Hello Everyone,
Welcome to the inaugural BowTiedWookie substack! This will be a public case study on a niche affiliate website I officially purchased on 10/19. My plan is to use this first article to detail my due diligence process, and then send a weekly newsletter on strategies and tactics I used to grow the website and increase CRO. Depending on how popular that substack is I may do separate articles on split tests and other SEO strategies I am testing in both my day job and other consulting work. But for now, if you are working on building a content website or looking to acquire one I think this substack will provide some awesome tactical advice as well as high-level strategy.
But first a little background on me….
BowTiedWookie graduated college around 2 years ago. In college, I worked for an e-commerce startup and then on an SEO team for a large mortgage company.
After graduating I went to go work for a giant CPG company as an e-commerce analyst and hated it. In April of this year, I took a job as an SEO analyst for a fintech startup (more on that later).
Additionally, I have started 5 separate E-com/SEO websites that have all had various levels of success. At my worst, I lost around $6k and at my best, I made $25K. Everything else fell somewhere in between. (If people are interested I can give details about each venture and what I learned in a later post). The important thing about all of these is that I learned a lot and the failures ended up helping me get several jobs and make a few crucial connections. It also makes for great stories.
Ok now onto the case study…
For the last two months, I have been looking to deploy around $20K I had in cash and put it into a content website. I wanted to buy something that had some specific flaws I could fix. The idea was that if I fixed the flaws the site would rank better, get more traffic, and make more money.
After looking around Flippa, Empire Flippers, Investors Club, and Motion Invest, I ended up buying a site off of a Twitter post! Mushfiq from The Website Flip was advertising that he was selling one of his sites. I have been a big fan of Mushfiq’s for several months and trusted his reputation enough to know that he was not going to sell me a lemon.
Site Stats
Purchased for $16K in a private transaction
$451 average monthly revenue (but trending down)
Around 400 people per day from Google organic search consistently over the last 5 months
DR of 32 via Ahrefs
Highly relevant aged domain redirected to the site in July
The top page only receives around ~10% of the total traffic
71% of total traffic comes from Mobile
The Pinterest account gets around 30k views per month and has not been touched in several months
The site is in the “Health & Beauty” Niche
Here are a few reasons I liked the site
The site was spammed with ads and failed core web vitals. Core web vitals is a metric Google uses to evaluate site speed and layout. It is primarily for mobile users. Google came out with a core web vitals update this summer which prioritized sites that were in compliance with core web vitals. This is a little tricky since scaling back the ads will reduce revenue.
Despite having 70% mobile traffic over half the sales were coming from desktop. This strengthens the argument that ads have killed the conversion.
The digital product was high quality and had a lot of good content that I thought could be republished into additional blog content without detracting from the product itself. Basically free blog posts.
Despite having a good digital product it had a microscopic conversion rate of ~0.01% and was trending down the last three months. We believe this was due to spammy ads killing the conversion rate of the digital product. You can see revenue splits below.
There was a lot of opportunity to create affilaite relationships for high ticket products in this industry ($30-$40) CPA.
The blog had just used Niche website builders for a backlink campaign and had acquired 24 backlinks. They were not extremely high quality but they were decent links that made me confident in ranking for new content quickly. I think there is also a good chance the blog has not had time to feel the full effect of the new backlinks. I do not consider backlink building to be one of my core competencies and I like the fact that this campaign would allow me to focus on content and CRO for the next few months without having to worry about links.
There was a clear content “gap” that we could fill with 50-70 articles. There were 68 published articles on the site when we closed. I think we could double the content by the end of the year.
The site had an email list of 800 people and there are a lot of opportunities for newsletters in this space
The site has a solid following on Pinterest despite not having posted in several months.
Here are a few things I didn’t like about the site:
The revenue was trending down. Obviously, it’s not good to have a site that is losing revenue. However, the traffic was still steady despite having no content published for close to three months. We attributed this to launching ads on the platform which meant to test if our theory was right we would need to pull the ads. So right off the bat, the site was going to take a revenue hit.
This site is a .co not a .com. Not a huge deal but definitely annoying. Takes away from the “premium” brand feel IMO.
Based on how the revenue was trending the ask of $17K was pretty high. We ended up paying $16K, which I still think was a bit high. However, when it comes to buying a content site there are extremely few great deals. If you buy a site and think you got a great deal you probably got screwed.
The digital product was delivered in a database and there was basically no instruction on migrating, cleaning up, or restructuring the database.
Mushfiq no longer had access to the original images and artwork. Frankly, I didn’t even ask about this until I put the money in escrow. I think if I would have realized this I could have gotten the site for cheaper. Oh well, you live and you learn!
Only 49% of the traffic came from the U.S. This may not be a bad thing long-term but I still prefer dealing with U.S. traffic. However, the majority of the traffic was coming from tier-1 countries and it wasn’t a big enough deal breaker for me to say no. You can see the traffic breakdown by country below.
Roadmap
Before buying the site I wanted to chart out the next 6 months to figure out what I would need to do to get the site to a $100K exit. I’m not sure I want to sell the site but I would like the option to be able to sell it if I want to. Back of the napkin math says I will need to spend around an extra $12K on the site to get it to $3K a month. While this may sound extremely aggressive I think the site actually has enough traffic to sell 2-3 copies of the digital product per day right now if conversions rate issues are fixed. At $29.99 that would increase the revenue to $32.7K in sales per year. At a 4x multiple this would result in ~$110K in proceeds from a sale when accounting for costs & agent fees. That does not even include adding new traffic to the site, which I think will be pretty easy to do.
Below is a high-level overview of what I plan to accomplish with the site over the rest of the year
October: All goals completed successfully in less than two weeks ✅
Remove ads
Test new landing page
Hire a writer
Publish 7 new articles
November:
Publish 25 informative articles
Improve CTA in blog posts to increase traffic to the digital product landing page
Install GTM and goal tracking in Google Analytics to get a more accurate conversion rate and learn which posts are driving revenue
Create new artwork
December:
Create 10 “Best X For X” product review pages to increase Amazon affiliate revenue and internal linking opportunities with existing informative content
Publish 15 informative articles with CTAs to the digital product and applicable review pages
Begin split testing new landing page
Reach out to brands for direct affiliate relationships to decrease dependency on Amazon Associates (they are wildly corrupt)
Begin regularly posting on Pinterest
Create a newsletter and drive visitors to email signup
Closing Thoughts
I am writing this substack for a few reasons.
If I want to scale by raising money I will need to create a case study. Doing this in real-time and building a small following would be a good way to connect with potential investors or at least have the heavy lifting done for the case study if it comes time to make a pitch.
Dealflow. Mushfiq has ~2,000 followers on Twitter and is constantly buying and selling sites through his Twitter. If I do this consistently I think I could do the exact same thing and save a fortune on brokerage fees in the process.
Consulting clients or jobs. I really like where I am right now but this could be a good way to get a new consulting gig or a better job if things go south where I am currently. Basically, just a way to build leverage.
Inflation is a real concern. Cash is trash! I think over the next two years DTC e-commerce stores are gonna gobble affiliate sites up and raise the normal valuation.
Helping others. Maybe this sounds like B.S. but I really want this substack to be the guidebook I was looking for a year ago. Anytime you want to ask for questions or advice just send me a DM on Twitter :)
Right now in my career, I have two modes: “Do it to learn” or “Do it to earn”. Everything I do should clearly fall into one of these buckets. In an ideal world, you want everything you do to hit both. However, a lot of times you have to pick. I took less money to join the startup I work at because I knew what I would learn would be extremely valuable. This “experiment” hopefully will allow me to “learn” and “earn”. This will continue to help develop my skillset in SEO and digital marketing but will also reduce the dependency on my salary and allow me to eventually be my own boss. My ultimate goal is to have 2-3 sites that each makes around $10K per month.
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Great stuff. Working on my first site as well so this stack is super helpful!
This is great. I have two affiliates sites I started this year and I think this newsletter will help me learn something