Site Flipping Case Study: How I Turned $13.5k into $60k

[00:00:00]hey what's going on it's doug cunnington here and this is the doug show i'm interviewing my friend adam smith who has i guess a steak he's one of the co-founders over at niche website builders but he started as a niche site owner sort of from the ground up so i'm excited to hear his story it's very interesting because he's never started a site from scratch but he got into this by flipping sites so purchasing them and then selling them later so adam how are you doing today yeah good thanks doug and yourself fantastic fall is sort of upon us here it was so hot a few days ago but it's cooling off which suits me much better so how is it over there weather-wise yeah it's it's nice today i mean i'm in wales and i live probably 25 minutes from the brecon beacons national park so it's it's always raining pretty much like 70 of the year it's just rain where i live so it's it's nice to have a i can see the blue sky out the window it's nice nice today that's pretty awesome well for the people that don't know you can you give a little bit of an intro about what you do right now and then i also want to hear about your your previous career because i know you haven't been doing what you're doing now very long yeah sure so as you mentioned i'm one of the co-founders of niche website builders we we're an agency that focuses on helping affiliate website owners and marketers improve their websites um we build websites for for clients and essentially we are we're aiming to be the hands-off go-to agency for affiliate marketers you can come to us we do the keyword research we have a team of in-house content writers um so it's all all based here in the uk and then we do the the formatting and uploading and then we have additional services like um link building and web building services too before this so that companies is quite new um we started that company uh in december but since then we've grown we've grown really quickly we've had some good industry recognition we our retention rate is insanely high so our client base is is growing really quickly before that um i was just a regular affiliate marketer myself that's kind of how how we got started me and mark with the company in fact mark queued me on another podcast and i was talking a little bit about my frustrations in outsourcing content and finding good quality writers and that whole space and mark was experiencing something very similar so he reached out um interestingly me and mark live about two and a half hours three hours apart so i mean we've grown this business together but we've only ever met each other in real life like three or four times so mark you had me on the podcast he he drove down to wales we spent the day together just kind of getting to know each other and chatting and we hatched this idea um to start the business and we went from there but i guess i probably start from the beginning of kind of from how i got into the space or or how did you want to yeah well before before that what was your your previous gig yeah sure so prior to um affiliate marketing i've always kind of worked in in digital somehow i worked initially for a um an ad network it was a very specialized ad network they helped and this is our specialized they helped south um they helped asian publishers monetize their video traffic their video content on their websites um so my primary role there was managing their google ad exchange accounts uh setting flow rates for different categories and it was kind of cool getting to see how the tech was built and how an ad network was run and um and is profitable and then from there left that role and i joined a more traditional marketing agency um and they helped uk universities attract students so it was postgrad and undergrad students and i started there as a strategist basically coming up with ideas for paid campaigns across things like facebook and instagram and twitter and that kind of thing um and then quickly progress to senior strategists where it was a lot more client-facing i would travel to the universities um i would explain the plans i would explain what kind of audiences we would we would want to reach how we would reach them what that message would look like um and essentially pulled together this plan into a a cohesive you know plan over 12 months and then um we had an advertising operations team that then took that plan and tuned it into actual uh into the actual campaign and ran the campaign got it how many years did you do the digital marketing stuff that was about four years i think until then okay so not a super long time and yeah so eventually you realized hey i kind of want to do some side hustle stuff and then you got into niche sites somehow or another so yeah what was your first exposure to affiliate marketing niche sites and making money online yeah so i mean i've been dabbling with affiliate marketing for for a long time like even far as far back as when you could run your your own self should that survive it's on plenty of fish where you could actually call out attributes of people and you know say um are you interested in asian women for example then click our advert and send them off to asian dating sites and things like that that was a long time ago when you could do that kind of stuff and then i was a big follower of um of of piafly and luke who who used to run the the blog over at pfly and his blog was great he used to give lots of information away around paid affiliate marketing around these kind of dating offers and um pin submits and email submits so that was kind of my first exposure and then i kind of i could never really get that to the point where i was profitable enough to to make it my full-time role so that was always kind of like i always felt like i was knocking on the door and trying but i could never quite crack that and then while i was working for for the last agency i decided i had some money saved up um and i decided i was gonna buy a site from empire flippers and this was um this was back when you could buy sites when they were down around like the ten thousand dollar mark i don't think they quite sell them that cheap anymore um and yeah i had this money then i thought i'm gonna i'm gonna go into this i have a good exposure and good knowledge of of seo from my my day job so i mean let's do it so i bought the site i was looking at the numbers before this call actually was 13 and a half thousand dollars is what i paid it was in a niche i literally knew nothing about uh it's about barbecues and smokers um and we don't even we don't even have smokers in the uk and we just have barbecues so i literally didn't know anything about the niche and then over the course of the next seven months i did a lot of technical work on the website so the website was was quite messy from a technical perspective the structure of the site wasn't great did a lot of work there and then i spent a lot of time uh creating new content and this was before you know i figured out how to outsource things and make my life easier i was writing this content myself i was doing lots of the research i was very active with that site in the facebook groups which is cool because they have a very enthused audience base around like smokers people are very enthusiastic about about the smokers and that was cool because i got in the groups and i really got to know the product and how they talked i even got a couple of people to actually send me photos of them using their actual smokers which i could use on the review posts which which were great and then out of the blue seven months later i had a an email asking me if i was interested in selling the site and initially i thought this is a scam because i obviously never had some kind of that email out of the blue before like this but it turned out it wasn't the guy was just doing manual outreach uh trying to buy sites and um we talked and we negotiated uh and i sold the site to that guy for for sixty thousand dollars and i was like wow this is great like why am i why am i working a day job i can do this so i asked i asked the agency could i drop down to three days a week um and i could focus on on this stuff two days and they said no because at that point i was very client-facing so i quit i just uh that was it quit which was which was scary um my wife was a bit uh you know are you sure you're doing the right thing kind of kind of thing but yeah i mean i haven't looked back since that was kind of my first foray into into this world how long ago was that this was back in 2017 i believe okay end of 2017 beginning of 2018.

[00:08:49]okay so just about three years amazing and do you have do you happen to remember how much money you invested into the site after the purchase email yeah it wasn't a lot in terms of monetary value um i did almost all of the work myself it was very time intensive i was working obviously quite a demanding job so most of my evenings and weekends were spent working on the site which mainly consisted of writing content i'm not a natural writer like writing isn't my natural skill so it was i think it was a bit more difficult than that should have been as well trying to perfect how to write these this type of content so yeah i guess in terms of money there was very little of actual money involved i didn't really outsource anything which is which was probably a good thing because it meant i had to learn everything from the ground up okay so a nominal uh you know maybe a couple hundred bucks max yes yeah okay very cool and then how much time did you have the site uh for seven months seven months so obviously great turnaround and what okay you sold the site you have roughly 60k you pay some taxes some other stuff and actually before i move on to what you did with that money how did you sell the site so i know someone contacted you you obviously didn't pay broker fees you worked directly with the individual so can you tell us about the actual mechanics of like what you shared on the site as far as traffic revenue did you give them access to certain pieces of information in the transaction did you use an escrow what legal documents were drawn up all the kind of boring stuff but this is deep in the weeds so what did you do yeah yeah i think i was a little bit naive back then obviously being the first time and i've gone through this process many times afterwards and it's looked slightly different but essentially they're the same things i always always use escrow.com as the escrow service i think there are other providers out there but i've always i've always used escrow.com i find them to be to be very good i know that they don't work with with some countries which can be a pain if you're trying to to buy or sell a site from someone within these countries and in that instance depending on the the value of the sale sometimes it's best to walk away i've been negotiating with people to buy sites and they can't use escrow and they suggest like payoneer and it's always that you know okay you send me the site first and then i'll send you the money and they say you send me the money and i'll send you the site and i mean just end up walking away because it's just not worth the risk but so we used escrow i always give access so give him access to google analytics so read-only access to google analytics so they can go in and check the traffic um i mean they can do something similar by looking in ahrefs or scm rush but i mean it's not super accurate i guess the thing they're looking for there is to make sure that there's not just one or two pages that are driving most of the traffic and they also want to check that the traffic is coming from you know predominantly the us or the uk depending on what the site is because i just want to make sure that most of the traffic is organic or if it's social where where is that social traffic coming from and are those accounts included in the sale but for this sale it was it was primarily google it was primarily the u.s it had a nice split of traffic across a number of pages so there wasn't really a there's no real issues there i can't remember with this one if i just sent screenshots of the amazon account so the earnings uh including the tags so they could see that this was the actual tag that was driving the revenue or if we actually did a video walkthrough i think we may have done like a screen share and i did a video walkthrough showing showing the revenue in the amazon account and then afterwards then there was a i don't remember the amount of days a seven or a 14 day inspection periods where essentially they funded the escrow account i've sent them the login details and um pushed the domain to them uh and then they get either seven or 14 days to go in and switch out their affiliate tags ensure that the revenues that i promised or that looked that was that i stated was making was actually real and was coming through into their amazon account and that everything looked good on their side with analytics and then once that inspection period is over and they're happy with with everything they tell escrow that they've received everything and they're happy and then escrow releases the funds to to the seller then which which was me um so that whole process i guess from start to finish probably took like three or four weeks by the time we kind of sent over all the details they checked them we then were negotiating on price a little bit um and then obviously we had the inspection period and for the people that don't know what protection do you have like using escrow like why why do people need to use a service like that yeah sure so escrow acts as like as a middleman essentially like an impartial middleman where you initiate an escrow transaction and then the the buyer uh deposits their funds with escrow and esco will tell you once those funds have cleared and then you know those funds are essentially ring fenced you then send over the login details for the website and push them the domain and they they do that whole migration so essentially they now have ownership of the website and then you can select whether you have uh no inspection periods or you know however many days inspection period you want where it gives the the buyer the opportunity to change up the tags or to verify everything and then um once that's verified they just tell escrow they've received everything that's good if they tell escrow that they've received everything and it's not good they then have to send you back ownership of the domain and i've never been through that process um i say fortunately or unfortunately because i don't know i don't know the ins and outs but i assume after that they send you back the website and the domain um they have to prove that to escrow before they get their money back so it's it's kind of like a middleman just to make sure that as a as a seller you're protected your money's safe and it's it's ring fence they can't just run off with the money once you've sent them the details and as a buyer your money's safe while you verify everything is it checks out okay and it is what the seller says they're selling cool and it you know just provides protection on both sides everyone feels a little safer running through it so from a legal standpoint were there any documents drawn up or was it pretty pretty much like a handshake agreement yeah there's no there's no documents signed up i know i've in the past had to look at ndas so i won't compete with it within certain niches which uh some sellers require uh sorry some buyers require and some buyers don't i have had uh deals fall through because i wasn't prepared to sign an nda for like five years within a specific niche i think that's a little bit too long i mean five years in an affiliates in the affiliate world is a lifetime i think that's too long but yeah there was no there was no no no other official documents i think escrow in this case was more than enough to protect us both yeah okay cool any other details with the transaction at all like did you feel pretty safe throughout because you were using escrow yeah i mean i i think i was lucky because i was selling to an experienced buyer um they handled all of the site migration they handled all of the the tag updates i mean it was very it was a very smooth sale from my site i think it's a little bit different if you sell to someone who's a beginner and they need the handholding of how to migrate the site and how to update the tags especially if like the website is using amazon shortlinks um you know typically they want some help in switching out those short links so yeah but in this instance it was very it was very straightforward very simple transaction on my side which which was good considering it's my first time yep and i by the way quick side note i've i've sold a site pretty high dollar amount and didn't um use escrow just transferred the money high amount of trust but part of it is because i have like a public brand and they felt safe working with me there were some legal closing documents which were actually essentially like a real estate transaction in fact i think they were literally used for real estate transactions so as i read through everything i didn't even hire a lawyer myself all right that's how like seat of the pants it was i just read through it and i was like this line makes no sense this is not like a residence or whatever so people operate differently and some folks will have you know a huge stack of papers to sign and sometimes even with 60k or even more you may be able to just operate if you trust the person without making it super complicated so okay for sure i think that's a big part i think that whole relationship you build in the in the negotiation part i think puts you at ease if someone's uh very responsive and they you know i get i guess it's just the gut feeling you have with someone when you start chatting to them about potentially selling a site um that's the way this felt anyway i mean i put seven months of like blood sweat and tears into this site and it felt like the guy at least initially appreciated that i say initially because i spoke to him then like uh i think it was like six or seven months later and i was like i remember speaking and i said um you know how's my baby doing how's my sight going and it's still growing and to him it was just another transaction he said no i sold it like six months later for for 90 grand he was just on a upwards trajectory and he literally just held on to it waited for the average revenue to increase and then and then flipped it on and that was that was kind of a light bulb moment for me again i was like wow i want to be in that position to one day as well where i can just buy sites and hold them and flip too which brings us to what did you do with the 60k yeah well the first thing i did was i took some time off i actually burnt myself out write in all of that um content so i'd finished my job it's quite a demanding job and i'd done all this content right in i started looking around for another site um and then um i think i found it in the flipping websites group it was a site in in in a in a sports niche um similar kind of value i think this was a bit less i paid around ten thousand dollars for it all of the content was written by non-native speakers so i instantly saw the opportunity to upgrade and update that content and then add a ton more um this this website was then buying this one in january 2000 and 2019 i think yeah about around then i think maybe was it 2018. i don't know when the date was but i remember it's a january time i had the december off for christmas and i bought the site in january and i started working on the site again um lots of technical seo lots of foundational structural changes and then this time i didn't write the content i started outsourcing the content and first of all i tried to find some some writers on places like upwork um which were very hit and miss it was difficult to find consistency there and also difficulty difficult to find scale there i mean you find one good writer but they can only push out you know x amount of words per week and then they have other commitments and before you know it you know you've got one good writer that's doing three thousand words a week few and five terrible writers who are able to pump out as much as you want essentially and then i grew that site um similar kind of time frame actually so around seven or eight months in that site was doing around three and a half thousand dollars a month but this time i didn't sell it obviously i kind of learned my lesson from the last one where i sold it a little bit too early um and i still have that site still part of my portfolio but that cash flow allowed me to to reinvest so rather than sell the site and then kind of look to buy more what i wanted to build up was a portfolio of sites um so this cash flow and some of the money from from the initial web sale allowed me to start buying other sites most really of which have come from the flipping website um facebook group and they tend to be quite small i guess in comparison to to some website sales i find my sweet spot tends to be around the five to ten thousand dollar mark in terms of buying sites and then work on them and invest in them and then flip them for sort of 20 30 000 over over a time period and i've done that quite a few times um i've recently sold off uh three three websites in the 20 to 25 000 range and then literally this week i've put up uh another three sites which combined come to about another 25 000 all of which i've just bought and invested in and grown and i'm looking to exit and the main reason i'm looking to exit now is not for the cash flow um which i think we'll come on to a little bit later but it's to reinvest back into my expired domain portfolio okay cool and when when you had sort of like the height of all your sites and the portfolio how many sites did you have in the stable i don't think i've ever i think i don't think i've ever been above kind of six or seven sites at the time at one time it's really difficult to work on all those sites at one time obviously and what you find is you tend to work on the ones that are doing the best and then the ones which are you know either you've just recently bought or not doing as well then you kind of just leave them to the wayside um and but then is i think it's always a good opportunity then to say okay well what am i going to do with these am i going to am i going to keep them and work on them am i ever going to get around to them you kind of always have that thought in the back of your mind yeah you know i'll get around to that one day and i'll do this but really speaking you know as as you get busier you just kind of never never really get around to that um one of the sites incidentally that i'm selling i put up for sale recently is this exact thing i bought it end of last year um and i've literally done very little to the site it's just sat there it's been very consistent um the cash flow has been good but i mean i've literally done nothing to it to be fair when you are looking at these sites are there some criteria that you identify knowing that you'll be able to improve the site and sell it for a higher amount or you know increase the value just by increasing the cash flow yes definitely so there are two things that i always look for um one is the ability to to look at the top 10 pages that are driving traffic and have a look at the contents is it thin content can it easily be updated can i easily add a faq section um can i easily add another five product reviews does it have a buyer's guide can i add that in so i can easily and and quickly have quick wins on those top sort of 10 or 20 pages that are driving 80 of the traffic the other thing that i always do is switch over the design of the website to to one of our templates so over the years we've developed a template that's that's built on thrive and i think a lot of people will have something to say about that i think page builders are a bit of a um a personal subject but i personally love thrive i think they've done great over the years but i always switch up the design to one of my thrive templates it has it's proven to work over the years i've done lots of split tests and a b tests using google optimize to test even as far as things like what's the best call to action on the buttons i think i shared some results with you recently where we talked about is it best to have um check price on amazon or buy now on amazon as the call to action text um so over the years this this template has kind of evolved based on all these little tests and i find switching out the the design to this template on the top 20 of the pages um usually has a nice boost in in conversions we recently did this for one of our clients actually where we switched out the site they'd bought over to one of our designs on the average time on site i never really noticed i never took too much notice of average time but i've gone from like 45 seconds to like a minute and a half um and it's very was very clear in analytics you switched the template and you could see just went like whoop so that was kind of cool to see in actual real-life data and raw data switching out uh to one of our templates what that looks like and yeah so the opportunity to update content the opportunity to to improve cro through changing the template and then i'm also leaning towards these days um niches which are quite broad so i can start expanding um i've always been a fan of sports sites niche specific sport sites so for example um you know soccer and i like the reason i like this is because the niche is very well defined before you start you can plan everything out you know in the soccer niche for example you've got you can pre-plan your categories you've got balls you've got cleats you've got goals shin pads and it's very easy to plan out what the whole finish site will look like in terms of content before you start whereas if you start with something broad you know just like outdoors um you know that could that could cover everything you could have a cover camping could cover rv in it could cover so many things i find it's difficult to nail down what a sub what your first sub niche should be and then how much you should build that out before expanding to the next and there's always that thought about okay i've covered everything in campaign if i now start looking at you know a shoulder niche will google recognize that will that content start to rank um so i've always been a big fan of very narrow niches but recently since since time to build on expired domains and utilize the power of the existing backlink profile i'm actually santolin the opposite way again now where i'm looking for expansive niches i'm looking for the sites where i can add you know a million words over the course of time where i'm not going to be constrained to a single niche or if i am at least to start with i'm looking for domains that are brandable so you know for example the the domain won't include the word soccer or be totally about soccer but it'll be about um ball sports and i can expand into rugby and you know all the related sports essentially like go along there i thought you guys call it football oh yeah i mean i i call it i call it soccer because i actually have a site in the soccer niche and i've obviously done the research but yeah football is what we call it all right well thanks for working with the u.s audience here so you mentioned the technical seo and i'm curious about like what you did actually on the site yeah sure so um a technical order consists of of a number of different aspects the first one being speed site speed is very important um the first thing that i do is i run the the site through gt metrics and i get a report there that typically consists of things like minifying css and js scripts optimizing image sizes implementing a cdn if the site's not already using one and there are a couple of other different different things in there of what you can do but mainly it's just about the getting the larger things fixed i think some sometimes people can go a little bit overboard on fixing all of the tiny issues but as long as you get i'm very much an 80 20 kind of guy i'll fix the 20 that drives 80 percent of of of whatever i'm looking at so site speed was was one the structure of the site in terms of um like site categories and how things are laid out so i remember on the first site that i bought the site wasn't wasn't really set up in any particular way just had like a blog roll on the home page and that was that was kind of it so spend a lot of time re-categorizing all of the posts into you know smokers grills barbecues accessories recipes that kind of thing and then reworking so creating custom category pages for each of those categories then changing up the homepage design so we can utilize any homepage link juice to send them through to those custom category pages and then they flow down through to the individual posts within each category um the other thing which i spent a lot of time on back then which kind of you don't have to do so much these days because of spencer's uh link whisper plugin was was internal linking and that was all done manually so essentially the first thing i did in order to restructure the site was create a spreadsheet of all the posts and that became like my masterwork in documents where i then added all of the categories and then i would go back then and i would create virtual silos so all of the content within smokers for example would be internally linked um and i track all of this in a spreadsheet so i'd keep a track of all of the anchor text that i use for each post um how each post is linked to each other that took a long time i mean on on a site as you keep growing it to keep adding internal links like that is it's quite painful but like i said these days with plugins i mean spencer's even have added the feature recently where you can click the box to only show internal links to the same category so that's great for for keeping those those links siloed and then the other thing then it's just about creating um an about us page uh i'm more in depth about this page and creating like uh authority for the website i guess uh that trust trust element one thing which we we still use and we use back then was this person does not exist.com it's essentially a website which or generates images of people that look very realistic it's um it's like an ai generation tool um and you can go on there and you can press refresh until you find an image of someone you think's looks like they would be into smoking and barbecuing and you can you take that person and then you just create a whole persona around that person then um i i don't think i'm not a lawyer but i don't think there's any this person actually doesn't exist i don't think there's any issues with using that person as your persona for the website um and yeah that's kind of what what i mean by fixing all of the technical and on-site issues there and for the custom category page i've put together a couple of these i just want to make sure our definition is the same so can you explain what you mean with the custom category page yeah sure so wordpress standard category pages i think are a little bit terrible um they usually have if you have a lot of posts then they have lots of like page annotation uh issues there where you know you go to page two and it's another url for google to crawl and and it's sometimes not set up correctly for self-referencing so i would like to create an actual page a wordpress page where i can layout all of the posts on the same page they're not page and tated and then i always have a nice um unique um contents added to the top so there's there's an introduction about you know if it's smokers what are smokers um you know how they've developed over the years so you've got some nice unique content on there so google actually recognizes this is a this is an actual page rather than just a list of posts and then always make sure that i redirect the old category page so the forward slash category forward slash smokers to this new page and i replace that category page in the menu with the new the new custom category page that i've made perfect that's exactly the way i've done it in the past and it just gives you more control over real really making sure every page is accessible there's no orphaned pages so you potentially i imagine on your home page you have a link to that custom category page the custom category page has a link to every one of the posts or pages or any url on your site related to that category right exactly that yeah so it's never more than two two clicks away exactly yeah and uh yeah that's that's one of the tests i always do is run it through screaming frog and they've got a nice click depth analysis tool in there and it's so easy to see how many clicks away things are from the home page and always try and get things within two clicks of the home page very cool and when you do i think one of the the top things that you mentioned was to internally link a site which i mean people did a pretty bad job with it for a very long time because it's a pain to do i mean it's easy for someone to publish a new piece of content link to old stuff but the big missing piece is to go back to the old post and then update it so when you do that did you usually see an immediate uptick in rankings and traffic and just you could tell that you did something yeah for sure so every time i make a change on the page i always resubmit it in google search console for recrawling through into if you internally link something the change is pretty much i feel like it used to be quicker these days it seems like honestly you could submit it a while back and you could refresh the rank tracker within 10 minutes and you'd see a change it's not so quick these days but definitely within you know sort of within 24 hours you can see a change there did you often make on-page changes to the content at the same time you were doing the internal linking or did was it like two separate processes two separate processes so essentially the the internal linking um came after everything was done so once the posts were created i had updated on my spreadsheet and it wasn't a case of okay i've done one post today and now i need to internally link it i would essentially you know build up a bank of posts so i might have five posts i've had added them to my sheet and mainly it's because like you say it was a pain it's like kind of like the last thing you ever do and then i would go back and do a couple other times so it was just that one-off one-off change okay that's pretty awesome and did you see sort of different reactions for the different sites that you've had where some really sort of jumped in traffic and earnings and then some were a little lackluster any like big highlights and then actually any failures where it didn't work as well as you thought yeah for sure um so i mean i can't really think of any which kind of took off instantly after just doing just doing that i think it's a combined effort of of um of the technical stuff and then just working on the content and continuing to work there one thing which i guess is a failure which i think people tend not to talk about too much in terms of their failures but this one is a great one and i i would imagine it caught lots of people off guard um and it's to do with keyword intent rather than duplication so i had a website where where i was pumping out lots and lots of content um so much so that inadvertently i was cannibalizing the content but i didn't realize um because for example if you if you think of two keywords one is best golf balls for old people and one is best golf balls for seniors they have the both they have the same intent whereas if you run them through a keyword research tool they'll have different search volume and they'll have different competitiveness and on the face of it they look like two independent keywords um and i mean a couple of years back you used to be able to get away with having two individual pages like that because google didn't quite understand the intent was the same um so i had this site and i had a lot of content and it was doing very well and then all of a sudden um something changed in google where they could obviously understand this intent a little bit better and the site started dropping rankings and i couldn't really figure out why he was dropping lots of traffic um until i realized that this was probably what was going on i had lots of content covering the same topics and that was a real pain to try and work out so i had to go back to my master sheet which i keep of all the posts on all of the primary keywords and i literally i spent days googling every primary keywords analyzing the first page of google to see what results were actually showing rather than what i would be showing and then making a list of all of the ones that cannibalize each other and then making a plan to either merge that content and set up redirects or to delete that content and just um set up a redirect uh and it was a mess to be fair i mean it took took a long time to pull that plan together and then it took a long time to plan out how to merge everything and actually physically do it so i guess that that was a failure initially but then as soon as i fixed that issue traffic came back um and um yeah it's been going strong since but it it felt weird because i felt like i was doing everything right i felt like i was doing all the same steps i've always done and then all of a sudden you're like whoa what's go what's going on here but yeah and that's a very important check that we do with all of our keyword research these days um for ourselves and for clients we always do that intent check we always google every keywords and we always look at the front page to see what results google are returning just to make sure that we've we've got the keyword right but we've also got that intent correct as well and i've done the exact same thing where you're just doing so much that you're not checking the keywords properly and i've had basically a post where it targeted the singular and then a post where it targeted the plural of the product which obviously was essentially the same article so i had issues there and i've even done it more recently on niche site project because there's some older content i don't even remember that i've written it and it's roughly targeting the same keywords so the consolidation is a mess there's no sort of shortcut you just have to look at it you may be able to just say you know what i'm just gonna make this one a draft and have it go away and then see if everything is okay maybe you could pull a couple lines over but yeah it's so so time consuming okay that's one uh one of the that's one of the key things that we do now for for client sites is as soon as we onboard a client we we create what we call a site structure document so essentially we will download the whole structure of the site on what posts they have what the primary keywords are how much traffic each post is driving into a g document into a g sheet so when we then do our keyword research when we present that back to them we've already done that duplication check against their existing content so you know like you say if you've done content a long time ago and you've kind of forgotten about it or if you potentially bought the site and you're having us work on it and you don't know the history of the content um we've always got that site structured document to refer back to and say actually you've got a post on this or it's very similar the intent is the same we're going to remove this keyword and we're very diligent about doing that is that a standalone service or that just for onboarding that's just part of the onboarding service for content clients well there's a business idea for someone if you wanted to put that together by the way yeah exactly yeah moving on to the expired domain stuff so this is a super common question that i get almost daily and typically i advise people that if they ask the question they probably shouldn't get into the expired domain area and try to build a site on an expired domain but it sounds like you guys have seen some good success with it and can you tell us the process and some of the results you've seen yeah yeah i mean we as a company as individuals we're heavily invested now into expired domains and building on them um we we started essentially looking at this area because a close friend of mine had seen very good success he's kind of uh like been in into the expired domains for around two years so he has quite a big head start um i know he's recently listed and sold a few of his sites for for good six figure some so having seen him do that and watched his process i kind of gave me the confidence to think right well i need to need to investigate this a little bit further and i guess you're right there are lots of pitfalls with expired domains if you kind of have to ask the questions then like you say you probably you're probably doing something wrong and there seem to be so many ways that you can fall down with an expired domain everything from selecting the expired domain to start with uh where you buy it what the metrics need to look like there are so many different uh ways you can get caught up with sites that have been repurposed in the past and it's not obvious i mean you have to really dig deep for example i run i also run a newsletter called domain geeks that every every sunday i send out the list of all of the best expiring domains that i've found at the go daily auction and every now and again i'll put something in the newsletter just to highlight exactly how easy it is to get caught up and and become a cropper with these domains so there was one recently where i found and it looked great on the surface i had great trust flow metrics had a great backlink profile i mean it looked like a stellar domain and when i looked at the bid in it was up to 700 which again is a good sign because it means other people have seen it and also see value in that to me but when i started digging a little bit deeper and i mean by deeper i mean i literally checked uh every um or not every but very much all of the the snapshots from wayback machine from archive.archive.org and there was a space of is like six months or so where somebody had restored the old website and i'd put some links back to a casino on the home page but within the existing content so even if you were just skimming the website looked exactly the same as it did you know a year prior and uh but it just had these these links which have been inserted into the homepage um and that's an example where someone's obviously bidding on that and they're gonna pay several hundred to a thousand or so for that domain and i mean it's been used as part of a pbn in the past um i i've never built an expired domain on a pbn but i would imagine you know that's something you probably wouldn't want to get into you don't know if it's being penalized you don't have it if it has a google penalty or anything like that until you've connected up the search console so i mean it's so easy to get to get caught there um and so much so that we've now come to the the conclusion that we pass up like 99 of the domains that we see we look at a very uh a mixed very variety of metrics so things like trust flow citation flow majestic um moses d and pa ahref scores the backlink profile we look at the the anchor text ratio and profile to make sure that looks clean and natural and hasn't been messed with and then we do a very deep dive into into way back and if we find that just one of those metrics looks a bit off we just walk away from the whole domain because it's not it's not worth it's not worth the investment when you buy an expired domain you're going to put a ton of content on there and you might as well wait until you can find the perfect domain rather than you know taking a chance on something which 95 percent looks great but there's something there which doesn't look quite great so rather than take that chance yeah there's so many so many little issues and i have not i have looked back at the wayback machine it's a great resource to see anything obvious but as you mentioned if they are pretty sly about it you may not notice unless you actually read everything and you may have dozens of different snapshots to go take a look at so when you get one of the domains that looks promising i imagine being in the the proper category and topic area is very important that relevancy is probably one of the top things you look for you don't want to have a say like a photography site and then put the smokers and barbecue stuff on there it doesn't make sense right so how important is that and do you just look for certain niches where you're like hey we know these are promising categories i guess how do you look for them yeah yeah relevancy is huge and i mean after this call i can send you over a ton of examples where i've seen people build sites on expired domains that are not relevant like totally irrelevant uh and they have this big spike up in traffic initially because i think google is playing catch up you know it builds a site on the six by domain it's got great backlink profile but it's not relevant and then google plays catch up and you see a big big drop um i'll go back to golf because i mentioned the about the golf keywords earlier but i'll send you over an example of a golf website that was built on this old website about european business and they got up pretty quickly to like 20 000 visitors a month in in ahrefs and then just as quickly came back down to 5000 um so yeah relevancy is huge and and also being in a category predominantly we build product-based websites so amazon style review website so being in a category where you can you can actually build out the site like that so sports home home and decor kind of musical instruments that kind of thing is very important you see lots of sites come up that are you couldn't really to keep the relevance you couldn't really turn them into an affiliate site per se you know it might have been a um a conference website for farmers for example and on the surface of it you think that's great i'll turn this into a website about gardening or plant seeds or something like that when you do a little bit uh dig a little bit deeper into the backlink profile you realize that the website was actually about more about the conference rather than being about farming or gardening or growing plants and that's a big thing to look out for is is that the other one which i see tons of things come up for are like um coffee shops for example where on the face of it this looks great to build a coffee review website but when you actually do a deeper dive in there they've never really had any content about coffee it's been about you know this is the opening times and this is the menu i mean there are definite examples where a coffee website does have a blog and it has content about coffee and that's that's okay but you want to stay away from the ones where it's predominantly about the business and not about the topic got it once you get the site do you just treat it like a normal site that you're starting and then you're more or less shortening or skipping the sandbox you just put content promote the site yeah pretty much um so forex by domains we we have a different keyword research method um and i don't want to give too much away about that because it's a bit proprietary but essentially without diving into the details we have a look at what competitors we think we can outrank with this expired domain based on their existing on the existing link profile and then we produce our keyword keyword list from there and then we treat it like a normal domain to start with we get the content set up we structure the sites in the same way that we talked about earlier where we have custom category pages and the home page feeds in that's very important on expired domains because the majority of the time most of the the backlinks will be to the home page so you need a structured way of finding that link juice through to category pages and then through to the individual posts the other thing that we do is we look at what pages uh have links that are not the home page so they may have had you know a handful of other pages on the website with good individual backlinks too that either need to be recreated or redirected to make sure to make use of that link juice so typically you find um you know you need to recreate some pages the url structure will almost always be different because it'll have like dates in there typically you'll find so you'll have to set up a redirect from the old url to the new to the new url on the website um and then i think one thing which a mistake which which people may make with expired domains is they set up these pages and they think oh well there's you know 40 other pages with one link and i'm not going to go and set up those 40 other pages so i'll just redirect all those other other links back to the home page um we don't do that i think you run the error there of or the potential there for for giving the home page like a soft 404 google sees that all these pages have now been moved to the home page and they have nothing to do with what the old pages used to be so the way we handle that is we let those pages just 404 until they drop out of the errors in uh search console in the crawl report and once they've dropped up there we know they've dropped out of the index and then we set up the the 301 to 404 uh the 404 to 301 to the home page redirects so we're still trying to preserve that juice but when we we're not putting the home page up at any risk of a soft 404 initially okay gotcha and i had i was not even aware that that was an issue with a soft 404 but it does make sense now that you explain it so is it just those other pages maybe are totally not relevant or is it just not worth it because i was going to say uh maybe if you have 40 of them and you do create those pages and then you can link those pages to somewhere else at least to redirect and maybe an aggregate it adds up but i haven't done that before just any thoughts yeah sure i mean it's on a page by page basis to be fair you look at what the referring domain is and if it's if it's worth keeping you know try to think of it as how much would i have to pay for this referring domain if i was buying as a guest link um is it worth my time to reset it up i mean some pages will have one link and it's just like a spammy web 2.0 or something anything it's just not i'm just not going to bother with that um if it's got a link from like you know the new york times or something then it's uh that it's well worth setting that back up what kind of results have you guys seen from say an average expired domain in a relevant topic area you put content on there can you tell us how much content just initially and then what kind of results you've seen over sort of 3 6 12 month time frames yeah i guess i should probably before we do that tell you a little bit about the way that i'm personally investing in these domains because it'll give you a good background of kind of where we're at with the results so far so um i've built out five websites on expired domains recently the the first one was back in february and then the rest have been in may and june so a bit more recent um and the the whole plan is to build out another five so i have 10 expired domains and then from there i see them with content between 100 and 150 000 words of content and i just leave them sit and i wait to see how how they react how they come back in google and then the whole plan is um to sell the five that are essentially doing the worst at the 12 month point for break even hopefully a small profit and then to double down and reinvest in more content and link building active link building on the five which are the the five clear winners essentially and the whole reason behind this is expired domains come with a certain certain amount of risk as you know you know we can line up all of those metrics initially and and make sure everything is right but i mean it's still more riskier than essentially building on a fresh domain because you've got that history there so by spreading out the risk across a larger portfolio i've kind of hedged my bet a little bit i've got the resources thankfully to to see these 10 sites with this kind of content um but it also works with with smaller smaller portfolios we've got a couple of clients who are doing this with two or three expired domains and you know they're gonna we're building two of them for example and then they'll they'll double down on the one which shows the most promise after six to 12 months so that's kind of where i'm at i've built five and i'll be doubling down i'm planning to build another five and i'll be doubling down on on the five winners so in terms of results um i wish i'd pulled this up before the call but maybe i can send it to you afterwards you can add it to the notes but um site one which was started in february was actually the slowest of the sites to gain any traction so i didn't really see any revenue for the first two months there um but this month it looks like it's going to break about 150 um so that month that site is seven months old um so that but that was one of the i guess it's the slowest of five to actually take off and then uh site two which was started in may or it was one of the quickest in its first month earned forty five dollars and this man is on track to do uh about 150 as well um so that was obviously a lot quicker and then the the other three uh two of them were started in may and one of them was started in june uh and they'll they'll do around 15 20 each this month so just in that starting growth stage what i have seen and what i expect kind of reverse engineering other people who have built on expired domains is this seems to be this very slow and steady starting pace for the first six to eight months and then there's that hockey stick growth from eight month eight to month twelve typically seems to be around the sweet spot so i mean i've got a one of the site is coming into that period now and i can definitely see i mean i update this in my my um domain geeks newsletter every week but for the last couple of weeks that site has seen like 15 20 month a week on week growth traffic wise so it's definitely kind of hitting that that upward face what i haven't done here is any active link building on these sites yet because obviously i'm investing in in five and it's a lot of money to to put into these but we have worked with clients and and one client in particular which has had great results where we built an expired domain in february for them similar sort of time um it was on a very weak spy domain actually i mean it was literally like 20 referring domains it was a domain that he had himself we added a hundred thousand words of content initially and then we added another 50 000 words after that finished so it's a 150 000 words uh and then he he took out our our biggest link building package which is based on the shotgun skyscraper method um and that site is due to do a i think he said around 500 this month so it's much quicker with the link building but obviously there's a much higher capital investment there interesting and with the 100 to 150 000 words how many posts is that for people that you know they're just unsure yeah uh our best of posts so it's a it's a mixture of three different types of posts so we do best ofs uh single product reviews or product a versus product b type and informational and our best offs are around 2500 words we like to do long form content where the buyer's guides has an have an introduction uh typically five individual products then an in-depth buyer's guide and an faq section and we take the questions from places like um answer the public and also ask to make sure that the questions that people are actually searching for rather than ones we just made up and then the single product reviews and to be around 1 500 words and informational pieces between a thousand and thirteen hundred so it really depends on on the split but typically these days we're tending to do around seventy percent and commercial content and 30 informational content okay very cool and when you when you publish the content do you just publish it all in mass or as quickly as you can basically yeah this is a question we get asked a lot actually is should i schedule things or should i should i just post them and uh we find it's best to just post it as quickly as you can the quicker you get into google and indexed and and gain traction the the quicker it it becomes i guess if you're just gonna build a site and then and then leave it and not work on it forever i don't know if that maybe is not the right idea in some niches i know google um freshness is a factor of how often posts are added or updated um so if you're in a niche like that then it may be best to schedule things but the majority of the time it's best to just push it out as quickly as you can um you know we launched these sites typically with a hundred thousand words on them like day one we've built them on a staging area we we put them on the the right domain and then we just go live with you know 100 150 000 words perfect yeah i agree i don't think there's much of a reason to hold off and schedule it just publish the content hopefully you'll publish more in the future but you know it's not like a youtube channel or a podcast where people want to see a regular schedule people don't really care they just hit your site for a few minutes get information and they go away awesome well i would love to get more updates from you in the future i know this is an ongoing thing with the expired domains and the more data you have you're going to have more and more as you're launching more sites clients that are doing the same thing too so pretty cool and i think you'll probably have more data than any other folks that are doing this in a public fashion within a few months because it's expensive i know there's some people doing it off the radar and have been for years actually i know people that have done this for you know five six years and that's just kind of an area they work you know some new sites some purchases and flips like you and then some expired domains or brand new sites so very cool well obviously people can find you over at niche website builders but is there any anything else any advice for people who are maybe thinking of getting started and they do have capital to invest don't make it a sales pitch for niche website builders but more of an advice thing here yeah sure so i guess the the advice i would give would be to um to understand exactly what you're investing in even if that means spending some time watching you know your content like you put out some great content um just to get an understanding i feel like at the moment there's the the market is maturing a little bit and people are just normal run-of-the-mill people are understanding that investing in digital assets is it provides a good return so you know they may have come from a real estate background or they may just you know they might have sold a company or something they've got funds to invest and they come into this space and they don't quite know exactly how it works and they invest i think it's always good to know exactly what you're investing in how things work [Music] some clients we have they're in this boat and we actively encourage them to get involved with editing some of the posts so we leave some of the posts without the images in there so they actually have to go in and manually add the images themselves just just to get them motivated to go in and learn a little bit more um but yeah i think that and i guess the other part is to find a partner if you're gonna outsource the work that um that will work with you that's not very rigid so we'll work to your individual needs and also has done this for themselves in the past and is continuing to do it i think uh you know that that sets a lot of companies apart is is me and mark are actively doing this for ourselves we're actively testing for our own portfolios and investing our own you know real money our own personal money into our stuff to test what works and what doesn't work and we always feed that back through to clients website so find a partner that's that's invested themselves into this business and into this area um one because you know you know what they do for you is what they do for themselves and it works and two just just so you know you have that peace of mind that you're working with a partner who if something happens in google tomorrow when an update happens and something happens to the website they're in the exact same boat and you know they're going to work their butt off to figure out what happened and how they can restore their own sites and then pass that knowledge back to you too great advice thanks a lot adam i'll put links for everything so people could find you and i think we may be able to put a checklist together i'll talk to you after this for just the technical seo some of those things that you went through i think those are hugely valuable so we'll we'll chat after that i think we could put it together so thanks man awesome thanks doug i really appreciate it