Episode 26: Bounty Program & December Monthly Recap
Greetings anon,
Welcome to the December monthly recap. In addition to the normal monthly recap, we also have a special offer for anyone looking to make some “easy money.” We are offering a bounty of $4,000 for anyone who can find us a buyer for our website. All you need to do is have the buyer say you referred them, and we will pay you $4,000. You won’t have anything to do with the negotiation, escrow, etc. Literally, just introduce us to someone who will buy it, and we will send you $4,000 upon completion of the sale. If you are just getting started or know someone in the market to buy a website, this should be an excellent opportunity to make $4,000 for minimal work.
Below is an outline of December, along with our strategy of how we plan to go about selling the site.
Exit Strategy
Traffic & SEO Update
Medical Reviews
Revenue Update
Costs Update
Link Building
Auditing Services
Exit Strategy
Selling a website of this size is more difficult than it looks, especially in this economy. Earlier this year, we sold two sites for sub $5k a piece and literally had multiple offers after a single tweet from me (and my account was a lot smaller back then).
This time around, two friends (James Camp and Richard Patey) generously agreed to advertise it in their newsletters in November. We had 6 people hit us up for more info after these were sent out, but then the site got hit with the penalty. I followed up, but the two people who were seriously interested from that group had already bought a site 🤷♂️.
I’ve looked at several brokerages, including Empire Flippers, Motion Invest, just Website Brokerage, and Flippa. All of these platforms charge anywhere from 10% - 16% when you include the Escrow fee. If we sell the site for 6-figures that’s a 5-digit fee.
So the plan is to see if we can do a direct deal in the next few weeks. If we can’t we will go to Empire Flippers because the multiples are clearly much higher on there than anywhere else. Plus, they do a great job of verifying funds and dealing with a lot of the B.S.
Traffic & SEO Update
As we stated in last month’s update, our site recovered in early December. Since then, it seems that we got another small bump shortly after Christmas.
We only published 7 articles in December, but we had a lot going on and thought it best to hold back on publishing until we were sure the site fully recovered. All of these were also medically reviewed by a doctor, so it took longer. I would expect to see double that amount of content in January.
In addition to 7 new posts we paid to have 2 of our top 10 informational posts medically reviewed and updated by a doctor. These were the top two posts when we bought the site. We were a little wary of messing with them, so we decided only to publish the updates for one post and watch what happens. We updated the post on December 29th, and it looks like it helped! Assuming this trend continues over the next week, we will update the other post as well.
Medical Reviews
Medical reviews are expensive, but a lot of the big players in the health space are doing it. We had new posts medically reviewed as well as the one existing post updated above. Here is a filtered view of all new posts medically reviewed. Still small in terms of traffic but moving in the right direction.
Going to let this sit for the time being. We have no plans to have January content medically reviewed by a doctor unless we see growth we consider to be “out of band” for these pages.
Revenue Update
Just like traffic revenue bounced back HARD. We made $3,457 in December, which was our ATH and the first time we made over $3k in a month. The Mediavine implementation has been killer. We made $500 from it this month without impacting commissions at all. Additionally, a few key commercial posts got a solid bump which we interpreted as Google apologizing for killing our traffic for 30 days.
I would expect January’s revenue to be a bit lower due to decreased shopping and lower RPMs. I think we will land right around $3k. When you look at the L6M valuation, this is actually a big deal since the site only made $1,000 six months ago. Replacing July’s revenue with January's will likely push the valuation firmly over 6-figures if we list on a major brokerage (but we are willing to sell for less if we can do a direct deal)
Costs Update
We spent $763.20 in December. As you can imagine, we didn’t spend much, with only seven posts in December (think we actually paid for most of it in November).
Content - $347
Dev work - $314.58
Hosting - $78.62
Email - $23
I would expect costs to be around $1,200 in January. BowTiedPlug is updating cover images on some of our top posts (we paid for some nice, high-quality images), and we will need to pay for new content.
Link Building
Still radio silence from the link-building agency. Can we threaten them for not delivering? Would love to talk to anyone with experience in this arena. Once I get this resolved, I will gaslight them… But that’s for another day…
We are writing one “Brand Review” post this month, and part of the deal was that the company agreed to link to the article somewhere on their site. I think we could make this work with a lot of big companies in the space. But these take time and are something the next owner should mess with. The key to this is that they have to have a higher domain authority than you.
Auditing Services
Since our site recovered, we have had several people reach out asking us to audit their sites. This has been a nice little revenue generator, especially as work with our current site has decreased. Taking an in-depth look at other websites is a guaranteed way to make you a better SEO, and after a year of looking at the same two sites and their competitors, it’s refreshing to look at what others are doing. Feel free to email me or shoot me a DM on Twitter if you are interested in getting an audit done for your site.
That’s it for this week. Let us know any questions you have in the comments. If you are interested in buying the site or know someone who may be interested, please let us know!
❤️
BowTiedWookie & BowTiedPlug