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How an Amazon Niche Site Made me $16,843.01 in One Year

I started an Amazon niche site one year ago in April and since then it has made me close to $17,000. In this post I will be explaining how I accomplished this as well as why I think everyone should be trying to make money with niche sites.

People love to claim that niche sites are a waste of time and that they aren’t a good way to make money online. I beg to differ.

Niche sites, in my opinion, are the single best way to make your first dollar online for so many different reasons. That is how I want to begin this article, by telling you all of the reasons why I ABSOLUTELY LOVE niche sites.

Why I Love Niche Sites

1

You are Building a Sellable Asset

This is the main reason why I spend a lot of my time building out niche sites because I am building something that I can sell down the road for 20x monthly earnings. That's huge!

Not only do niche sites earn you money each month but then you can decide to cash them out and sell them whenever you want for a nice payday. Not to mention that niche sites are very, very easy to sell.

Think about this, imagine that you have a niche site that makes $2o0 a month pretty consistently. That means that you could sell the site for around $4,000 at 20 x $200 a month. Let's say that you decide to add some new content and some new PBN links to the site and you increase your monthly earnings from $200 to $300.

Now you can sell that site for $6,000! Just from increasing your monthly earnings by $100 you can increase your potential sale price up $2,000. The increase in monthly earnings is magnified in the sale price.

I love the idea of building up something that I can sell off later for a good return.

2

Upfront Work, then Passive Income

Another awesome thing about niche sites, well at least the ones that I build, is that they take some initial upfront work for the keyword research, site setup, content and link building but after that there isn't much work.

The only work that is needed after you get everything setup for your new niche site is to add a couple new PBN links per month to try and rank for new keywords.

The site that made me close to $17k was a site that I didn't even log into for the past 4 months and I hadn't added any new PBN links either. It was 100% passive income each month.

It took some work to get the site to that point but I have no problem busting my butt for a month to get a niche site to a point where it consistently earns over $500 a month without any work.

If you build niche sites properly and set them up for success, then it is very possible to get them to a point where they make you money each month without you having to even think about the site. It takes very good keyword research combined with excellent content and smart link building.

3

Low Barrier to Entry

What I mean by "low barrier to entry" is that it does not take much to start your first niche site.

On a budget? You can still create successful niche sites.

Busy Schedule? You can still create successful sites.

Limited Knowledge? That's fine, there isn't a TON of info you need to be successful.

Niche sites are the easiest way to get into online marketing and making money online. There is almost zero risk to start a niche site and they can have an awesome ROI.

You do not need any special skills to be good at making niche sites, as long as you work hard and follow a plan you can make money with them.

4

Relatively Easy to Be Successful

When you have a process that has worked for you before it is pretty easy to replicate the same success over and over again. That is what I have done with niche sites.

I have found a method of creating niche sites that has been successful for me and now all I have to do is follow what I know. It took some trial and error to get to this point but building a successful niche site is generally easy, especially compared to other ways to make money online.

The idea of niche sites are also very easy to grasp, even for people looking to make money online for the first time. The process goes like this: get traffic to your site, get them to click to Amazon(In my case) and then hopefully they buy when they get to Amazon.

The whole process is simple to understand and makes niche sites a great option for beginners.

5

Excellent ROI

To set up and start a niche site it takes very little, or even no money at all to get them started.

If you really wanted to save money, the only thing you would have to buy would be your domain name and hosting. Everything else could be done by you or for free.

I like to outsource certain parts of the process and spend money on things that are important(content and links). I have no problem spending money when I know that I will make it back tenfold in a couple of months.

For example of some insane ROI let's take a look at the site I just sold. I spent $750 on this site for all of the content and private blog network sites and then a year later made $16,800.

That is a 2240% ROI

Try and get that sort of return on your investment anywhere else!

Niche Sites AREN’T Dead

Many people will claim that niche sites are dead and that they are not a good way to make money online.

In a way they are right, low quality and spammy one page niche sites ARE DEAD. It is getting harder to rank sites and people lose hope when they don’t make money within the first month of making the site.

People are correct when they say that it is not as easy as it once was to make money with niche sites but that doesn’t mean you can’t make good money doing it. You will just have to work a little bit harder and smarter than before.

In my opinion, niche sites are the easiest way to make money online plain and simple. Many will disagree with that but that is how I feel.

The simple fact that I made close to $17k from ONE niche site in ONE year should be enough proof to prove that niche sites are a viable option to make money online.

Proof of Income

Before we get into the details about my niche site, I first wanted to show some proof of income so that you all know that I am not lying about the earnings for this site.

Money Wired from Selling the Site

Total Earnings from Amazon(April 1st 2014 – April 1st 2015)

Earnings from CJ.com

Total Earnings for Niche Site TZC

  • $11,824.35 from the sale of the site
  • $4,799.62 from all of the Amazon Affiliate commissions
  • $219.14 from some sales on cj.com

I know that the Amazon screenshot isn’t the best way to prove the earnings but I don’t want to show the name of the site or the niche for the sake of the buyer of the site. You can look at all of my income reports and the site is niche site TZC in all of the reports.

Now that we got the proof of income out of the way, let’s hop into the good stuff! The information and details about my Amazon niche site.

Information About the Site

I think that it will be helpful to give you all some background information on the site. This site was my first successful niche that I ever made and I learned a ton from making it.

Before this site, I was struggling to make any money whatsoever and this was my first true success. It was sad letting this site go but it made room for new things and I am very excited about these new opportunities.

Let’s take a look at some of the important information about the site.

​

Niche

The niche for the site was in the outdoor/sportsmen type niche. Before entering into this niche I had no prior knowledge of anything related to it. Many people say to make niche sites around your passions, I disagree and would rather follow the money.

The niche was fairly broad as it allowed for me target many keywords that were all related to each other.

A good example of this niche would be something like fishing rods. Then I targeted keywords such as best fishing rod reels, fishing rod holders reviews, fishing rod parts, etc. There were a ton of different longtail keywords that I was able to rank for easily due to good keyword research.

Many of the items that I sold were in the $50-$75 range but my overall average price of items sold was only around $30. You will see that I sold a good chunk of items each month but many of them were on the cheaper side.

If this niche had higher ticket items this could have brought in an easy $1.5k each month, unfortunately it did not and I had to settle with selling cheaper items.

​

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Content

I had 3 main articles written for this site right when the site was created and when I sold the site it had only 10 pieces of content.

One was a contact page, one was a privacy policy and another two were filler content. The other six pieces of content brought in all of the sales and earnings for the site.

I might have been able to increase earnings with more content but I did not see very much earning potential in doing this. That is why I only had 10 pages on the entire site.

I got the content from a writer on Elance who was an expert in this specific niche. He did a very good job writing the content and I believe that was a major reason as to why this site was so successful.

The type of content on the site was formated like "The Best Blank Reviews" and it was about 1500 words. The articles were broken up into two parts, the first being information about the items I was trying to sell and the second part was where the top 5 items were reviewed. In the second part of the articles that is where I would put the affiliate links and made my sales.

​

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Monetization Methods

Like the title of this article suggest, the main monetization method was with the Amazon Affiliate program which accounted for over 95% of all of the earnings(excluding earnings from selling the site).

I love the Amazon Affiliate program because as you have probably heard a million times, Amazon converts its traffic into buyers very well.

They also have a 24hr cookie which means that anyone who visits Amazon and buys an item within the next 24hrs, I will still get a commission in the purchase.

Another really cool thing is that you get commission on ANY item sold after they visit Amazon through your affiliate link. I would venture to guess that at least 33% of all of my Amazon earnings was from selling items that were unrelated to my niche.

That stat alone makes up for the often complained about low commission percentage that Amazon uses. Every month I was able to get to the 7.5% rate and I don't have too many complaints about it.

Aside from you Amazon, I also had some earnings from cj.com. Cj.com is an affiliate site where many sites have an affiliate account setup.

The only reason why I used this other affiliate site is because for a period of time my top selling product on Amazon was no longer sold on their site. For about 3 months I had to send my visitors to another site until Amazon sold the item again.

​

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Link Building Methods

The main type of links that were used on this site were from my private blog network(PBN) sites. Back when I first started this site, the effectiveness of PBN's were through the roof!

You could be ranking for some medium competitive keywords within a couple of weeks with only a handful of PBN links, which is almost unheard of nowadays.

Now it usually takes around 2-3 months to rank for these same keywords but PBN sites are still one of the best ways to rank sites, even with this delayed time period of ranking.

Besides PBN links, I also built some pillow links to the site such as blog comments and social links. This didn't do much to help rank the site but it made the link profile of the site look more natural and helped it stay away from any google penalties.

You'll see in the timeline below how quickly PBN links were able to rank my site and how fast the site was able to reach 100 visitors a day.

​

Timeline for Site

This site found success relatively quick, especially compared to niche sites today, and I think that was due to a couple of reasons. I put in a ton of work into this site within the first month which gave it a nice push towards success. Another factor was that private blog network sites were EXTREMELY effective, as you will see in the timeline below.

That brings us into the next part of the article, the timeline for this site!

Mid March – April(First month and a half)

The first month and a half I was very busy adding new PBN links and I also added 3 articles to the site. These 3 articles were written by an expert in this niche and they were all about 1500 words long.

I paid top dollar for these articles but it was worth it for excellent content. These same 3 articles earned me about 95% of all of my earnings during the time I owned the site. The investment for a top notch content was a good one to say the least!

Like I said, I went crazy with PBN links in the early stages of this sites life and this led to it ranking VERY quickly for many of its keywords. Below is a screenshot of my excel spreadsheet where I kept track of all of my PBN links added to this site in the first month in a half.

 

pbn-links-firstmonth

 

 

I added 18 PBN links to this site in 41 days! Some days I even added 3 PBN links, which is a very rapid pace to add links. Each one of these PBN links linked to 3 pages each on my money site. The rapid pace that I added new PBN links is a major factor for the hyper growth that the site saw in its early stages.

The traffic for the first month and a half of the site is shown below, you can see some awesome growth happening very quickly.

 

first-month-traffic

 

I added my first PBN link on March 19th and then 35 days later, on April 23rd, I had my first 100 visitor day. You will be hard pressed to find growth this quickly on your niche sites today.

On April 27th, 4 days after my first 100 visitor day the site reached 162 visitors in one day.

I never fully realized how quickly this site grew until I went back and looked at the stats. I wish I would’ve started 10 new niche sites during this time period instead of just two, but it is easy to say that now. During this time period it was very, very easy to rank in Google with good content combined with PBN links.

Enough of the dreaming, let’s get back to reality and see how much the site was able to earn during the first month in a half. The earnings from Amazon are shown below.

 

earnings-firstmonth

 

The site was able to pull in around $48.00 with the majority of it coming near the tail end of April, since that is when my traffic started to pick up.

This was my first ever earnings from a niche site and it was like Christmas morning each day when I would check the stats and see I made a sale. It was so motivating and I realized that if I was able to make $48 then I could scale that to hundreds of dollars as long as I kept increasing the traffic.

You will see in the upcoming months that I was able to do just that, increase the traffic which in turn increased the earnings for the site.

The Next 4 Months(May – End of August)

I am going to lump the next 4 months of this sites life into one section because I did not put much work into the site during this time period.

If you want to get a month-by-month breakdown then you can read the income reports that I wrote during this time. This site is called either Niche Site 1 or Niche Site TZC in the income reports.

I only added a couple of new PBN links during this time span and the traffic stayed pretty consistent. Looking back on it, I am not sure why I stopped putting work into this site. Im guessing a lot of it had to do with it being summer and it was my last summer home before going off to college.

Another reason is because I had another niche site that I was also working on at the same time which took some time away from this site.

The screenshot of the excel PBN document looks a lot different this time around. Instead of adding 18 new PBN links within a month and a half, I added 2 PBN links within a 4 month time period.

 

pbn-4months

 

 

2 new links in 4 months… pretty weak if you ask me! If I was smart I would have taken advantage of this time since PBN links still worked like a charm with ranking sites in Google. I should have been trying to rank every single keyword related to my niche during this time.

One thing that I keep forgetting and need to remind you all of is that I was very new to private blog networks during this time. I also did not know as much as I do now about them.

During this time, I was still buying expired domains from GoDaddy Auctions and from domain brokers which cost me a good chunk of money. I was not using the method that I use now to find expired domains, which allows me to find niche relevant expired domains for the price of registration.

Let’s check out the traffic during this time period shall we?

 

traffic-4months

 

Traffic remained steady throughout these 4 months, which would make sense since there were really no new PBN links added.

I want to show you all the traffic to the three pages on the site and to prove that this site was getting most of its traffic from just three pages. You can see the page stats below.

 

pages-4months

 

Over 29,000 pageviews between 3 pages and practically zero for the rest of the pages. The other pages, besides the main 3 pages, were pages such as the about page, contact page and the homepage.

You might also notice that the average time time on the page is pretty good. They have 2:30-3 minute average on each page and that is because the content was well written and useful. That is why I am willing to fork up a good amount of cash for high quality articles for my niche sites.

All of this traffic is also coming from organic search, mostly from Google. You can see in the image below the distribution of traffic sources.

 

traffic-source-4months

 

It would make sense that most of the traffic is coming from Google organic since ranking in Google was the main goal.

The site was also able to bring in a small amount of traffic from Yahoo, Bing and Aol search engines as well. I never put too much effort into growing the social media following for this site so that was never a major source of traffic for this site.

The niche of this site would have been a good niche to build a Facebook page/group around since it is a passion niche. People in this niche love to talk about their passion and it would have been smart to try and utilize Facebook more.

Now I want to take a look at the earnings for these 4 months.

 

earnings-4months

 

Close to $800 in 4 months which comes out to about $200 a month. This is a very good start to this site and I can’t even explain how happy I was to have a site making me $200 each month.

What made me even happier was knowing that at any point I could sell the site for 20x the monthly earnings, which would mean I would be able to sell the site for $4,000 at this point.

In less than 6 months of this site being live, I was able to get it to a point where it was making $200 consistently each month and the traffic was close to 200 visitors each day and build up a sellable asset that is valued at over $4,000.

September – End of October(2 Months)

The next two months I started to put in more work into this site because I knew that the site had more potential than just $200 a month. You will see that a picked up the pace on PBN links and the earnings followed.

If you are looking for a month by month breakdown for this site then you can read the monthly income report for September but I did not publish an income report for October(First full month of college and I was really busy).

Nonetheless, let’s see how this site did in these two months once I started to add more PBN links.

The screenshot below is once again from my excel document where I kept track of my PBN links for this site. You can see that I added more PBN links in these two months than I did in the four previous months.

 

pbn-2months

 

I was able to add 5 new PBN links, with most of them being added in September. One of the reasons why I started to add more PBN links was because I added a new piece of content to the site that I thought had potential to bring in a lot of traffic and earnings.

As a byproduct of trying to rank this page, I also increased the rankings on my other pages as well.

Let’s check out how the traffic during these two month time span looked like with the new PBN links being added. The previous four months the site averaged right around 140 visitors a day, let’s see how that stacks up to these next two months.

 

traffic-2months

 

With some rough math, I can see that during these two months the site average around 215 visitors each day!

My Math – 12,900/2 months/30 days = about 215 visitors a day

This is a huge increase over the 140 daily visitors that I was averaging during May – August. This increase was partly due to the new PBN links but it was also because my content was starting to age in Google and it started to rank for more keywords.

I am assuming that Google started to see my site as being “trustworthy” and worthy of being ranked highly.

I think Google saw that my site had a low bounce rate and high average time on page which would lead them to believe that the people that visited my site found what they were searching for.

There have been multiple studies done that prove that having a high CTR in the search engines increase your rankings and my site had a very good CTR on almost all of its keywords that it ranked for.

Just by having high quality content I was able to increase my traffic per day but the new PBN links were like steroids for ranking keywords. With all of this new traffic coming to the site let’s find out if that translated into higher earnings as well.

 

earnings-2months

 

The site was able to pull in $632.08 during these two months which works out to be around $316 per month, This is a nice upgrade over the $200 per month that it was earning during the last 4 months.

The increase of earnings is expected since the traffic was increased as well. With the site earning around $300 a month, that now meant the site was valued at $6,000 if I wanted to sell the site.

The idea of being able to increase the monthly earnings by only $100 but increase the sale value of the site $2,000 was crazy to me. Such a small monthly increase was a HUGE deal if I decided to sell the site. That is a major reason as to why I love niche sites so much.

 

November – End of January(3 Months)

These next three months, from November to the end of January, the site saw some steady growth in both traffic and earnings. At this point the site was over 9 months old and in my opinion was considered to be a “good site” by Google.

I didn’t write an income report for November or December but I did a 2014 Income report that gives some updates on the site. If you would like to read that then you can do so here  – My 2014 Income Report

I also wrote a January Income report that will give you more insight and details about how this niche site did during the month of January. The site is named Niche Site TZC in these income reports.

I was able to add a handful of new PBN links during this time(mostly in December) and this helped maintain and increase the keyword rankings of this site. Check out the new PBN links added during this time below.

 

pbn-3months

 

There was 6 new PBN links added to the site during these three months with 5 out of the 6 coming in December. I was home for Christmas break in December so I had a lot of free time to work on my sites. That would explain the surge of new PBN links added during this time.

By adding new PBN links fairly consistently to the site for the last 3-4 months I was able to steadily increase the traffic to month after month.

I was able to rank for new keywords as well as increase the rankings of my already ranking terms.

You can see the traffic growth in the screenshot of Google Analytics below.

 

traffic-3months

 

During these three months the site averaged close to 333 visitors a day which a nice increase over 215 visitors a day.

I talked about how I was trying to rank for some new pages on the site that I thought had potential for some nice traffic and earnings. These new pages are marked by yellow boxes around them in the image below.

 

content-3months

 

Not anywhere near my other 3 pages in terms of pageviews but they were starting to rank in Google and bring me in some extra money.

The average time on page for my whole site is still around 3 minutes during these 3 months which is very good.

With all of this new traffic the earnings for the site were able to increase quite a bit, check it out in the screenshot under this.

 

earnings-3months

 

Wow, this site is really starting to rake in the dough!

With $1,825.85 made during these three months it comes out to be a little over $600 a month from this site!

This is close to double what the site was making during the previous four months. Now instead of the value of the site being $6,000 it has now increased to close to $12,000!!

When the site reached that point I started to have some serious thoughts about selling the site. $12k is a lot of money, especially for a college student who has to pay a good chunk of money each quarter to be able to attend the university.

In the next section of the article I will go into more details about the idea of selling the site and how I weighed the pros vs. the cons. For now, let’s see how the months of February and March went for the site.

 

February – End of March(2 Months)

If you wanna read the income reports for these two months you can do so here – February’s Income Report and here – March’s Income Report

During the beginning of February I started to seriously consider selling the site and I actually listed the site for sale around mid February on Empire Flippers, more about that later.

One of the biggest reasons why I wanted to sell the site was so I could start selling on Amazon by private labeling a product from China.

Initially, my plan was to buy the Amazing Selling Machine course and start my Amazon FBA journey that way but as you are all probably aware of, I have decided to go at this alone. You can read more about my Amazon FBA journey here.

At the time, I needed money to buy the ASM course($5,000) as well as pay for my initial order which would cost anywhere from $2,000-$4,000 so I concluded that I needed around $7,000-$9,000 to start selling on Amazon.

I thought it would be a good idea to sell one of my niche sites and create some free cash for me to invest into my next business venture. That was my main motivation behind selling the site.

I will go into more depth about the pros and cons of selling a niche site and a couple of other reasons why I ended up selling the site a little later in the article. For now, let’s see how the site did over these 2 months.

Since I had a pretty good idea that I was going to sell the site, I did not continue to put in any work into the site during this time period. Matter in fact, I don’t think I even logged into the wordpress backend of this site.

I also did not add any new PBN links but despite no new links and not putting any work into the site it continued to grow in terms of earnings. However, the traffic slowly decreased. Let’s see the traffic for the site below.

 

traffic-salemonths

 

You can notice that the traffic is slowly starting to downtrend and for obvious reasons. I haven’t added a new backlink to the site since December, so the decline in traffic is expected.

However, even with less traffic coming to the site it continued to earn more each month from Amazon. Below you can see the two month’s earnings from the site, pretty impressive.

 

earnings-salemonths

 

Close to $1,500 during these two months, which comes out to be about $750 each month! The site was also able to sell 645 items during these two months which is a ton of items to sell.

I ended up selling the site on April 1st(more info about the the selling process later on in the article) so this was my last earnings and traffic to the site.

Full Review of the Site

Now that I have walked you through the timeline of the site, I want to take a look at the overall stats. There is just a little over a years worth of data for this site. From mid March 2014 to April 1st 2015. The first thing I want to look at is the total traffic that the site saw all time.

 

fullyear-traffic

 

The site got very close to 80,000 unique visitors during its lifetime which is awesome and over 150,000 pageviews, that is a huge number! It also had an average visit duration of 1:44 minutes on the site which is due to the high quality content that I had written for the site.

The pages per session which sits at 1.60 is very good for an Amazon niche site. It is interesting to see how the traffic changed over time and to observe the highs and lows.

One thing that I notice is that the traffic was starting to dip at the tail end and maybe it was a smart decision to sell the site when I did.

Next up, I want to look at the traffic sources for the site.

 

fullyear-trafficsources

 

As expected, Google search made up over 80% of the total traffic with 77,558 sessions. The next highest source, with 8,587 sessions, was direct traffic which is kind of surprising to me.

Most niche sites have very low direct traffic because its not normally a site that people bookmark or go to directly in their browser. I would assume that the content on the site was useful and people came back to the site for reference.

Most of the other sources are from smaller search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Aol and Comcast which is what I would expect since the content and site was optimized to rank well in search engines.

The next image is going to be the all time pageviews for the site.

 

fullyear-pageviews

 

You can see right away that three pages dominated most of the pageviews and that is due to the way that I utilized my PBN links. Some of the other pages started to gain some traction in Google and pull in more pageviews as well.

I left a couple of the pages from being blacked out to show the site really did get most if its traffic from just a handful of pages.

That does it for the traffic, now I want to show you the total Amazon Affiliate earnings that the site earned.

 

fullyear-earnings

 

I showed this exact screenshot at the beginning of the post but I thought it would make sense to include it here again in the Year in Review Section.

It earned close to $4.8k in around one years time, which comes out to just about $400 a month. Not bad for some easy passive income!

The next image is a screenshot of all of the most important data from month to month from this niche site. I know it is a lot of data to look at but you can click on it to make it bigger and then take a better look at the numbers.

 

stats-overview

 

The excel doc above shows some cool stats such as CTR to Amazon from my site, average sale price, earnings per day, earnings per click and revenue per thousand visitors.

All of this information is very important to know for all of your niche sites because it will let you see where you need to improve your site and compare the stats from one month to another.

One of my favorite things to do at the end of each month is to fill out the new data for my excel doc’s that I have for each of my niche sites. I love to see how the site has grown and what I can do to try to improve in areas that it is currently performing below what I would like.

Below is a screenshot from Semrush, which is one of my favorite tools to use to track a niche sites progress as well as do a ton of other things.

 

semrush-keywords

 

The site is currently ranking in the top 20 in Google for 500 keywords! You can also see the trend of how the site was able to rank for these keywords.

The best ranking month was in March and since then has decreased a tad, could be just natural movements but I am also not building any new PBN links(obviously).

I know that the new owner of the site site using his own PBN links to rank the site but the fact that I didn’t add any new PBN links since December could be catching up to the site and hurting the rankings.

To give you all an idea of the type of keywords I was targeting with this site I have taken a screenshot from Semrush. Below you can see the top keywords that bring in the most traffic to the site.

 

keywords

 

The site targeted many high monthly searched for keywords including the top keyword, which has 9,900 monthly searches. About halfway down the image you will be able to see that I was ranked for 1st for a lot of keywords with 200-500 monthly searches.

There are countless long tail keywords with 100-300 monthly searches that I was able to dominate and rank 1st in Google for.

People don’t like to target keywords with only 150 monthly searches but when you rank 1st for 10 of these keywords it starts to add up.

Finding a bucket load of long tail keywords related to a niche is very important to me and is something that I make sure each niche has before I enter into it.

That does it for the full review of the site, in the next section I will be talking more about the sale of the site and how that whole process went. Thanks for reading this far, let’s continue on.

The Sale Process

Once I decided I was going to sell the site, the first place I went was to the Empire Flipper’s Marketplace.

The other option I had was to use Flippa but the guy’s over at Empire Flippers run a much better business in my opinion. Some of the main reasons why I chose Empire Flippers over Flippa are listed below:

Benefits of Selling Your Site Through Empire Flippers


  • Sites Sell for 20x the Three Month Earnings Average
  • Excellent Customer Service
  • ​Site is Almost Guaranteed to Sell Once Listed
  • ​They Handle All of the Leg Work(Site transfer, buyer requests, etc)
  • Very Reasonable Seller's Fee of 15%
  • They Will Put your Site in Front of Many Hungry Buyers
  • Don't Have to Worry About Being Scammed
  • URL of Your Site is Kept Private which Avoids any Copycats
  • The List Goes On and On, I would 100% Recommend them to Anyone Selling a Website

Once I decided I was going to sell my site through Empire Flippers it was a pretty straightforward process to get it listed in their marketplace.

Initially to get started, you have to submit some basic information about your site along with the URL of the site.

They will then ask for income proof as well as access to your Google Analytics account to verify the traffic and earnings of the site. They will also verify that you own the site but that’s about all you have to do. They may have a couple other questions but its pretty easy.

Once you have submitted all of that information, then they begin the vetting process and your site will generally be accepted within a week. After that your site is given a listing price and listed on their marketplace.

From there your site will sell in no time, they make it a very simple and easy process for the seller. It took barely any work from my side and the site was ready to sell quickly. 

It’s as simple as that, in the next section I am going to be detailing how I sold my site and what it looked like from my perspective(as a seller). 

Selling my Site

I told you that I had posted the site on the Empire Flipper’s Marketplace around the middle of February and the initial listing price was $11,596.60.

You can see the email from Joe Magnotti himself letting me know what my site was listed for and what to do next, that’s what I call service! You can also see all of the calculations that they used to reach this valuation of my site and the listing price.

 

email-inital-listingprice

 

In the calculations(Bottom of the email) you can see that the sites 3 month earnings average was $579.83 and that multiplied by 20 brings us to the site’s listing value of $11,596.60.

The site had a couple people interested in the month of February but there were no takers. I had a few people put a deposit down, which is 5% of the sale price, which allows them to view the URL of the site as well as be able to ask me(the seller) any specific questions they might have.

With this deposit, they also get access to my Google Analytics account where they can verify the traffic for themselves.

When March rolled around my site had another month of earnings under its belt and it was time to update the sale price. Luckily, the month of February was a good one for the site and I was able to rake in close to $730.

The $730 earned in February was higher than the previous 3 month average which meant the sale price should be updated. I sent Empire Flippers an email to see if they would update the sale price for me.

Below is what I sent them on March 1st:

 

march-updatesale

 

I got a reply back to my email on March 9th, a little slower than I would have hoped but everything worked out. I was a anxious that someone was going to purchase the site before the sale price was updated but luckily nobody bought the site and on March 9th I received the response below:

 

march9th-reply

 

Sweet Sauce!!

My listing price was raised more than $2,000, from $11,596.60 to $13,911.00! I was also able to make another $730 from the site even though I was in the process of selling it.

With a high earning month in February, my average monthly earnings for the past three months raised from $579.83 to $695.55. That’s a huge increase!

You can see why I was little worried about someone buying my site before they updated the sale price, I wanted that extra $2k 🙂

In the month of March I had a couple more depositors who were interested in the site and I was in talks with them throughout the month.

To give you an example of the type of questions that I received you can check out the questions that I was sent below:

 

quetsions

 

If you are interested in my response to those questions you can read it below, sorry I had to cut some of it off because I couldn’t fit it all on one screen.

 

response

 

It turns out that the person asking these questions didn’t end up buying the site but you will see soon on how it did sell.

When the end of March rolled around there were still no buyers. I thought that the site would sell very quickly but it took a little longer than expected.

I wasn’t complaining though because with each month that passed I was still making money from the site and I was raising the sale price in the process. Win win.

I did have someone give me a counteroffer to the listing price. The listing price was at $13,911 and the person offered $12,000. Almost $2k less than the sale price. This was the email that I received:

 

counteroffer

 

I replied to this email by saying this:

 

counter

 

The reason why I said what I said was because I knew that my March earnings were going to increase the sale price of the site. I thought that my counter offer was fair considering that the listing price would be raised in the near future.

During the month of March the site was able to earn $766.38, the highest earning month ever for the site.

I once again sent an email to Empire Flippers and asked them to update the listing price. They generously agreed and sent me the email below:

 

listing-update-2

 

The listing price was increased once again to just over $15k!

Once the listing price was updated it did not take long for it to sell.

The reason why it sold so fast after the listing price was updated was because the people that had placed a deposit down on the site before the listing price was updated could still buy the site for $13,911.

This created some urgency as well as showed them that they were actually getting a good deal on the site. Very soon after the price was updated I got this VERY exciting email in my inbox:

 

sell-email

BOOYAA!

I can’t even explain how exciting it was to earn my first big chunk of money online. It was an awesome feeling. 

After I sold the site I had to help out the new buyer with some stuff and I had about a 20 minute skype call with him.

After that the site was transferred over and I received a bank wire transfer of $11,824.35(This is with the 15% fee taken out that I paid to Empire Flippers).

Just like that I made my first website sale and it couldn’t have been an easier process. HUGE props to Joe and Justin over at Empire Flippers. 

Why I Sold the Site

It was a tough decision to sell the site and it was something that I put a lot of thought into. I had to weigh the pros vs the cons and I ended up deciding there were more pros than cons.

In this next section I want to get into some of these pros and cons to further explain my reasoning for selling the site. 

Pro's of Selling the Site

1

Create Cashflow for Future Projects

One of the biggest reasons why I wanted to sell the site was to create some cash flow for me to use in starting Amazon FBA.

​I knew that I needed at least $5k to get started with Amazon FBA and selling the site gave me enough money to do that as well as save for college at the same time. 

2

Reinvest The Profits into my Other Niche Sites

Not only did selling the site allow me to start a business on Amazon, but it also allowed me to reinvest the profits into growing my other niche sites.

I currently have two other niche sites that earn me money each month and two other sites that are still in their early stages.

With the new money I have been able to outsource the PBN creation as well as start to add new paid links to some sites.

I am still waiting to see how or if this will pay off but I am hoping it will give me a positive ROI.

3

Save for College

I was able to pay for my first year of college(2K each quarter) from the money that I have made online so far.

By selling the site I was able to basically guarantee that I would be able to pay all of next year without having to worry.

I am very proud of paying for most of my own college considering most of everyone that I know either have their parents pay for them or they have loans.

That is another thing, since I was able to make money online I have not had to take out any student loans which will keep me from being in debt when I graduate. ​

4

Rather be Safe Than Sorry

Even though I have setup my PBN very safely and with a lot of care, you never know when Google could penalize your site. The last thing I wanted was to have a $15k asset be worth nothing the next day after being penalized.

To prevent that from happening, I thought it was a good idea to cash out on my hard work and ​take the money and run, in a sense.

5

Sold It While The Earnings Were Peaking

This really worked out in my favor and I could not have sold the site at a better time.

I listed the site in February and for the next two months it continued to earn me money and make more money, month after month.

I sold the site at its absolute peak while it was under my control and maximized my return on it. It also seems like the traffic has taken a small hit since I have sold it. I might have gotten lucky and got out of the site just in time.

6

The Site Had Reached its Max Potentail

In my opinion, I had done everything that I thought was possible to maximize the revenue. I had ranked all of the keywords that I wanted to rank as well as reach just about the max possible in terms of traffic.

In my hands, the site was at full potential and I had done everything I could to maximize earnings. ​

It was either hold onto the site and earn $700(hopefully) each month or cashout. I liked the cash. ​

Con's of Selling the Site

1

No More Recurring Income

This was probably the hardest part to let go about the site. The $700 each month was VERY nice.

Even though I still have a couple of niche sites earning money each month I almost feel like I am starting back at square one.

My monthly recurring income will take a huge hit after selling the site and you will be able to see that in the upcoming income reports.

I am willing to sacrifice the $700 monthly income from this site to have the opprtunity to start a new project that has more earning potential.

I consider it a calculated risk and I hope it works out!​

2

The Possibility to Earn More

This is something that I will never truly know if I made the right decision on or not.

I feel as if I exhousted all of the posisble earning avenues and there was nothing else I could do.

One of the monetization possibilities that I looked into could have made the site earn $10k+ a month​. Unfortunately, it just did not work out for this site which was a bummer. 

Overall, I feel like I did everything I could and I am content with my decision. ​

You can see that the pros heavily outweighed the cons in this case. Which is why I decided to sell the site. In the end, there were too many good reasons for me to sell the site and that is what I ended up doing.

I am confident that it was the right decision despite losing out on close to $800 each month. 

To Sum It Up

In one year I was able to go from zero income from niche sites to building up my own site and selling to to make a grand total of $16,843.01.

That is a very good chunk of money to make from one niche site, especially when everybody claims that niche sites are “dead”. 

The funny thing is that when I started this niche site a year ago people were saying the same things about niche sites that they do now. Don’t let them stop you from at least trying to make a niche site. 

It is the best thing I have ever done and it has propelled me into practically running my own online business at the age of 19.

Thank you all for reading this article, it turned into a much longer post than I had hoped. Hopefully it wasn’t too long and that you found some use out if it. If you are interested in making a niche site of your own then check out the info below. 

Again, thank you all for reading and have wondeful day!

Want to learn how to make your own profitable niche site?


If you want to learn how I made this site successful from start to finish then make sure that you sign up to get notified of when my course on how to make niche sites comes out.

I am going to be making a video course on every single step that I take when I make a niche site and walk you through every part so that you can make successful niche sites as well.

I am also going to be making a niche site live in front of you all and I will use this site as an example of how to make your niche sites successful. You will only be able to see this site if you sign up for the course.

Features of this Course

  • Step by Step Instructions from Someone Who Has Experience with Making Profitable Niche Sites 
  • 2+ Hours Worth of Video Content
  • Watch as I Build a New Niche Site from Scratch
  • There will be no stone left unturned
  • Access to a private Facebook Group 
  • Access to Future Videos and Updates
  • Member Only Webinars where you can Ask me Questions 
  • And much more

If you are interested in learning how to make niche sites that make you $500+ a month then sign up below. I am in the process of making this course as you read this and it will be out soon. Also by signing up below you will be eligible for a discount that no one else will get. 

Comments

29 Comments

Sheyi

Whao!!!

This is great and lovely.

So happy you were able to earn a good money online to pay for your college.

And no, this article is not long. Even though I have read countless number of articles in this niche site arena, I still find your writing style lovely.

And yes, I rarely comment but I am just happy to read the increment in earnings of your site.

I wish you all the best and I hope your other sites pick up in due time.

It sure pay to have those healthy $800 monthly recurring income … but its better to take a big chunk now than regret later.

Keep Winning

Keep Hustling

~ Sheyi

Josh
Josh

Hey Sheyi,

Your nice words mean a lot and I am glad that you enjoyed the article. Comments like your make the hours of hard work writing the articles worth it. Truly appreciate and thank you for commenting.

-Josh

Kyle

Another great write up, man!

This is another avenue I was curious about getting into, but don’t know the first thing about. I’ll be the first one on here reading your niche site process and going for it myself.

Keep up the awesome work!

Josh
Josh

Whats up Kyle,

Appreciate that my man and thanks for commenting,

-Josh

Jamie

Hi Josh,

First time to your site. Glad I stopped by, this is an awesome post with amazing depth of detail.

I’ve been sitting on the fence for a while now about building niche sites and your post is pushing me to take action and just give it a go.

It can only be a win-win. I could build a successful site and start making passive income, or I don’t create a successful site but learn a ton in the process. Definitely a win-win.

Keep up the good work. I’ve entered my email in anticipation of your course.

Josh
Josh

Hey Jamie,

Awesome to hear you liked the post and found it inspiring enough to want to start building your own niche site!

I think that’s a great decision and you have a great mindset going into it. If you ever have any questions you can always teach me at [email protected]

Thanks for commenting and see Ya around the site

-josh

Mark McKnight

Nice one Josh. I also make some money from affiliate sales on Amazon.com. I starting to scale up now and pump out a few more small niche sites. I just hope this bubble doesn’t burst for a while. Have you ever discovered a way to build and monetize a list from your niche Amazon sites?

Josh
Josh

Hi Mark,

I don’t think that the bubble will ever burst, the way people make the sites may change but I think amazon niche sites will always be a good way to make money. I have built lists for a couple of my niche sites but I have never tried to send them anything. From what I have heard, email lists aren’t very useful for niche sites.

Hope this helps and thanks for commenting!

-Josh

john

wow my site will value at

826 mar
700 apr
699 may
total: 2,225 usd / 3 =741.67 * 20 = 14,833 usd

while
1,371 nov
1,466 dec
1,511 jan
total: 4,348 usd / 3 =1,449 * $20 = 28,986 or 1,275,413 million pesos

wow just wow

Josh
Josh

Hi John,

Are these stats from one of your sites? Why was there such a bog drop off?

-Josh

john

my website used to be ranking number 1,2,3 in google now its only 8th for my main keyword..

but now im adding new pbn links into the internal pages… they are gaining visitors again but not as they used to.. ill monitor the sale this month before i decide to sell it… 6-5-2015 the earning is already $180 but if i target $1,500 for june then its short of $80 to make it half ..cause its supposed to earn $250 on june 5th … $750 on june 15h then finally $1,500 on june 30-31 … thats the time ill sell it.. maybe

Josh
Josh

Still some impressive numbers my friend! Maybe your old PBN links have been deleted or the PBN sites have lost their power, which resulted in you losing some rankings. This happened to my site and my rankings suffered from it

-Josh

john

ill check on how pbn lost their link power… do you mean lost their PA and DA ?

i believe the ranking drop cause of this
9% of the pie in majestic anchor text is a name of the girl i used for blog commenting, the links were placed in a sidebar… i think thats how it went down

Tony

Josh, nice write up. I have 2 questions. Did Empire Flippers charge you $300 for the vetting process and if so did that come off the top price or your cut?

Also, do you think it’s possible to rank page 1 with an Amazon affiliate site without a PBN?

Josh
Josh

Hi Tony,

Thank you!

Empire flippers charged me $300 straight up, it didn’t come out of anyones cut.

Basically what they do is charge you $300 for the vetting process then if you fail they give you your money back but if you are accepted into their marketplace then they keep the $300. Hope this kinda makes sense.

100% yes! There are countless other ways to rank websites but I just prefer PBN sites because they are effective and I have experience with them. Also, with good keyword research you can find keywords where you don’t even have to do any outside link building.

Thanks for commenting,

-Josh

Tonmoy Parves

Hello Josh,

First thanks for share this case study with us 🙂 How’s doing? Hope everything is going good. Really by reading your this case study just learn a lot’s of points. I’ve few questions to you. Hope, you would like to response.

1. How you get the Writer on Elance? And How much you were paying them for every content? And to build up a niche blog, How many contents you mostly need? Would you please recommend few or someone within budgets to me 🙂

2. I’ve read a few case study and people share about PBN link building. But I’ve also read few Google updates and some experts say to avoid PBN as well they are risky and also Costly. So, would you please share some cool methods to build backlinks? And you have mentioned that you added your 1st PBN links after 30 days+ But why? and you also mentioned that you were adding 5, 10 PBN links monthly. So total how many links you added there and how much were it cost? Would you please share. And if we don’t have PBN then how should we go for first..

Hope, you will answer these two questions 🙂

Regards
Tonmoy

PaolaPagol

Hey josh,
thanks for share this useful and informative article. You are really brilliant.

Josh
Josh

Hi,

I really appreciate it 🙂 Thanks for commenting

Josh

Simi

Thanks for great post really I am very happy to get you post you provide us most of the valuable tricks and information. Thanks for your greatness.

Josh
Josh

Hi Simi,

You are welcome, glad I could provide some helpful info to you!

Josh

Mrs. Budgets @MrandMrsBudgets

I am in the process of starting my own niche site right now. I really appreciate you writing this article as I was starting to get discouraged. We are just finishing up writing content then will be up in a couple weeks. Our articles are super in depth resource type articles that will have amazon affiliate links and we will also be posting pure educational non-linked posts.

Question: Did you also use google adsense for revenue?

Josh
Josh

Hey there,

Glad I could provide some encouragement to you! Good job on writing your content and now you are on the right path to success. On this niche site I did not use Google Adsense, only Amazon Affiliate.

Good luck!

Josh

David

Well done Josh! You deserved that chunk of money buddy. It was just a result of your hard work; -)
I can’t just still find the right equation for Pbn do you have your own Pbn or do you buy the links? Can I email you?

Cheers
David

Josh
Josh

Hi David,

Thank you!

I have my own PBN that I use to rank my sites. Feel free to email me at [email protected]

Josh

san

Thanks Josh, for such a wonderful explanation of each and every step.
Perhaps this is the best blog I have ever visited so far.

You’ve cleared every doubt that a reader might have in mind.
But I still have some doubts regarding setting up PBNs.

Do you have a detailed post on that??

Thanks again

Jaswinder

Hello,

I spend a lot of time reading your article, which was not only interesting, but informative too.

I learned some knowledgeable points from it!!

I have only one Niche site, which is only six months old. Around four years ago, I started to write on Squidoo and learned a lot there. Before that, I never wrote anything online. I made some money too. Then they sold it to Hubpages, I deleted my account and made a blunder mistake.
Then I created two blogs at blogger and made some Money there and again stopped.

After the gap of one year, again I got the urge to write something and just started my Ease Bedding Niche, today after six months, almost I made $200 and going to get my first Check from Amazon.

Thanks.

Josh
Josh

Thanks for reading and I am glad to hear that you enjoyed my article!

I want to wish you the best of luck with your site and feel free to ask me any questions you have along the way

Josh

Mohan Desai

Hey, Josh!

it was a really long article but really enjoyed the reading, most of the time I end up in between but I loved your writing style.

Thanks for sharing this great information and good luck for your next Project.

Josh
Josh

Thank you, that is awesome to hear!


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