Happy 2020 everyone!
I’m happy to start the new year with some renewed rejuvenation to be successful. And as you can guess by the title, this case study will be about building a niche site and eventually flipping it.
At the back of my mind, my goal is to flip the website for $100K. And going by the typical industry valuation of 25X – 30X revenue of the past 3 months, I need to get the website to be earning an average of $3500 per month.
The site that I’ll be building to flip is this one that I did a case study about when it was de-indexed from the SERPs after a DMCA takedown request by a competitor.
I started the site in 2018 but have never really given it the attention it deserves. Part of the reason for this is that my laptop hard drive was stolen at a PC repair shop where I’d taken it for repair. The hard drive had a lot of content and marketing strategies that I’d planned for the site.
When the hard drive was stolen, I got frustrated and never looked at the site again. This is until last year in May when I discovered that some of the site’s pages had been de-indexed due to a DMCA takedown request.
Status of the Website
The website has a lot of content published. To be precise, there are 105 articles published. Most of the articles are product reviews and “best of” guides.
Coming to traffic, the site has been seeing a steady increase in visitors over the past few months. Here is an overview of the site’s traffic since inception:
As you can see, the site has never had 3000 visitors a month. The highest number of visitors that the site has registered in a month is 2,319, which was in July 2018. In January 2020, it has the second-highest number of visitors, at 2,314.
If you love SEMrush stats, here is how things have been since the site’s inception:
The flatline you see from November 2018 to June 2019 is the period during which some of the top pages of the site had been deindexed due to a DMCA takedown request.
I managed to get the pages indexed back as I wrote here.
Finally, the site is primarily monetized with Amazon. Here is an overview of how earnings were in 2019:
And for 2020, this is what we have so far:
From the looks of things, the site is going to smash last year’s earnings. At the end of the year, I’d like the site to have earned at least $2,000.
The Game Plan
The game plan is rather boring; something you already know.
I will simply go through all the articles posted on the site, proofread them, optimize them with relevant LSI keywords, and then promote them by various methods.
Apart from this, I plan to add a ton of content to the site. My goal is to have at least 100 more articles published by the end of the year.
The new articles that I’ll be publishing will be informed by the existing articles as well as doing keyword research by checking the competition as well as using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Keywords Everywhere.
I plan to do this project concurrently with the $100K project. However, I will not be posting monthly updates. Rather I will be posting whenever there is a significant milestone achieved. You will also get all the traffic and earnings data.
Before the next update, this is what I plan to do:
i) Pass the website through Screaming Frog to check for internal errors that I can easily fix.
ii) Go through all the articles on the site and determine the keywords they should be optimized for. Here, I will be using SurferSEO as well as Keywords Everywhere for keyword research.
iii) Come up with a list of at least 100 article titles that should be written.
And with that said, may the games begin!
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