Welcome to the Project Long Term Safety Net
This project is going to be a guide and sort-of case study on how I’ll be building an online media asset (you can call it an authority site) that will generate passive income for years to come. The goal of this project is to eventually flip the site for about $1 million, buy a yacht and retire on an island.
All this has to be done in 4 years. So, 2022 will mark the close of this project.
Ha, ha.
But in all seriousness, I’ll be building an authority site that I will flip for $1 million.
I know this is a huge claim. However, it is actually doable.
The Numbers Game
In the online marketing world, flipping websites is not a new thing. There are a number of marketplaces where you can flip your online property for a tidy sum.
At the moment, the general rule is that sites are flipped for 20X to 30X their average income for the past six months.
For example, if your site has earned an average of $1000 for the past six months, you can expect to get between $20,000 to $30,000 when you sell it.
There are various factors that determine the value of your website. Some of the factors include:
- Quality of links to your websites. Obviously, the more white-hat your links are, the better your odds of selling the site for a tidy sum.
- Community of your site. Have you built an engaging community around your website e.g. a forum, Facebook page/group, email list, and so on? Having these can increase the value of your online asset.
- Brand products. Do you have brand products you have created for the site e.g. training programs, physical products, etc.?
Well, the above is just an overview of some of the things that increase an online media asset’s value. I will be writing more about the topic at a later date.
For now, back to my $1 million valuation. For me to sell a site for $1m, I need it to be generating an average of $33,000 to $50,000 per month. This is quite a lot of money.
But hey, people are generating over $100K with their properties. So, why not me?
Background of the Website
The site I will be working on has been on the works for quite some time. The site is 2 years old and was hit by the recent August and September Google updates.
This site is a health niche site and has quite a load of content. Here’s what site:domain search shows:
Well, that’s 177 indexed URLs. However, not all of them are articles. In fact, from my dashboard, I can see that there are only 81 posts and 12 pages. So, a total of 93 pieces.
The other indexed items are categories and tags.
Performance of the Website
This website hasn’t had a stellar performance since I started it. This is mainly because I’ve been working on it as an afterthought rather than putting all my energies into it.
The website was also hit by the recent Google updates. Here is what SEMrush shows:
You can see the site was getting over 2700 visitors in June, but that number has drastically declined to about 259 in October.
My approach to this site will be two-fold:
- Quick wins
Carry out some optimization and audits to try to recover from the impact of the Medic update. This will give me quick wins to get traffic as well as increase the site’s income. Remember, I’m going after income from day 1. There is no waiting for the unreliable and unpredictable Google traffic.
- Brand building
After carrying out the quick wins to recover from the Medic update, I will be going full-throttle on building a brand. Here, I will be experimenting with different monetization sources, products, and so on.
I will be providing an update on what has been done on the website every month. I want to stick to a schedule of one month so that I’m motivated to set goals for the site and achieve them.
However, since I’ll be working on the site nearly full time, there are probably lots of small things I will be doing along the way. I will be providing weekly updates on the activities I’ve done for the site through my newsletter. So, make sure you subscribe below if you would like to get the weekly update of tasks done.
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Site Income
The website gets the majority of its income from Amazon Associates Program. Overall, it has been averaging a monthly income of $150. In 2018, the highest the site made was $218.70, which it generated in April.
Traffic Status
Here is a snapshot of traffic to the website from Google Analytics for September. The site is getting an average of 50 visitors a day.
That’s all for this introduction.
What do you think will be the biggest obstacle to me achieving this goal of generating $50,000 per month in 4 years?
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