- Aug 15, 2015
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I noticed this pretty small affiliate site sell in less than an hour today and it dawned on me that I haven’t really seen people talk about this. We talk about big content sites selling for six figures but there’s such a demand for content sites that you can sell a lot sooner if you wanted to.
Normally people preach build a blog and way down the line, you’ll have an income. This can certainly be true – but if you’re just getting started (especially with SEO) that’s a long road before you’re seeing anything meaningful.
What I don’t often see is people talking about building a small content site and flipping it. Yes, the buyer will (if they know what they’re doing) make more money from the site in the long run but if you’re needing capital now then that really doesn’t matter.
No, I’m not saying every beginner should sell their website. But whether you want some extra capital for your main site or you need some quicker income, it’s an option.
And anyone can do this. A couple of dozen articles, no expensive backlinks and while it only makes a few bucks in ad revenue you can still flip it for $1k profit (as you’ll see in the example below).
It’s not as sexy as telling you that you can make $10k a month at the click of a button but the reality is most of us could write 40 articles pretty quickly (especially if you’re using AI content tools). After that, let the site sit for a while and once it has a little revenue you can sell it as a multiple.
Or, if you don’t want the wait, you could sell a site like this before it even has any revenue. I bought a site last year for about $4,000 that was only a few months old and had no revenue. The seller stuffed the site full of good content but wanted capital now rather than waiting and we both left happy.
That gives you some immediate capital for bigger projects or income if you need it – and can make a more meaningful difference than the $30/month you’d get by holding onto it for now.
If you’re just getting started in IM/SEO there’s such a market for content sites and this can be a good way to build yourself up some income. You get practice building sites and get some income earlier on than you would by building and holding.
The example site below was not built and immediately sold as a starter site. It looks like it was just a small project that just wasn’t scaled but it’s an example of a site you could build pretty quick. If there is any interest in seeing it done, I’ll do a case study where I build and flip brand new websites like this.
Most ‘starter sites’ are skinned Shopify stores with a few stock images and a page or two added. There are loads of them on Flippa and they look something like this:
I wouldn’t really suggest competing in a market like this (unless your goal is to upsell SEO services or something).
Instead, we’re talking about selling content sites that have articles written and they’re just needing some time to grow or some resources to scale.
This is just the first example I pulled from Flippa but that site isn’t a bad example. It had a few dozen short articles on gaming, a few bucks on Adsense and it sells for $300. After fees, I wouldn't really try and emulate this exact site but it's an easy example of the kind of site I mean.
As a better example, this is the site I saw sell today: wargunmods.com. It was listed and sold within an hour.
Sold for: $1,180
Claimed earnings: $31/month.
It’s your standard Amazon affiliate site. Roughly 40 posts and a mix of info and product review articles.
I don’t really know guns but I had a skim through the content of the site to get an idea of the quality. You have posts like this that don’t read too badly. Looks like these same images were used for this backlink (which is the only real backlinking done).
The info content quality itself isn’t half bad. There’s not a lot of media and there’s nothing groundbreaking to the info but it’s better than a lot of the affiliate sites I see go for higher prices. There’s no in-depth research here that you wouldn’t get with a quick Google search. It looks like the site was sold once before and some of the newer ‘Best X for Y’ and ‘X vs Y’ review articles look better than the previous ones so you’ll see a bit of a change in content quality if you pick through them.
The earnings seem pretty evenly split between Amazon and Ezoic. I feel like the Amazon review pages could be improved with some better tables (and they might well have been added by the buyer by the time you read this) but it’s enough to sell as a starter site.
Realistically, you could write this kind of content in a couple of days if you put your head down. Maybe even sooner if you’re used to writing content.
No need for backlinks, hundreds of posts and over a year of waiting around. Just put together some half-decent content and sell it to someone who doesn’t mind waiting a year or has the setup to scale sites like this.
For extra $$$: You could build a number of these sites every month and build yourself a list of buyers which means not having to pay marketplace fees. Or upsell them on SEO or content services to continue building the site.
This won't be for everyone. I like building and holding sites but I've seen sites become abandoned and people just drop the domain when they could have sold it.
