I sold a website for 1/45th of a million dollars. Don't ask me anything.

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I was encouraged to join up and talk about this here. This isn't an ask me anything but I'll answer some questions. Maybe. I know this isn't a huge win compared to some of the threads I've seen up in hurr but hopefully it helps inspire some folks none the less, in an "if I can do it then anyone can" sorta way.

In short: I built a website and barely worked on it at all, and then sold it for a decent chunk of change (Probably works out to about $600 per hour spent on it if you include the monthly earnings as well as the proceeds from the sale. That's almost triple what @thehobbster makes on backpages, for context.)

BULLETPOINTS!!!!
  • All of the traffic was from SEO. Thank you based Google.
  • I didn't pay anybody to build links for me because it's easy enough to do it myself and then it's done right.
  • Most of the sales came from one inner-page's ranking for a keyword that gets over 20k searches a month.
  • I never ranked in the top 5 for that keyword.
  • The total expenses were less than $300.
TIME TRAVEL WITH ME!!
  1. Domain was registered about two years ago and I put up a little 2 page site that ranked for the main keyword until the main keyboard started to get a lot more competitive. I didn't have any monetization at that point because I'm stupid.
  2. It just chilled like that for quiiiite a while. About 14 months later I popped up a magazine theme and made it brand-ier (Social accounts, tightened up the style, etc...)
  3. Started doing some basic SEO at this point. Making profiles (AND USING THEM!!) on relevant sites, some Web 2.0 stuff. Nothing fancy, nothing that anyone can't do. I think some people spend more time trying to find a good provider and fucking around than it would take for them to just do it themselves. I'd rather have 10 of these profiles / web 2.0 / hubpage-esque satellite sites setup than to have 100 that were built by somebody who gives zero fucks and rushes them out with awful content.
  4. Shortly after this I redesigned the site again, made it unique. It was using a very popular themeforest theme but I got it loading in under a second and decent page size.
The takeaway: If you're going to be lazy, be lazy but do things the right way from the start. Fucking around with all the blackhat nonsense is so much harder than just doing things correct. I'm not going to preach about hard work because this isn't an example of hard work paying off, but it is an example of spending more time working than looking for shortcuts.

If I was going to do this again I would have started with a domain that allowed for a broader niche but still focused on the same area. The site wouldn't have been limited to one smaller topic, and I would have ranked even higher because I could have leveraged social media a lot better and gotten all those sweet signals, virality, and ultimately links too.

The best part about entering the elite group of people who have made more money online than they've spent on WSOs is that I don't even have to find my own gifs anymore. @CCarter be a dear and fetch me a gif.
 
@CCarter be a dear and fetch me a gif.

PwRLxxP.gif
 
ah the beauty of doing seo properly and earning that long tail traffic. Well done, sir.

Are there any stats/case studies on what/who earns it, and why? I know the basics, but I wouldn't mind more material on it if it's available.
 
Are there any stats/case studies on what/who earns it, and why? I know the basics, but I wouldn't mind more material on it if it's available.

It's not something I can predict. It just happens over time as authority builds. So vague. Sorry.

I just do more of the basics until the canons go boom. Sometimes it never happens. Sometimes it happens after I give up. *shrug*

There are no REAL case studies that I know of because it's not like (A+B+C)Time=Longtail; and if there are, they ain't tellin'.
 
Are there any stats/case studies on what/who earns it, and why? I know the basics, but I wouldn't mind more material on it if it's available.
Go buy serp woo.

Nobodies gonna give you more then that. Take what you can get and say thank-you.

Its a brutal truth.

Educating wannabees so they can compete with you is not a very lucrative market.
 
@algospider Actually using the accounts instead of just buying fake followers and loading up hootsuite and buffer to feel like I was accomplishing something. But I didn't really get any traffic from that anyways, it wasn't a big part of my strategy for this site because I was so focused on selling a handful of products, but I believe in my tiny, black heart of hearts that it helped me rank. Every site should have a social presence but that social presence isn't going to be an effective source of traffic for every site. Had I gone more broad I could have been cleaning up with social traffic on the front end and ranking like a mawfker behind the scenes... Y'know, I probably could have done that anyways to some degree.

Web 2.0 stuff, don't just build it and toss your links in and be done with it. Comment on shit, share shit, follow/friend other people's pages. All these sites are setup differently but it's all the same, really. Some link on some island page on a monster domain isn't going to be nearly as effective as a link on a page that you've build hundreds of bridges to... Why even bother spamming it when you can harness the ridiculous amounts of juice and authority that already exist on the domain, in a genuine way, that doesn't disappear? Lazy fuckers. This was the big part of my strategy. If you're lazy don't just hire some mouth breather to blast it with spam, do like one site/profile a day for a month and you'll have 30 rock solid links that you have full control over that can be very relevant to your niche, that you can point to another site down the road, that you can improve, change, etc.

Picking a target keyword with lots of volume, buyer intent, that's relatively easy to rank for and has a lot of really easy long tails doesn't hurt either...
 
Go buy serp woo.

Nobodies gonna give you more then that. Take what you can get and say thank-you.

Its a brutal truth.

Educating wannabees so they can compete with you is not a very lucrative market.

Already bought SW, and it's an amazing tool; Jason and Carter have built something excellent.

I also agree with you in not teaching the newbs.

I was just curious if there was any data on it as far as a percentage of search type thing, not necessarily how to obtain it. I get LOTS of longtail, very little of the big KWs in my niche.

This was fair response:
There are no REAL case studies that I know of because it's not like (A+B+C)Time=Longtail; and if there are, they ain't tellin'.
 
You mentioned selling products. Was your monetization method affiliate links or actual ecommerce?

Also what platform did you use to sell the site? Flippa auction? If so where did you start the bidding?
 
Great thread . How did you make the dollar out of the longtail traffic ?
 
  • Most of the sales came from one inner-page's ranking for a keyword that gets over 20k searches a month.
  • I never ranked in the top 5 for that keyword.

You guys are all talking about long-tail traffic, but I'm not sure that's the clear picture. Pheasant, are you saying the traffic came in and converted from that specific keyword mostly? I can imagine that this could be the case if all of the other pages that ranked above you sucked, and yours was awesome, and your title and meta description were better.
 
@RiverStyx Selling an affiliate product. Sold through a private broker.

Yeah @Samwise89 gets it. I don't think I was necessarily cleaning up on long tails. The top KW in terms of bringing in traffic that Google would show me was the one I was ranking 5-10th for (Usually 6-8). There could be tons of long tails that don't have enough volume to have any slipping through the [not provided] gates but I think most of my traffic and sales came from my bottom-5 ranking for this one kw.

Bros you don't need a lot of traffic if it's targeted and your page gives the people what they're looking for.
 
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