schedule pins. I literally don’t touch the account, although maybe I should touch it more because here it is humming along with 1.6 million monthly views for one of my niche sites.

  I created rich pins a few years ago and did some bulk scheduled posts and joined group boards and had this active for a few months in a row and now here we are years later with over a million monthly views still, and my site still gets consistent Pinterest traffic.

  The particular site this account is connected to has also gotten over 15,000 free organic website visits from Pinterest over its lifetime.

  My top pin received 1,544 link, clicks in the past 30 days with the other top pins receiving 100 or more clicks as well.

  

  How to do Pinterest SEO

  The goal of Pinterest SEO is more Pin impressions and website visits.

  It’s not hard to be successful on Pinterest, and you’d be surprised how some upfront work can produce views and traffic for years after even if you completely take your hands off the wheel like I did with this site.

  Here are the pillars to follow to set up a strong Pinterest SEO foundation and get more views, clicks, repins and site visits:

  1. Create a Business Pinterest Account & Use a Business Email

     First create a business Pinterest account using an email that not’s your main email.
     It’s also good to have a separate business Pinterest account because the Pinterest algorithm favors an account when it is super focused around one topic.

     It’s good to create a business account type which you can switch a personal one to at any time because you get more detailed analytics and you can run paid promotion at any point with a business account whereas you don’t get those analytics or paid ad options with a personal account type.

     The reason you should use a different email than your main personal email to create your Pinterest account is but also because any time you’re running a growth focused Pinterest account there is the possibility Pinterest will shut your account down at any time for any reason and they don’t have a great support team so it may take months or never to get it back.

     I personally have had an account shut down and it took months of me emailing them on a weekly basis for them to reinstate it and I guess I’m lucky they did end up reinstating it.

  2. Niche your account down, make is super specific

     This is because more people will follow you when they are interested in your specific niche and can see you only post about your niche because they don’t want to be spammed with random topic pins.

     Having a super focused account will help you gain followers, repins and support because people will be genuinely interested in all of your pins which will help your account grow.

  3. Create amazing pins and content

     The key to having a successful Pinterest account is providing amazing content that those following you want to see.
     That’s part of why it is so key to have a super specific niche you post about so every post can be a direct hit home run as opposed to having a bunch of lukewarm posts that don’t resonate with your audience.

     The real key here to success on Pinterest is posting incredible content. Post the content you’d want to see if you were in your niche.

     I find the best images I can – remember here that copyright free or using your own is the best option with creating your own images and video being the absolute best option as long as you can make it insanely high quality. Then I use my free canva.com account and they have a size Pinterest size option which is 1000px by 1500px.

     I personally create my own dimension of 1080px by 1920px because a long time ago I did some research and that was the best size for visibility and repins. Then I upload the images into Canva and add copyright free text and design the pins all in the same Canva folder for easy export.

  4. Do Pinterest Image & Keyword Research
     One additional trick to position your pins for success is to search your target keyword on Pinterest before creating the pin, and make your image the best image and make it stand out in color and how you compose it.

     The key is to make it what you would click on if you visited that page on Pinterest and had the option to click on any pin. When you make your pin stand out and make it the absolute best pin for your target keyword, you will get more views, saves, repins, clicks and site visits from it.

  5. Create Rich Pins & Upload them to you Site

     Then you need to upload the pins to your website and put them on a page as rich. This part is even more important part than having incredible jaw dropping content because for best results you need the pins to be in rich pin format.

     You also need to have all your pins posted on your website so you can pin them directly from your website onto your Pinterest boards. There is simply no point in even pinning a pin if you don’t pin it directly from your website because you lose the rich pin benefit and you lose the site traffic benefit if you don’t do it this way.

     You can create a pin page on your website where all you do is post rich pin images, or you an integrate pins into your blog posts. I can’t emphasize this enough. You have to post the images on your own site, and post them using rich pin format which you can easily google how to do.

  6. Add Pinterest Social Sharing to your Website

     Then, you’ll need to install a social sharing Pinterest plugin on your site so you most importantly, and then second most importantly anyone else visiting your site can pin your website rich pin images images directly to pinterest
     The key to start gaining a following and traffic is to go to directly website every single day for a month and click to pin 5 or so RICH PIN images by clicking the image on your site and pinning it directly to a board on your account.
     I personally used PinPinterest’s $5 a month plan so I went in one day and pinned 180 pins in one sitting so 5 were scheduled to go up on my boards every day for a month.

  7. Schedule 5 Pins to Post Each Day

     Scheduling using PinPinterest took a lot of the manual busywork labor out of it for me and made scheduling a month worth’s of pins super easy and cost effective.

     Then, once you have a few months content on your own boards and site, you can start joining group boards that have thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers in your niche and posting one or two a day to every group board in addition to your own boards to really start getting exposure for your pins.

  8. Join Group Boards in your niche

     I used the website pingroupie.com where you can easily search for group boards in your niche.

     How it works is you search for a keyword in your niche and it brings up a list of group boards that have that keyword in their title, you can then filter by number of followers, number of board collaborators and number of pins.

     The sweet spot is to filter by number of followers a board has, then go down the list and choose ones that have 10 or more board collaborators to reach out to. You want to request to join and reach out to boards that have 10 or more collaborators because that means the admins have actively approved at least a handful of people to collaborate on the board.

     This means you have a better chance of getting approved to pin on the board the more collaborators the board already has.

     I personally requested to join and sent a personal personalized message to dozens if not over 50 or 100 group boards and was approved by around 10% of what I applied to.

     Once they approve you, don’t spam them. Instead schedule one pin every day or every few days and start with great content that has already performed well on your own boards, every few weeks you can pin a semi-promotional pin but it should really still have insanely good content. If you post bad content or too promotional of content on grojp boards you will get removed and there’s no point in doing it because your bad or overly salesy content won’t perform well on the boards anyway.

  Important Pinterest Takeaways

  If you post amazing content that stands out that you would want to click on and read, and post your content first in rich pin format on your website, pin it at a rate of 5 pins a day onto your own Pinterest boards, join a few dozen group boards and post one a day per group board, you will start to see your impressions, repins, clicks start to grow!

  Comment below your favorite takeaway from this video and like this video if it was helpful because that helps more people see the video and it gives me the ability to make more posts and videos for you guys. Good luck with your pinning!

  ]]> https://her.ceo/pinterest-seo/feed/ 0