Website Flipping Case Study: These 3 Crazy Simple Website Tweaks Led To An 860% Revenue Boost

How I Bought A Website For $3700 And In 4 Months Increased The Revenue By 860% Without Spending A Dime Or Doing Any SEO…And Then Sold The Site For Over $30k.

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So many times website owners have complained to me that they don’t know SEO and they struggle increasing the traffic to their websites so the website flipping methods I teach won’t work for them.

I recognize that SEO can be difficult and take time (but can easily be learned if you want to know how to do it) so I set out to prove that I could buy a website that had traffic, and without doing any SEO or website promotion I could increase the revenue significantly.

Check out this website flipping case study:

Using the prospecting method I invented I went out looking to find a website to buy. I was looking in the healthcare education leads niche.

I found a site that fit several of the important criteria I was looking for.

– It already had good traffic.
– It was making some money but not a lot.
– The site was not converting well.
– It was already set up to get education leads.

I look for websites that match these criteria because I know I can make quick changes that will have a positive impact on the revenue of the website.

So I emailed the owner and negotiated the purchase of the website. It really is amazing how many website owners are ready and willing to sell their websites if someone simply approaches them and asks.

I assume this is because most people that start and run websites are serial entrepreneurs and they get bored quickly and like moving on to other projects.

As soon as I found out the owner of the website was willing to sell I asked the appropriate questions and we got into the numbers of the website.

The 2 big numbers I cared about was unique visitors to the site each month, and total revenue each month.

The site owner gave me access to Google analytics and I was able to verify that the website was getting about 4,000 unique visitors each month.

He also told me that the site was making $208 each month which with that much traffic I had no reason to doubt him. In fact just running some quick numbers I was able to see that each visitor was worth $0.05 per visitor.

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Because I have experience in this industry and had run a website that had a value of over $1.00 per visitor I knew that this website had a ton of potential to make things happen quickly.

Because of this I had no problem offering the website owner an 18 month multiple (monthly revenue x 18 months). I usually don’t go that high unless I see a ton of potential in a website.

Here is the data from the website:

websitedata

So I purchased the website for $3700. Here is what the homepage looked like when I got it. It wasn’t a terrible design but it didn’t drive the visitors to do what I wanted them to do.

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How This Website Makes Money

The way that this website makes money is it collects leads for schools that offer healthcare education programs. The owner of the website had signed up with a company that has agreements with all of the schools. The website owner put “Request Info” forms on the site and sent leads to this company.

So a visitor to the website would come and see the form on the bottom of the page or over in the left hand navigation as shown in the screenshot above and they could request information from different schools.

Anytime a visitor to the website requested information from a school the owner of the website would get paid a small commission usually between $15-$30.

I had used this same monetization method with other sites in this industry and I knew it was the best way to monetize the site so I had no plans to change it. I did however use a different company that I already had a relationship with that also had agreements with all of the schools, Quinstreet.

As soon as I got control of the site I immediately made 2 very quick tweaks to the website. These changes took me literally 30 minutes to an hour to get set up.

Tweak #1: Moved The Lead Form Above The Fold

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Only about 1/3 of the homepage is viewable (above the fold) when you first come to the website. This meant that in order for someone to see the lead form and fill it out they had to scroll down to the bottom or look in the left hand navigation which most people wouldn’t do.

I wanted the lead form front and center and right in their faces as soon as they came to the site. So I moved it to the top of the home page.

I also removed the lead form from the left hand navigation. I didn’t test whether having it there increased conversions, I just made a gut decision to take it out and focus on the one form being above the fold.

This change took me about 15-30 minutes to do.

Tweak #2: Popup Lead Form

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I know that many if not every person hates popup windows. Or at least they say they do, and many of you are probably scared to use them because you don’t want to offend your website visitors.

The reality of popup windows is they work. They work because you are forcing your visitors to make a decision. They have to decide either “Yes I am going to fill out this form right now,” or “No I don’t want to fill it out right now.” There is no other option. They can’t do anything else until they make that decision.

Because you are forcing them into a decision many of them will choose Yes. It has been proven time and time again that popup windows increase conversions.

So this is the second tweak I made. I just gave my visitors the chance to decide for themselves Yes or No whether they wanted to fill out a form.

The wordpress plugin I used for the popup window is XYZ Lightbox. I like this because it has flexibility in what you can put in the popup window. I needed to be able to put a picture and a javascript form.

Tweak #3: Add State Pages To Each Category

tweak3

This change took a little more time to implement. I knew that some of the schools I was providing leads for had campus across the country. So I wanted to be able to allow a website visitor to search for programs by State.

So I added state pages to each of the different healthcare programs. When a user would click on their state the page would populate with the schools in that state. They could then choose any or all of the schools and request information from them.

This change took me about a day to get set up.

The purpose of these 3 minor tweaks to the site was to give the visitors more opportunities to do what I wanted them to do, and that was to request information from one or more of these colleges.

I was simply trying to guide them instead of letting them try to figure out the site for themselves. It’s similar to how a retailer will put all of their high margin products right up front and center so you have to see them and pass by them to get to anything else.

860% Increase In Revenue From The 3 Tweaks

The changes took about 2 days to get totally implemented and then I just watched and waited. I didn’t try to promote the site. I didn’t try to do SEO. I just wanted to see what the 4000 visitors per month would do with the changes.

The results were amazing. I was surprised to see how much of a difference these 3 small changes made.

Within 4 months the revenue increased from $208/mo to $1992/mo in month 4. A 860% increase in revenue. It was awesome to see what could be done with just a few changes to the site itself.

It was all about increase revenue per visitor. We didn’t need more traffic we just needed to monetize the traffic better.

So what was the new revenue per visitor after the changes? $0.50 per visitor.

$0.50/visitor was much more like what I would expect in this industry. That is a number an investor will drool at. So what happened? An investor came and offered an 17 month multiple for the site.

The offer was $34,000 for a website I had just purchased 4 months previous for $3,700. A 719% return on my initial investment.

newwebsitedata

All from 3 tiny changes that took less than 2 days. Not a bad 2 days work.

So to recap, the three changes I made had to do with pointing the visitor in the direction of what I wanted them to do. My goal for this website was to get the visitors to the site to request information from healthcare colleges so they could potentially enroll and become students.

I didn’t care if they read any of the copy on the site, I just wanted them to see the form and fill out the form. Now I understand that providing good content that is engaging helps increase customer satisfaction and can increase conversions as well. On this test though I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to see how quickly and dramatically I could increase revenue per visitor.

I accomplished this by moving the form above the fold on each page of the site. Then since that wasn’t in your face enough I added the pop up form to the site. If the visitors somehow ignored those first two changes I also added state pages that listed all of the schools by state for each program. Again, this was to give my visitors as many possible opportunities to request information from schools.

I think the biggest takeaway from this test was that if you want your visitors to do something you have to make it so easy and brainless that they actually have a hard time doing something else.

Do you want to learn how build websites you can sell for big profits?

For the past 6 years I have been finding undervalued websites, buying them for super cheap, fixing them up and then selling them when the time is right. Some people call it website flipping. I started Prosperly to teach others how to do the same thing.

If this is something you would be interested in, click the button below and watch another case study of a site I sold. You won’t be sorry.

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Also, after you sign up I will immediately send you the video case study where I walk you through how I bought a site for $500, fixed it up and sold it 9 months later for $150,000.

 

I have been buying and selling websites successfully for many years and would love to show you the ropes. Just click on the button above and lets get started.

This Site Just Sold For $75k After Making $7k For One Month…Bad Deal?

I was just at one of the online website marketplaces and noticed this website that sold for $75k.

Anytime a website sells in the high 5 figures it gets my attention. So after a closer look let me tell you why I think one party got the better end of the deal.

The website is dogfood.guru. It is basically a website that talks about dog food recalls and does reviews etc.

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The website was started literally just a year ago. As you can see from the traffic chart here it ramped up pretty quickly.

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Within 5 months of starting the website is was up to 20,000 visitors a month. In case you were wondering that was really good. At the 10 month mark their website traffic doubled. Then as you can see 1 month later it doubled again.

This is not normal growth. The traffic growth of this website was phenomenal. It is rare to see a website grow that quickly being that new of a site.

First Red Flag

Here is a chart of the breakdown of traffic sources:

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The most interesting thing here and my first major red flag is the site gets 86% of its traffic from search engines. It doesn’t say which ones but it is most likely Google. The reason this is a major red flag is because that means there is no traffic diversity and one Google change could erase all of the traffic instantly.

Think about it. If they lost their rankings the site would go from 150,000 visitors a month to just 21,000 per month and it would be even lower than that because a lot of the direct traffic comes from people who found the site through Google.

It is a major red flag for me because this is exactly what happened to me on a site that was making $1000/day, believe me it was not cool.

I am very surprised to see how a website that is barely a year old could grow in the search results like that. If a new site can move up in the rankings that quickly, I may have to rethink my entire philosophy of buying existing undervalued websites and just start one from scratch.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there probably wasn’t a lot of competition in the “dog food reviews” space so it made the barrier to entry much smaller.

I just wouldn’t trust that this traffic or the search rankings were going to stick with such a small amount of history. Show me that kind of traffic for 2 or 3 years, then I am much more interested.

Red Flag Number 2

The second major red flag that jumps out at me is the revenue from the site. As you can see from the chart below the site made $6800 last month.

dogfoodgururevenue

Even if I just look at the last 3 months of revenue and take an average a 10x multiple (which is pretty standard for online businesses) would be about $40k.

The buyer of the website based the multiple off of just one month’s revenue history. That is a GREAT way to get yourself burned and lose a lot of money.

Instead what the buyer should have done is averaged out the 6 months of revenue data and based his 10x multiple on that, which would have been about $27,000.

Now I can understand that you have to factor in the growth of the site and how you could probably make the assumption that the site will at least hold where it is at right now and that might drive up the price a little.

That is why selling a website at auction can sometimes be the best way to go. Get different people bidding against each other based on potential.

Who knows, if this things stays where it is at or continues to grow this website could bring in $100k in a year which would be an amazing return on investment.

That is the risk the buyer is taking. They are probably much more familiar with the dog space than I am.

What I Think The Website Is Worth

If the owner of this website came to me and wanted me to buy, after looking at all of the data and the industry and looking at the revenue channels that exist in the dog food/pet space I would probably not be comfortable paying $75,000 for the website.

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I would be much more comfortable coming in at about the $25,000-$35,000 range for this site. That way if things stay exactly as they are I can make my money back in 4 to 6 months but if in a month or two things take a dive, my risk is mitigated.

Again, the pet space is not one I have spent much time in so I would be much more risk averse on this one. If it was an industry I knew more about I might be willing to go higher.

 

Want To Learn More About Website Flipping?

I have been helping people quickly get started online by teaching them how to buy low priced websites for pennies on the dollar and then fixing them up so they make money fast. Get access to my email course to learn how you can do it too.

3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Start An Online Business From Scratch


I was doing some key phrase research with Google’s keyword planner the other day and was intrigued to see the huge number of people searching on Google how to start an online business. That phrase, “how to start a business” gets over 40,000 searches a month by itself, while “how to make money online” was also over 40k searches.

It’s great to see the entrepreneurial spirit alive and well. The sad truth about starting a business is that 80% of small businesses fail, and they fail quickly. Or people see just how much money it costs to actually start up a business and decide it is not worth the risk.

Starting an online business is a little different because you don’t have all of the overhead and real estate costs associated with brick and mortar businesses. That makes the barrier to entry smaller. But whether you are trying to learn how to start an online business or a brick and mortar company there is something you need to know that will get you to profitability faster than you ever thought possible.

One of the accidental revelations that came from me buying and selling websites over the last 7+ years was learning why you should never start a business from scratch, especially an online business.

1. Let someone else do all of the initial work for you
The ramp up stage of running a successful online business can be both daunted and demotivating. Especially if one of your main strategies is SEO as getting to the top of the search engines takes time. You can take advantage of someone else’s demotivation as they have waited through that ramp up time and buy when they are on the brink of success.

This works because people are not as emotionally attached to a website because they are so cheap and easy to get set up. So you swoop in and offer them a sum of money to buy the online business from them when they had most likely given up on ever making anything from the website. Now you can take it over and take the business to the next level much more quickly than starting from scratch.

2. Take advantage of disheartened owners
I helped a friend do this exact thing. He wanted to start an SEO consulting agency. He was good at SEO but knew that trying to get a new website ranked in that category would take years. So he did exactly what I described. He went out and found 3 or 4 SEO consulting websites that had been around for at least a year and contacted them all. Sure enough he found 2 that were willing to sell at a steep discount. So he made a deal with one of them and bought a SEO consultant website from the disheartened owner for under $500.

I helped him take the site over and apply SEO knowledge to the website and it quickly moved up in the rankings. Now he makes thousands of dollars every month consulting. Can you imagine being able to walk into a business that is primed to make money right now?

3. Going After A Proven Model
Another reason that this strategy is so awesome is that you can pick any industry. You can choose an industry that you know is very lucrative. For example, let’s say you want to be a realtor. You know there are thousands of other realtors out there right now that you are competing with.

That also means there are many realtors who have decided the competition is too much and they are moving on to other things. These realtors have all done the work building and promoting a website. So you as a brand new realtor can sneak in and snatch up a disheartened realtor’s website and then be in business in no time. There is no reason to sit through ramp up time on any business.

If you want to know how to start an online business this is how you do it. Buy your way in but the key is to buy low. I once bought an online business for $500 and within 9 months sold it for $150,000. All I had to do was fix up the site and do some awesome SEO and I was rocking and rolling in a couple of weeks. I have repeated this same model many times and had the same result many times selling 14 internet businesses over a 5 year span.

If you’re interested in learning exactly how I did it visit this page here

About The Author

adam whiteAdam White is the founder of Prosperly Method, an online course that teaches people how to buy and sell (flip) websites for big profits. He has worked in the internet marketing world since 2000 and in his spare time wrote and directed a feature film. He lives in Arizona with his wife and 6 children.

Just bought another website

Many people ask me if I have retired from website flipping. In fact I saw a forum thread over at Warrior Forum where people were asking what had happened to me.

It is true that I took a year off from website flipping to pursue my dream of being a filmmaker. But my movie has long been released and is out on dvd so I am ready to get back into the mix of finding undervalued websites, fixing them up and then when the revenue is kicking, selling them for great profits.

I found a website that was on the verge of being really good and the guy needed the money so he sold to me. I can’t reveal all of the details now but I was thinking about doing a members only thing where I let you look over my shoulder and see how I work with the website from inception to sale.

I’m still not sure if that is what I want to do but I will see if enough people tell me they would be interested in something like that.

Anyway, in answer to all of the questions of whether or not I still flip websites or just sell training on how to do it, yes I do still flip.

Buy A Website or Start One From Scratch?

A couple of years ago Google hit websites really hard that had done a lot of SEO. This caused many websites in almost every industry to drop from the rankings and websites that hadn’t done a lot of SEO to rise to the top of the rankings.

This created an interesting paradox in the SEO world. Should you try to work to recover the rankings you worked so hard to get and now have lost? Or should you give up on a site and start a new one where you can control exactly how much SEO has been done on a site?

I was recently looking at one of the website marketplaces at a site that was ranking #1 for a phrase that was the biggest phrase in this website’s niche. I was impressed at the ranking because the website seemed pretty simple. As I looked at the details of the site I realized the site was only 4 months old.

4 months old? So what Google is telling us is you can start a brand new website and within a few months get to #1 for a top tier key phrase?

Now before you go out and start 10 new websites I have a word of warning. We have no idea what this website owner did to get that site to #1. They may be employing some serious black hat technique that will get them banned. But it may be worth a test to start a new website and see what kind of dent you can make in the rankings in the first few months.

It could be that since so many sites were penalized you just don’t have a lot of competition in the different niches.

I still prefer to buy a website than to build one from scratch but I probably will build one soon to see how it goes.