Sold a Million Dollar Website. AMA

@captainT You might want to read his quote very carefully:

Tavin said:
2. It took about a 6 months to get the revenue to those levels, but I had prior knowledge that I gained from previous projects, and people that I worked with. This brand was the culmination of years of learning, testing, and working/learning with others on other projects.
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^^ Notice the years of experience, and knowledge gained from working with people... That's the most critical, with the right knowledge and experience time is irrelevant. There are no shortcuts in life guys - somewhere along the way the grind has to be there.
 
@Tavin & @Thomas Smale

"We also look for gaps in the current digital landscape. When we started our fitness website, there wasn’t a humour based entertainment source for the lifting community outside of forums."
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That is a golden piece of advice. Even in the largest most competitive niches, you can eliminate and disregard competition by landing in the gaps and filling a need that's not being served. There literally are no competitors. As you said, some popped up and tried to copy but you moved fast enough to completely dominate. When you dominate the gaps intelligently, there is no competition! Gold!

"It came to the point that many of our competitors would simply rip off our content, and provide a link to us at the bottom of the article on their site."
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I would welcome that all day, as long as they were late to the punch. Easy back links. My guess is that many of the sites that pull that kind of crap aren't even online any more. But I also feel that Google has a permanent memory and still provides a boost for links that have gone down, even if it's only fractional.

Great post and interview. Thanks for sharing. I took a lot from it that I know will be helping me in the future.
 
Just read this thread top to bottom, really great stuff in here. Thanks to everyone for the questions and to Tavin for taking the time to answer them. Really feel grateful to be a part of this community.
 
Thank you for answers. Very helpful.

You said diet/health/fitness niche require a strong team to get in and get out profitable. Can you elaborate on your meaning of a strong team and what would be a perfect setup? What do you mean by "strong team"? (influencers)?
 
Hey @Tavin,

what would you say where the nitty-gritty details so that your site was well accepted on your traffic leaking sites(For example reddit?) and not considered as spammy?

Why would you say did users buy from YOUR site?

Muchos gracias for your reply!
 
Thank you for answers. Very helpful.

You said diet/health/fitness niche require a strong team to get in and get out profitable. Can you elaborate on your meaning of a strong team and what would be a perfect setup? What do you mean by "strong team"? (influencers)?
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Content is king. You're going to need an excellent content editor/manager that can clean up articles and give them the viral flair (Title + Clicky Featured image). You're also going to need strong content idea creation or curation.

Hey @@Tavin,

what would you say where the nitty-gritty details so that your site was well accepted on your traffic leaking sites(For example reddit?) and not considered as spammy?

Why would you say did users buy from YOUR site?

Muchos gracias for your reply!
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Our site did well socially because it revolved around entertainment/humor. People seem to let articles that are humor based slide a little further socially and not shoot it down as spam as fast.

Buyers didn't buy anything from our site (Except clothing/shirts). We sent them to other sites to buy from (Affiliate).
 
@Tavin

if i wanted to start flipping sites as a business, what would you say to the whole thing about not spreading yourself too thin? Surely you would need to work on multiple projects at a given time.

So whats the best plan of action in regards to "spreading yourself thin" I think it would be impossible to avoid this with my limited budget.
 
if i wanted to start flipping sites as a business, what would you say to the whole thing about not spreading yourself too thin? Surely you would need to work on multiple projects at a given time.

So whats the best plan of action in regards to "spreading yourself thin" I think it would be impossible to avoid this with my limited budget.
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I would be full of shit if I didn't tell you this is still a problem that I deal with. It's very hard not to get excited in an idea, and spread yourself too thin with tons of solid ideas that you'll never possibly be able to finish. I've had to, on numerous occasions, force myself to purge ideas I was working on to focus directly on the most important projects (This is a challenge as well. How do you know which projects are most important? (You can run analytics, metrics, and numbers, but i've found that going with my gut works out much better. Go with your gut.)

Only you know how far you can spread yourself before you start to seriously diminish your quality and effort on project. Right now i'm trying to focus on no more than 5 projects at once.
 
Cheers Tavin ! :wink:
 
@Tavin What do you do when you see a project as you planned, does not work out?

Appreciate your answer!
 
@Tavin

Thx for this GOLDEN thread.

I was wondering, which tools are you using when marketing a new website at scale? Do you use something like the seotoolbox from linkassistant at all?

Cheers!
 
I was wondering, which tools are you using when marketing a new website at scale?
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- Trello
- ProRankTracker
- Skype groups for each major website
- Semrush
- FB page spy tool
- Dropbox/Google Drive
- Excel
- RSS feeds (Feedly)
 
No it wasnt. Before we sold, doyoueven.com was ripping 90% of our content and resharing then sourcing us at the bottom (a la viralnova), and getting roasted by their/our fans for it.

We were a full 20k better than them on alexa, but saw each other as each other's main competition on facebook. Since then broscience.co has come along and is doing a very respectable job. I don't keep up with it much anymore, but last time i checked they seem to be the new top dog on fb in the niche.
 
Tavin said:
No it wasnt. Before we sold, doyoueven.com was ripping 90% of our content and resharing then sourcing us at the bottom (a la viralnova), and getting roasted by their/our fans for it.

We were a full 20k better than them on alexa, but saw each other as each other's main competition on facebook. Since then broscience.co has come along and is doing a very respectable job. I don't keep up with it much anymore, but last time i checked they seem to be the new top dog on fb in the niche.
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It's not a niche I know anything about as I don't lift, but one of my friends who's very into the gym had shared something of theirs on FB -- since it fitted the general description I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. Sounds like their ripping of your content probably only served to strengthen your position if they were catching flak for it.

Thanks for the reply. Congratulations on your very inspiring success.
 
@Tavin

1. What is the "FB page spy tool" you referred to? Something in-house?

Also keen to understand how you setup staff operations more.

2. I saw you had 2 full time VAs for this million dollar sale. Do they do outreach and also find and schedule your social posts?

2a. Where are you able to find VAs like that with those skills (to find viral content), surely they could be running their own social powered sites?

3. OR is the viral bit part of the writing team (ie they make the clicky title, image etc too) and the VAs do some other stuff? If so, what?

Thanks dude!!
 
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